GETTING IT RIGHT DOESN'T MATTER ANYMORE

Craig Claiborne, The greatest of all food writers, brought food criticism to a high point in his renowned New York Times column. His cookbooks were and still are masterpieces. Claiborne once said: "I despair of getting Americans to pronounce Vichysoisse properly.” He said that they though calling it “Vichy-swah” sounded more French. In fact – it is pronounced like it looks: Vichy-swaz. Ironically it is not French at all. It was an American concoction, based I suppose on the original leek and potato soup. But the point is: pronunciation didn’t matter. What Claiborne thought didn’t matter.

It’s a fact of life. My wife keeps telling me to “get over it.” One of my favourites is ”bruschetta.” The Italian pronunciation is brus-ketta, not as is our custom – brew-Shetta. Visiting in Austin Texas with my kids I asked the proprietor of one of that city’s great restaurants about the pronunciation. I had just been served by a wait-person who said, of course – brew-shetta. When I asked him how it should be pronounced he got it right. He also admitted that the common pronunciation, even if it was wrong, was in common use.

When I think about “Looking Ahead” I have to be careful not to groan over today's language. It’s kind of old-fashioned. You have to sound like “today”
so you mispronounce like everyone else does.

So just today I am lying on my bed watching Discovery channel. There is a wonderful documentary about the end of the age of the dinosaur. It is all about the cataclysmic and earth-changing explosion when a huge meteor stuck the earth in the Gulf of Mexico. The narrator, deep-voiced, sonorous, plenty of scientific gravitas said “it was the coup de grace.” He referred to the collision of the asteroid. He pronounced it ‘coo-de-graw.” He’s not alone. It’s a common mispronunciation, defended, in at least one case I know of, by someone who should know better. People get confused. Pate de foie gras is pronounced “graw.” Grace is pronounced “grass.” The phrase is “coo-de-grass.”

It simply doesn’t matter anymore. When a CBC news person talking about the recent horrible chemical spill in Hungary he referred to the leaking of toxic chemicals into nearby rivers and – are you ready – even the Danube. But he pronounced it “Da-noob” with the emphasis on the second syllable.

So does it matter? Can we look ahead to language distortions that pretend to be the evolution of language? Do we accuse the public of being completely “dumbed down?”
Maybe. But maybe it just doesn’t matter anymore. It doesn’t matter like young men not removing their peaked caps when they are in a restaurant, or staying seated on a crowded street car while a pregnant woman stands holding desperately on to a handhold. I was brought up in a world of grace. Part of it was that even if it didn’t really matter, it was good to treat language with some respect.

But maybe “getting it right” doesn’t matter any more.