Stupidity Squared
Sparxafire!
I cannot resist stuff like this: Apparently, your president’s new little press secretary accidentally posted online your president’s reading copy of his speech to the United Nations. The speech on the paper he reads from has phonetic helpers to help him pronounce words correctly. I know.
Keith Olbermann, of MSNBC’s Countdown, pulled back from the implications of having phonetic helpers in a speech, alleging that everyone who speaks publicly does it now and then. Although I agree with Olbermann 99.9 percent of the time, I’m not so sure …
I’ve done a fair amount of public speaking, and have to say I’ve never done it!
OK, so here’s the fun part: In the speech, the writer helps your president pronounce Mauretania this way…
more-EH-tain-ee-a
Now, this is not easy to do in a blog, but, the EH syllable is actually not accented… It’s the TAIN syllable that has the accent. Don’t believe me? Try it for yourself, say Mauretania out loud. See? It’s like Lusitania, the ship, except your president’s writers would have you saying, Loose-UHHH-tane-ee-a…
It’s tiny and insignificant. It is an error than means absolutely nothing, and, as Olbermann implies, there’s nothing here to extrapolate, such as Bush should be impeached because he hires speech writers who cannot even create an accurate phonetic helper for Mauretania.
Still. As a writer, my interest is in words, language, grammar and such like that, and I happen to find this ever so amusing… As in a stupid guy hires another stupid guy to prevent him from sounding stupid and ends up looking really, really DOUBLE stupid. Stupid X Stupid = Stupidity Squared. There’s your joke.
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