Pedants r Us
What on earth is going on? Is it all over, after all? Have the barbarians claimed victory?
First: Sir Roger listens to ABC Radio A LOT. One evening, or early morning, he was listening to an interview with an author by a respected ABC presenter. Now, you would think that a bookish person might be a, little…erudite, you know. Just a little. And the presenter expressed her feeling about a particular passage or idea in this book. She described it as POIG-NANT. This, of course, is incorrect. Simply incorrect. The correct anglicised pronunciation is POIN-YANT. So what, you might say. The thing is that if the presenter gets something as simple as that wrong, on what grounds can you respect anything else she says? It would be okay for Joe the Baker or the medical technologist or whatever, but the presenter is in her position because she is somewhat learned and something of an expert. Who is the ABC employing these days? What standards are they accepting?
Secondly, and more jarringly: Hindsight last Sunday was the NSW History Council Lecture. The speaker was Professor Joy Damousi, Professor of History at the University of Melbourne. This is someone who certainly effects to be knowledgeable and whose job description when she applied would have included a requirement for erudition at a very high level.
Prof. Damousi was talking about elocution, the development of Australian speech and the influence on the Australian accent of reading aloud.
One of the favourite things to read aloud, she opined, was Longfellow’s “Hiathawa”. Yes. High-ATH-awa. You won’t find many results for that in Google. You will, though, find many results for “Hiawatha”, a poem from which Sir Roger’s father used to recite sections from memory. If Prof Damousi had ever read “Hiawatha” she would never have been able to pronounce the word the way she did. It just doesn’t scan. The stresses are the wong syllables. So she, an academic, referenced a literary work of which she appears to be actually ignorant. She referred to GBS’s famous play “Pygnaliom“. And she referred to the “candescence” of someone’s voice. Should it perhaps have been the “cadence”? Or “traits”: is it trates or trays? We know what we think. Perhaps she was just really nervous, not used as a lecturer, previously, to standing up in a large room in front of hundreds of people. If this is typical of her academic standards – and she would have been at her best for a seriously formal lecture being broadcast by the ABC – and if this is the standard of a top-level academic at one of the two most respected Australian universities, what hope is there? (We have to say that we have searched the lecture online a number of times since to locate the exact point where Damousi said :”Hiathawa”, without success. We have no doubt personally that we didn’t make it up and wonder whether it has been edited out. However, if we imagined it, we apologise. We didn’t make up “candescence” and “Pygnaliom”, though.)
[excerpt from Hiawatha]
Homeward now went Hiawatha;
Pleasant was the landscape round him,
Pleasant was the air above him,
For the bitterness of anger
Had departed wholly from him,
From his brain the thought of vengeance,
From his heart the burning fever.Only once his pace he slackened,
Only once he paused or halted,
Paused to purchase heads of arrows
Of the ancient Arrow-maker,
In the land of the Dacotahs,
Where the Falls of Minnehaha
Flash and gleam among the oak-trees,
Laugh and leap into the valley.There the ancient Arrow-maker
Made his arrow-heads of sandstone,
Arrow-heads of chalcedony,
Arrow-heads of flint and jasper,
Smoothed and sharpened at the edges,
Hard and polished, keen and costly.With him dwelt his dark-eyed daughter,
Wayward as the Minnehaha,
With her moods of shade and sunshine,
Eyes that smiled and frowned alternate,
Feet as rapid as the river,
Tresses flowing like the water,
And as musical a laughter:
And he named her from the river,
From the water-fall he named her,
Minnehaha, Laughing Water.
[tags]english, australian, language, education, elocution, accent, oratory, history, university, Hiawatha, Longfellow, Australian English values, Australian English, education values[/tags]
Posted: 24 September, 2008 in Australian Values, Culture, Education.
Tags: pedants r us
Comments
Comment from roger migently
Posted: 26 September, 2008 at 1:48 pm
I fear that any society of those who really care about the language would be so small as to be such a secret society that they would make a fridge magnet about it.
Surely that wasn’t my erstwhile colleague, Kel Richards? He is a warrior for the language! How could he? Did you hear the HiATHawa, or was I imagining it?
Comment from Lang Mack
Posted: 28 September, 2008 at 9:05 am
Yes,yes it was,he is certainly,further investigation in my 1901 Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary suggests:Dis and Gruntle ..to grunt,to be sulky.
So, Chambers 1997 says ‘happy,pleased’
Chambers 1901 says ‘……..sulky..
Your erstwhile colleague ,whom I respect and learn from, is correct and perhaps so am I.
However, is it not great that hearing the ‘gruntled’ on the radio show has had me for some time in my PRINT Dictionaries, and then the problem, to put them down.
Interesting that when listening to Radio Nat, and Classic FM that you take expression for granted , also to a lesser extent on local ABC, so that when something is as not as should be, it makes itself more obvious.Personally, I have been proved wrong on more occasions than correct, so good on Aunty.That does not mean Sir Roger and I will less attune our ears and not chide should it be required.
Thanks for the scribe Sir.R. dragging out old Dictionaries and mulling.
Comment from Lang Mack
Posted: 29 September, 2008 at 8:15 am
And while I’m on this, if I hear once more from all sides of the ABC
‘and more news inanour’,I will have to write a letter.
Comment from roger migently
Posted: 29 September, 2008 at 2:33 pm
Nothing like a session of dictionary reading. I also like to check etymonline.com, although it didn’t have “gruntled”.
You can write a letter, of course, but you can also let fly through “contact ABC” and do it online. They do investigate and reply. Eventually.
Sir Roger complains to the ABC not in order to be right but because the ABC is so important – last bastion and all that. If the ABC becomes just another lowest common denominator commercial-standard broadcaster, then what is left? RN does have its heart in the right place but it, too, seems to be under attack from the white ants of “good enough”.
Comment from Lang Mack
Posted: 1 October, 2008 at 9:41 am
The ABC is so important, however the last bastion is us, to agitate .To improve and gently chide.I’m amused that there is/was a panel of ‘experts’ to advise presenters as how to speak, like proper. For gods sake is not that what schooling is for.
Having swung an axe at age thirteen to get by, and no formal education in the last fifty years , would appear to me not to hard a task to be remise of the ABC .
Comment from roger migently
Posted: 1 October, 2008 at 12:23 pm
It’s not the size of the education, it’s the size of the appetite for learning and understanding.
Perhaps I should explain about the “panel of experts”. For a long time there has been a section called the Standing Committee on Spoken English (SCOSE) to advise newsreaders and presenters generally on correct pronunciations. I think it’s a good thing. There are a lot of foreign and unusual names and things that get reported on or spoken about. For example, I heard a reporter talking about Karadzic, the Serbian guy who was arrested recently, which she pronounded “KARRA-ditch”. But I knew that was wrong and that it was either KARRA-jitch or Ka-RAH-jitch. She should have known and if she had checked with SCOSE, as she ought to have, she wouldn’t have made the mistake. I emailed the ABC and they emailed back agreeing with me. The thing is, as I always say to them, it’s not so much that she got it wrong, it’s that she didn’t know and not knowing didn’t check, and that goes to her credibility and to the ABC’s credibility and raises questions about ABC’s standards of accuracy and journalism generally. We have to insist the ABC be accurate because really there’s no-one else. I used to work there. I was immensely proud of working there. I still love it. And that’s why it hurts seeing standards slip and why I’m willing to be thought a fussy old fart – because it really does matter. In a democracy the quality of our information is critical.
Comment from Lang Mack
Posted: 26 September, 2008 at 9:00 am
Ah, Sir Roger I did hear the ‘piognant’, I also was tuned to a section called ‘What the Kel’ on local ABC where the good fellow claimed that ‘gruntled’ and ‘disgruntled’ were exactly the same.
So, I dragged out my Chambers and proffer the following;
Gruntled……. happy,pleased, in good humour ( back formation of disgruntled).
Should I ring up and correct the eminet chap?.Has he let Australia down and left gruntled folk disgruntled? Maybe there are only a few of us gruntles , whereby perhaps we could form a society and have ‘ Hiawatha’ evenings, would be poinyant.