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Mind your language

Dot Wordsworth

Wednesday, 14th November 2007

Everyone finds sooner or later that a word he has seen in print is pronounced differently from the way he imagines. The results can be more or less infuriating. I don’t much mind people saying heinous with the first syllable pronounced hee instead of hay, but I do get annoyed at people who pretentiously use the term machismo and pronounce it as if it had something to do with Highland clans. Contrariwise, machination has a first syllable that should be pronounced mac. The trickiest of the machs is probably machicolation, pronounced ma-CHICK-olation.

Veronica has just reminded me of a couple of popular songs that stress the wrong syllable of a word. Boney M’s ‘Ra-Ra Rasputin’ (1992) has made me laugh for other reasons, but it errs in requiring the stress on the first syllable of the mad monk’s name: ‘Ra-Ra Rasputin, Russia’s greatest love machine.’ Goodness.

The group Bauhaus found success in 1979 with ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’. But the famous Hungarian’s surname should, by contrast with Rasputin, have the stress on the first syllable, not the second.

A truly surprising leap of pronunciation was brought to my attention by the excellent philologist Michael Quinion (who has an entertaining website called World Wide Words). It is an American bêtise that appears to be immune to ridicule: chaise lounge for chaise longue. It is not merely a spelling error; they actually say ‘chaise lounge’. The word has even found its way into dictionaries, if not into Hansard.

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