Thursday, 24 May 2007

A household of three

I heard on the an ad for the current affairs program Close Up last night, that they were interviewing the "Lion Man" who has been charged with assaulting his partner (and yes she is a woman) who he found in a ménage et trois [sic]. Now if you have any knowledge of french you will know that the phrase is ménage à trois, but the presenter clearly pronounced it with a short "e" sound rather than the short "a" sound that it is supposed to be. (OK here feel free to have a go at me for not using the correct phonetic letters to describe the sounds - but that is just not my thing, at least I have better things to do today than teach my self them.)

This of course like most good mispronunciations, totally changes the meaning of the phrase. So instead of the intended "household of three" (literally) it became "household and three" which a child can see is quite meaningless.

How can someone who is supposed to be one of the countries best TV presenters be so clueless or careless about pronunciation. Especially since this sets an example to people for how they are supposed to talk, or at least say words and phrases that are not natural to them

So what should be done about this? Maybe we should institute lessons in elocution and the "Queen's English" for all TV and radio presenters. Though I doubt that will really prevent the slide into laziness that the English language is currently taking.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

shit dude, i can't believe someone mispronounced a word! Let alone a foreign word! holy fucking shit this guy needs to be fired.

mc2 said...

yes it is a foreign word but as I said in the post the presenters of shows like this whether they like it or not are an example for our language, and should make an effort to be correct. Or perhaps you think that communication between people is notimportant enough to be concerned about?

Anonymous said...

Your blog keeps getting better and better! Your older articles are not as good as newer ones you have a lot more creativity and originality now keep it up!