Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Miss Pronounciation & Miss Informed

It's cold. The grass is brown and ugly, the trees are naked and it is cold. The wood stove isn't going good yet and it is cold. This sums up all the days of January, so you end up watching lots of TV. Even when you aren't watching, it is on and you hear it as you stoke the fire, make a cup of tea, fold the laundry or whatever. That brings me to one of my biggest annoyances--commercials. My current most hated one is the one about arthritis--arthritis literally means inflammation of (itis) joints (arth). The woman on this particular ad bemoans "I knew arthritis could be painful, but I never knew it would affect my joints". Every time I hear this I want to scream at the TV. Did the idiot who put this ad together do any research on the subject matter? Did anyone bother to listen to it before they aired it? Or am I the only one who notices? I also listen to audio books while I sew and have been known to shout back when they mis-pronounce words. The one that comes to mind now is short-lived. The reader of many of the books I listen to pronounces this with a long " i " and it makes me crazy. I can't possibly be the only one who notices this---am I the only one reading these books? I don't think so, I am on a waiting list at the library for most of them. Could it be me??????

2 comments:

Jilly said...

You must be where I get my grammar-snobbishness from.
I just ended a sentence with a preposition ... that's not good.

Joy and Phil said...

I agree it sounds wrong but the dictionary backs up the long i pronunciation.

I am a fulltime RVer traveling in Missouri - 05-25-2009 - where is your RV park?

Joy