[CanYoAssDigIt] Linguistic Question

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Matt Love <matt.mattlove1@gmail.com>
Date: Jun 8, 2005 2:02 PM
Subject: Linguistic Question
To: NUNBERG@csli.stanford.edu

Dear Professor Nunberg,

Why do all the announcers on NPR pronounce Guantanamo as
"G'wantonamo"? It seems to me that in general English speakers in
this country used to pronounce it correctly. Now it's pronounced
incorrectly nearly 100% of the time. It makes our public radio
broadcasters sound like a bunch of hayseeds.

It occurs to me that maybe Caligula started the trend, and rather than
allowing him to look like an idiot (sort of like how they cut the part
of his response the other day when he said that the prisoners were
"disassembling" – that is, he says, not telling the truth – about
their treatment) they started pronouncing it the same way as he did.

Or perhaps it is more along the lines of when Claudius started
pronouncing Saddam Hussein's name "Sad damn" to make it sound like
sodomy – something everybody hates, except those of us that do it. It
could be that it serves some kind of propaganda function, like "We
ain't a bunch of pansies like them Spanish speakers, that can't even
muster a hard 'G' sound. When we say 'Gitmo' it means 'Do it our way
and git out of our way, or do it your way and git "hit")!'"

I'm depending on you to tell it to me straight.

Your fan,
Matt Love

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