Tikkabik

Attributed to Clarence Thomas, when asked about how he would define "harass":

"Harass meant nothing to me, I'm a tit man."

It's funny, I've always heard 'harass' as 'ha-rass' around here. Then the news media were talking about it for some reason, and every news channel was saying something like 'haris-ment'..

I have no doubt that the locals have been calling it Nee-zher the whole time, but I've always been puzzled by the changing pronunciations of place names. At one point in the late 80s, Nicaragua suddenly had to be pronounced as if the speaker were a native spanish speaker. The explanation I was given was that it was considered disrespectul to pronounce it any other way. Why this same logic wasn't applied elsewhere was never addressed to my satisfaction. Fortunately, that appears to have been a short-lived fad, although it appears to be making a comeback in Niger.

It seems that the problem is that there is no rule about which place names in english are close to their local pronunciation and which aren't. Is "Deutchland" really that much more difficult to say than "Germany"? Granted, it is more difficult to spell, but why was Niger pronounced Ni-jur to begin with? I suspect it was because most people who saw it written had never heard it spoken, and that's what took root. Nowadays you are much more likely to come across it spoken on the TV or radio. It might be partially a function of news agencies cutting back on their foreign bureaus and using more local stringers.

Maybe another twist is that now that it's in the news more often, we're noticing that the name is uncomfortably close to the double-g version, so we're using whatever excuse we can to distance ourselves from that.

I suspect this won't be the last place where we hear this phenomenon. God, I just hope it doesn't happen to Paris.