Orthoepically Challenged

    It’s true.  I am orthoepically challenged.

    Students in my college English classes could attest to that.  It was especially bad in literature classes.  When confronted with a French author or character, I invariably pronounced the names with a German accent.  Germans like to have consonant endings with sharp, defined sounds.  The French prefer to let muted vowels end their words even when the spelling shows a consonant.  It took years for me to figure that out, but it still didn’t help my pronunciation.

    The problem with being an English teacher was that everyone expected me to speak English perfectly when, in fact, I am an expert mangler of the language, and my talents are not limited to mispronunciation.  Subjects and verbs occasionally came out wrong when I was deep into my discourses about the topic for the day.  It’s embarrassing to say something like “He were in a lot of trouble” or “They is still there,”  especially when you are discussing subject/verb agreement.  Sometimes my syllables simply got slurred, and students wondered what I was REALLY drinking from my water bottle.

    It’s amazing what a missed or extra syllable can do.  That brings me back in time to Freiburg, West Germany, spring of 1976.  I was telling my landlady about giving blood, and all I did was add a measly syllable:  instead of saying “Blut spenden,” I said “Blut spendieren.”  That’s the difference between saying “giving blood” and “extravagantly lavishing my blood.” 

    When I first got off the plane in Frankfurt, it amazed me how fast everyone talked.  After two and a half years of college German, I couldn’t understand a single word.  It was disconcerting, to say the least.  Right away I came up against my lack of vocabulary.  Memorization hadn’t seemed so pressing back in college in Iowa, but now my lack of words had a huge impact on my life.  For example, once I had to resort to ordering an omelet for dinner because it was the only word I recognized on the menu:  "Omelette." 

    Within the first month in Germany, I learned that “winging it” in German was not an especially good idea.  Sometimes, though, one must improvise.  There is not always time to pull out the dictionary and spend ten minutes looking for the words you need.  Another example:  our group with the Institute for European Studies did some bus touring.  There was a problem the first night we stopped at a hotel:  there needed to be one coed room to match the location and number of beds.  Noticing, I guess, that I had hung around with another American student by the name of  Fred, the directors asked me if I would mind sharing a room with him.  The question panicked me, and I didn’t know exactly how to say that I absolutely did NOT want to share a room with him.  So I blurted out a question in return.  What I meant to say in German was “Do I HAVE to share a room?” (meaning I really did not want to).  What came out of my mouth was something quite different, the English equivalent being “Do I HAVE to sleep with him?”  After the uproarious laughter subsided, someone else volunteered to room with Fred.

    By the end of my six months in Germany, I was feeling more comfortable with the language (but not with Fred).  I had gotten to that gray area where I didn’t exactly think in German, but I could usually understand without consciously translating.  One day I was looking at clothes in a department store and decided I wanted to try on a few items.  Not really sure of how to ask where the dressing rooms were, I decided to wing it.  The clerk gave me a rather strange look when I made my request in German, which got the point across but not exactly how I intended it:  “Where can I take my clothes off?”

    By the time I got back home to Douglas, Michigan, I had developed the habit of concentrating hard before I said anything.  I remember bringing my film to the local drugstore one day and puzzling over how I was going to ask to get my film developed.  Then it occurred to me:  they speak English here!  That summer, I missed hearing German and found myself using it automatically.  Instead of “excuse me,” if I bumped into someone, “Entschuldigen Sie mir, bitte” popped out.  And one day, sitting in our living room, I spent a long time trying to puzzle out the English for Fernsehapparat (television).

    I’m not sure how to bring all of this back around to my original subject, and I blame my lengthy digression to the influence of Dave Barry, whose latest book I read the other day.  So I’ll simply stop here and look up the pronunciation of ”orthoepy” and “orthoepically” again.