It’s easy to tell when NPR has switched from the feed to the local affiliate. From Garner’s Modern English Usage :
In educated speech, the country’s name is pronounced either /i-rahn/ (preferred) or /i-ran/ (more anglicized). Avoid the xenophobic yokel’s pronunciation /I-ran/ or /I-ran/.Not everyone who says /I-ran/ or /I-ran/ counts as a xenophobic yokel. But who wants to be mistaken for one?
[May the women of Iran succeed in their fight against the official order of things.]
comments: 6
"xenophobic yokel"?
That's some judgment call on Garner’s part.
When people say liberals are wankers, I think of things like that.
We really can be.
He’s a snoot, yes. But he was a member of the Republican Party until fairly recently.
Remember when we were first hearing Obama pronounce the country’s name properly? I think anyone reading news on NPR should have a handle on it.
Lol—funny I got MY judgement call wrong—he was not a liberal!
But still a wankker🙄
I remember a song during the first Iraq War (“Desert ShitStorm”) on CW radio
“I don’t know the difference between Eye-raq and Eye-ran…”
Anyone on NPR should At least get the names right, yes!
Here in Illinois we also have Eye-talian beef. And don’t forget, we have public figures who deliberately mispronounce Kamala Harris’s first name.
I haven’t mentioned it in a post yet, but I was (am?) a member of the panel of critical readers for the forthcoming fifth edition of Garner’s Modern American Usage. BG is a good guy.
If I were to make a Venn diagram, there’d be a big circle for people who mispronounce Iran, and a smaller circle inside for the xenophobic yokels. In other words, mispronouncing it doesn’t make you a xenophobic yokel. But those who are xenophobic yokels mispronounce it.
I was once a manager of a documentation team at a high tech company (If my parents were alive they’d certainly have a laugh at the idea that I had duped someone into putting me in charge of a group whose reason for being was reading and writing, but I needed a job :-) ). One day at this job I had my trusty copy of Garner’s 4th open on my desk while beavering away on some writing task. Unbeknownst to me my boss snuck up and took a picture on his phone of the open Garner’s and me looking at it. He then immediately emailed it to his teenage daughter as proof that there were some people in the world who actually still used books. Apparently this was debating point between them, and he was glad to have proof he was right. From then on my copy of Garner’s had legendary status.
A book!
Maybe I shouldn’t mention it, but the book is also available as an app. Really.
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