Elwood says he kind of likes it when people mispronounce words. He says it's a sure sign of an autodidact. He says, "How else are you going to learn to mispronounce a word unless you picked it up reading a book?" (We will gloss over "relator" and "nucular" in this narrative.)
It's a good thing he likes it, because he hears a lot of it in this house. Some of the mispronunciations get passed down from boy to boy. Our oldest used to say "chaRECTer" for "character," for instance. He has long since figured it out, but now our fourth son says "chaRECTer" and our third says "chaRECTer-- wait, I mean character."
Today at lunch Joe was asking me about alveoli, which he pronounces alveOHlee. I had made pesto to go along with our frozen ravioli, only to discover that only the oldest child in attendance was willing to eat more than a picoliter of it. (And even he, when I handed him a spoonful of summery basil-y garlicky lemony deliciousness, and asked him what it needed, said, "Maybe...less...pesto?") Joe wanted to know if there were any alveOHlee in the pesto.
"No," I assured him. "No lungs in the pesto today." (Or breasts. I suppose you could puree mammary tissue and get alveOHlee in your pesto. Probably some celebrity chef will be all over that one. Or, you know, not.)
"Hey!" he said, his face lighting up. "If you filled ravioli with haggis, you'd have alveoli ravioli!"
In his idiolect, it rhymes, and his enthusiasm for the idea is infectious. Somehow, though, I don't think it will be a popular selection on this side of the pond.
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