Slow on the Uptake?
June 27th, 2003 - 12:37 am
In a long-winded column about nothing I posted yesterday, there was this little aside:
Years ago, my Grandfather Green and I were making fun of how “pneumonia” is spelled. He said, “The P is silent, as in ‘bath.’”
Hardly anyone asked how my puppy is, or if Adam and I got all the work done on the yard. But you can bet there was a bunch of email asking to explain the damn pun. Let’s sound it out.
“The pee is silent, as in bath.”
Get it now?
When I was a kid, we had a pool with a sign on the fence that read:
“Welcome to our ool. Please notice there is no ‘P’ in it. Please keep it that way.”
Cheers
I feel like such a smarty smarterson now, cuz I got the pun.
And you did say the pooch was fine.
Okay. I’m feeling particularly arrogant.
You actually had to waste bandwidth to explain that? You need to upgrade your clientele!
Wouldn’t know nothing ’bout pee in the bath. I shower.
Lilly Tomlin used to make a joke when she was doing the operator character. She would spell out a word and say, “P, as in pneumonia.”
A while back (probably late 70′s, perhaps in Dr. Dobb’s Journal), I saw an article proposing a phonetic alphabet entirely constructed of such usages. The only two I remember off the top of my head are “C as in Czar” and “T as in Tsar.”
I should see if I still have that article somewhere.
A quick search found this, though some don’t seem right:
Aeon
Bdellium
Cereal
Djakarta
Euphoria [or Eye]
Futtock
Gnome
Hour
Ian
Jalepe
Ever see the trick where someone asks you to pronounce the word ghoti, and when you pronounce it kinda like “goatee” but with the accent on the first syllable, they shake their heads and say, “No, it’s pronounced ‘fish’”?
(Explanation: gh as in “enough,” o as in “women,” and ti as in “nation.”)