three homes

Would you agree

that the Iliad could be called the Greek equivalent to the Bible?

Five to Take Off.

After three days of frustrating US Airways phone calls, I’m finally booked and scheduled to get to Berklee in time. All I’ve been doing is practicing for my placement auditions, fjdaldfa. I’ve never been more excited and anxious in my entire life.

Really?

ragbag:

this week’s f-words come from charles harrington elster’s big book of beastly mispronunciations (1999). while my own strong opinions about orthoepy vacillate between yes! and who-cares?, i have found this book to be (if nothing else) 1—a valuable bet settler and 2—a great way to show your barbarous buddies how much a pedant you can be.

• feral: FEER-ul. this pronunciation is favored by all 4 major american dictionaries.
• fifth: FIFTH or FITH. if you can pronounce the second f, good for you. but there’s nothing slovenly about dropping it… it is biestly however, to drop the h and say FIFT or drop the th and say FIF.
• finis: FIN-is (occasionally, FY-nis). the popular variant fee-NEE is wrong. finis is not french for “finished,” as many apparently imagine. it comes through middle english from the latin word meaning “the end, conclusion.”
• flaccid: FLAK-sid, not FLAS-id. apparently the flabby FLAS-id has been limping around in educated circles for most of the 20th century. webster 3 was the first dictionary to recognize FLAS-id, labeling it with its esoteric symbol of disrepute, the obelus [÷]. flaccid is a book-learned word which may explain why so many educated speakers have swallowed the beastly FLAS-id without giving a second thought to the pronunciation of analogous words. consider: accident, succeed, eccentric, etc.
• forbade: fur-BAD. in 1961, webster 3, in opposition to all previous authority, arbitrarily indicated that forbade should be pronounced fur-BAYD. the controversy may soon be academic: the evidence of my ears says that forbid is fast replacing forbade as the past tense of forbid.
• formulae: FORM-yul-LEE, not -LY. as any science savvy person knows, antennae, larvae, papillae, and so on have a long i sound at the end, right? wrong. words borrowed from latin that form their plurals in -ae properly have a long e sound at the end. that’s why, for example we say AL-jee for algae.
• forte (strong point): properly FORT, now usually FOR-tay.
• fracas: FRAY-kis. the first a is properly long. when you enter the fray, you enter a fracas.
• fungi: FUN-jy (j as in judge), never FUN-gy (g as in gout).

and for another look at how everything that you are saying, you are saying wrong, there is this and this.

With nine days to Berklee,

I still have no way of getting there and I am really getting nervous now.