Electric Josh

Pronunciation
So given that I know a couple of Bechtel people I'm not going to comment on all the Big Dig related craziness upon which The Boston Globe is reporting, except to say the following: It's not pronounced beck-tell like it's some kind of telecom company, for chrissake. It's becktle, rhymes with rectal (which is exactly the sort of silly mnemonic that gifted PR types could prevent even family members from thinking of for the better part of a decade.)

Typically, when people's egregious telecom-style pronunciation is corrected, and it is pointed out that the company's name is the same as the owning family's name, and that that name is pronounced becktle, they say, "Oh. Okay." But I've been listening to one of the guys on NPR say beck-tell for the last five minutes, now, despite the fact that his interviewee, a guy who wrote a book about the company, pronounces its name correctly. It's totally maddening. How you pronounce someone's name isn't a matter of taste! It's their name, and they get to tell you how it's pronounced.

Poor Kara suffers from this all the time. The Boston accent is such that a lot of people can't distinguish between the two normally acceptable pronunciations of that name. We are thankful, though, that we don't live in Pennsylvania anymore, where people would routinely think, inexplicably, that she was saying her name was Carla. "No, it's Kara." "Oh, okay, Carla." Never did figure that one out.

When anyone in the Bush administration talks about the leader of Iraq, they call him Sodom Hussein. I can't decide if this is a calculated political gesture or just a symptom of the usual mispronunciation syndrome.
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