Capo and pronunciation

The word, capo, if you're an Italian, is pronounced (roughly) - car-po (though without any sound of the letter 'r').  It means the head, and of course we get our word, cap, from it.  Which is pronounced like tap.  But when a musician takes hold of an excellent capo, (or even one that's not so hot), a capo that he's brought from a reputable shop (or even one that's not), he pronounces the word, Kay-po, as in the person's name. Well, he does in New Zealand anyway.  Or she does, if she's a female from the same country.

I doubt that most Italians would recognise the word, and it's curious that it gets such different pronunciations.  In case you're reading this and you don't know what a capo is, it's a device like a highly intricate clothes peg that gets hooked over the strings of a guitar or other similar instrument in order to save the player having to figure out how to play something in a different key.  Instead, the capo does the job for him, and the player just plays as if he was playing in the original key.  You're still with me, aren't you?  It's explained better here.

Talking of pronunciation, my wife and I have been continuing to learn Arabic.  We've just struck the section on verbs - not the easy verbs we were using when we started the course, which we've got familiar with - but present, past and future tense verbs.  These are like thickets of sounds that have various things stuck on the front or the back, and then more things stuck on in front of the ones stuck on the front already, and then other ones replacing the ones we stuck on the front last time.  And each time we stick one on, it changes the general sound of the original word.  Oh, how I love English.  In some areas, it is so easy.

I'm sure Arabic is easy - in some areas.  We've found some of them.  At the moment we're not finding them....

Mics? Yikes!

Amongst many things the production crew for our musical Grimhilda! have been discussing are radio mics (but not USB mics) for the singers.

I find it quite difficult to remember to use this spelling; my tendency is to go for mikes, in line with the spelling of my own name.   But like it or not the normal spelling by the techie people is 'mics.'

It's an oddity in spelling terms: I can't think of another word that ends quite like that and still sounds like mikes.  When you look at it, especially the singular form, you tend to try and figure out how to enunciate the 'c'.  Standing alone like that, with no 'k' or 't' to follow, it seems isolated.  If there was another syllable or two before it, as in the word pandemic, we'd know that it was pronounced 'mick'.  In fact, even looking at it bare, without other syllables, there's a tendency to think of it as a mick word, like endemic, systemic, polemic, academic, polemic.

But mic (say mike).  Nah, it just don't ring true...

I’ve been learning a poem over the last week or so called Curiosity, by Alistair Reid. I found it some time ago when I had a book of his out of the library. Previously I’d learnt another of his poems, Growing, Flying, Happening, and thought it was great. Curiosity also appealed to me, but as I tackled some of the lines today I found it quite odd rhythmically.

Here are the lines in question:

Face it. Curiosity
will not cause him to die --
only lack of it will.
Never to want to see
the other side of the hill,
or that improbable country
where living is an idyll
(although a probable hell)
would kill us all.

The succession of doubling ups of the letter, l, is okay, and the rhythm paces along quite comfortably until we get to the line with the word, idyll, in it.

Now, I’ve always pronounced this idyll to rhyme with riddle (as in Chesterton’s line: Hey diddle diddle will rank as an idyll, if I pronounce it chaste,’) and as far as I can tell that’s the general British pronunciation of it. (The Americans apparently rhyme it with the word, idle, but they’re prone to peculiar pronunciations.)

If no less an authority than Chesterton says the word is idyll, rhyming with riddle, then that’s good enough for me. But try saying that sort of idyll in the middle of this poem. It works in its own line, but it clashes oddly with all the hills, and wills and hells, and kills. I thought at first Reid might have had an odd notion to pronounce it i-dill, but it’s unlikely, since it throws the rhythm right out.

But pronouncing it idyll (rhyming with middle) is a riddle, because it gets no importance, and usually you’d think that idyll, because of its curious sound and comparative rarity, would get some room to breathe. Not in this poem.

Perhaps there’s a way to make it work. I haven’t quite found it yet.

Boise - in Idaho, you know?

Boise – heck I don’t even know how to pronounce the name. There seems to be an awful lot of dispute about it, especially by outsiders. (Of which I am one.)

Boise, in Idaho, ya know? Anyway, some pronounce it boy-zee, and some boy-see. I would have took one look at it and been very Gallic and pronounced it bwahzz, but plainly I’m in the minority there.

What do I want to pronounce it for anyway? Well, it’s good to go through life saying words the way they was meant to be said, ain’t it? And who wants to be like those guys in the Bible who missed out on a few more years on the planet by getting Shibboleth wrong (or was it Shibbolet?)

In one blog I came across, there seems to be a further option to the pronunciation: Boyz. As we’re told here: "I told him I was headed to Boise City, being careful to pronounce Boise as "Boyz" as I was instructed by the manager at the KOA we stayed at previously. He gives me directions in between puffs on his cigarette. I thank him for taking the time to stop."

So there we go: four options so far. Any more on the horizon? The interesting thing about the boy-see, boy-zee thing is that we have a friend, originally from South Africa, who delights in calling her seven boys collectively by the name boys-ee. Totally irrelevant piece of information, but I thought I’d fit it in somewhere.