Sunday, February 11, 2007

I wish intellectual weren't, like, a bad word

I’m reading Villa Incognito, finally, and I’m thrilled because it’s good and I’m enjoying it and while it’s not Cowgirls or Skinny Legs, it’s also no Fierce Invalids. Hooray! So I’m lying on my bed just now with it and I read a passage in which one character informs another that it’s pronounced sacrileeegous, not as would rhyme with religious. I wonder if this is true, and being the particular kind of dork I am, I reach over and grab my bedside dictionary to look it up. (Of course, the dorkiness here does not refer to my actually looking the word up; it refers to the fact that I have a dictionary next to my bed for just such occasions.) I grab the book and open it... to page 1082/3, which is to say, the exact right page that contains sacrilegious. Seriously, how weird is that?

Yes, of course he’s right, he’s Tom Robbins. The popular pronunciation, sacri-lih-gous, is listed as the second option.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

For the record, I didn't even pause to consider the dorkiness of having a bedside dictionary because, well, it's *you*!!

You really are an innate pun geek - or maybe just an innate geek :) xoxo

Anonymous said...

I hate to leave another comment, because I noticed that it said you had "1 commentS"... and that just bothered me......

Anonymous said...

Oh yeah? Well my dictionary is in my bed.

If a word is properly pronounced X and everyone, but everyone, pronounces it Y, is the pronunciation really X?