Party Bowels

Do you ever intentionally mispronounce words for comic effect, only to find that it has become so habitual that you can no longer recall the correct pronunciation?

As a person with a predilection for constant and obnoxious wordplay, naturally this happens to me all the time. For example, there's a fairly major street in Denver named Bowles. The very first time I saw Bowles (which, interestingly or not, was six years ago yesterday), I jokingly pronounced it "bowels". This struck me as irresistibly funny, although I'm quite sure I wasn't the first to do it. However, whenever the name comes up (and it did fairly frequently when I was a flower delivery boy), I often inadvertently say "bowels," which can have the effect of making me seem either stupid or crazy, depending upon the other conversant.

Another example: in high school I had a PE/Health teacher named Mr. Troxel, who was also the head football coach. I don't mind telling you that Mr. Troxel was dumber than a potted plant. Dumber than Georgie Bush. He had been a minor high-school football celebrity prior to becoming a coach/teacher, and obviously had taken quite a few near-lethal blows to the cortex. As a result, he shuffled around vacantly like a mental patient, his speech had an agonizingly slow cadence, and he constantly had saliva dripping out of the corner of his mouth, which he would slurp up every ten words or so. For some reason I feel compelled here to add that our school's football team went 0-9 that year.

And so one day in Health class, he assigned some sort of task where you were supposed to get information from various sources, and he was writing these on the chalkboard, and he actually wrote "NEWSPAPPER" up there. I could hardly contain my chortling. So of course I told all my wise-ass friends about it, and of course we had us a heyday with that. It was just more ammunition for us in the eternal jocks vs. punks struggle that waged on unabated in our school.

And as a result of this, I almost always pronounce the word with a short a, just like Mr. Troxel spelled it. I've been doing it so long that sometimes I don't even know I've done it. I don't need to tell you that saying "newspapper" around acquaintances does little to inspire confidence.

I also work with a Syrian fellow named Anas, and in certain company, I like to put on a Hank Hill voice and say, "Son, in this country that's pronounced anus." And it hasn't happened yet, but I'm getting worried that I'm going to accidentally call him Anus one of these days and then get run out of the company on harrassment charges.

Codicil: I just got off the phone with my lovely wife, who made a point of adding my pronunciation of the word "bagel" to the list. I told her that that's quite different, since I don't do it intentionally. But I'll list it here in the interest of prosperity. Or posterity, whatever.

Long about 1995 I was visiting Wisconsin where my paramour of the time was going to college. At some point my pronunciation of the word "bagel" became a cause of much mirth and derision among the roommates. Apparently my pronunciation of the word is highly unorthodox; I say it with the 'a' sounding like in bag or tag, i.e. with a shorter 'a' sound. Actually, it might be closer to egg. Anyway, they claimed it was pronounced with like the 'a' in baby: "bay-gul". I still think my way is correct since everyone knows that Montanans have perfect diction, whereas Wisconsinites most assuredly do not (although I don't think the roommates were native Wisconsinites), and anyway, what the fuck kinda word is bay-gul? Nevertheless, I've been very self-conscious about it ever since.

Also:

I want the world to know that I am on a powerful Ed Hall bender these days. "Love Poke Here" is my very favorite of their four (?) albums, with its lyrics printed in rebus and all. But like most Ed Hall fans, the song "Pollution" from their '95 album La La Land is my all-time anthem. The album kicks off with the following clip from what sounds like something from the Prelinger Archives*:

"With our music and our economic changes, we plunder the unsuspecting "straight" world for money and the means to carry out our program."

My longtime friend and fellow Ed Hall acolyte Smilin' Matt Farnham had this as the announcement on his answering machine for a long time. Moreover, in the course of our many late-night beer blasts, whenever someone would put this song on, Matt would add air quotes when the "straight" part happened. As a result, every time I listen to this song, now pert' near ten years later, I still dutifully do the air quotes during that part. Although lately I've been experimenting with moving the air quotes to different parts of the spiel, like "plunder" or "program", to interesting effect.

Matt, by the way, had occasion to see Ed Hall perform on or about Sept. 25, 1995 in Missoula, MT. By all accounts the show was mind-blowing, but very sparsely attended (I didn't even know about it until after it had happened). Maybe Matt will be along here to add more description, but as I recall him telling it, the members were naked and covered in fluorescent paint.

* Does anyone know where that clip comes from?

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