THE DEAF PENALTY AND SOVIET JEWELRY

posted by James Reel

This morning I received one of those Emily Litella-style e-mails complaining that we've been mispronouncing a certain Fritz Kreisler title. The correspondent insisted that it should be pronounced "lee-bes-leed," the first and last vowels being the same. Well, that would be true if the German title were "Liebeslied," or "love's song," but it's not. It's "Liebesleid," "love's sorrow"--IE (pronounced "EE") in the first syllable, EI (pronounced "I") in the last. That's very different.

I suspect there would be a lot less righteous indignation in America these days if people actually got some facts together before they began waving their misspelled protest signs...

BULLETIN: SKY FALLING AGAIN

posted by James Reel

These days you're hearing announcements, calm in tone but frantic in motivation, about the latest round of threats to federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Should we be worried? Timothy Noah has seen it all before, and has an interesting analysis of the recurring situation.

AUTOCORRECT FAIL OF THE DAY

posted by James Reel

A critic sent me an obviously unproofread review in which his software's spellchecker had changed the name of (admittedly obscure) conductor Fuat Mansurov to "Fat Manure." I do wish people would (1) read their material before they send it into the world and (2) put far less faith in spellcheck and autocorrect features. I learned my lesson the hard way many years ago when I wrote an article about conductor James DePreist and didn't notice that the software had changed every mention of his name to "DePriest." From that moment, I came to regard most of Word's automated functions as little more than, well, fat manure.