The word monster
Scared of words? The monsters groping in the darkness of our ever morbid gesellschaft world looking for new ways to attack us. The new bete noire in town has to be this word: Eyjafjallajökull. As televison broadcasters and media personalities twist their tongues and wear their heads off trying to pronounce or even write for that matter, this unspeakable word, we readers are left with gaping mandibles. The volcano business that has been going on for God knows how long is surely affecting the mortal millions in deeper emotional ways than initially believed. The continued failed attempts of polished belletrists to show off their fulgent logodaedaly failed miserably at none could pronounce the word as it is supposed to be pronounced, which, by the way, requires you to either be a volcanologist or some sort of PH Nerd to pronounce it right, and ended up spewing a molten lava of disaster on national television. From CNN to Fox news, from national news reports to international news castings people shuddered even at the look of this verbal Voldemort. Like he who must never be never be named, this unpronounceable word soon became a dread for news media. They read and laughed, bent their vocal chords, twisted their mouth, but failed. And each of them came up with pronunciations as outrageous as the name of this Icelandic volcano. The mystery ultimately solved when journalists trotted out Icelandic interpreter to decipher the unspeakable secret code. But the verbal interpretation hardly helped as people having already developed an innate fear for the said sixteen syllables avoided it altogether and replaced the phrase with the speakable word--Volcano. The Icelanders however had the laugh of their lives mocking the entire world for failing to pronounce such an "easy" word. I guess we all need a little mocking to get back to our senses and start searching for valid options to pronounce yet not-pronounce the sixteen syllable monster. People tried different measures to say it like singing, but it is undoubtedly the US military that hit the jackpot; they called it Operation E-15. Clever ha! Wonder how I could name it. A brainstorming might help, and until that time as I come up with an innovative way of pronouncing it, I am abstaining from saying it altogether.
Picture Courtesy: www.boston.com
