Shooting the breeze with Shanna the other day. While making a valiant effort to edumacate me in various facets of Greek myths that I had never studied properly, she mentioned a former professor of hers who was a stickler for the proper pronunciation of Greek names. That reminded me of something Dennis Perrin said once:
Being an autodidact, I often mispronounced new words I learned, holding back in conversation until I heard someone else speak correctly.
I laughed ’cause it’s true! There are so many words and names that I’m familiar with, having seen them in print eleventy-teen thousand times, but I’ve never once heard them spoken. ‘Tis the lonely fate of the self-educated, to spend so much of our lives limited to a textual relationship with words, isolated from the full enjoyment of their lyrical musicality!