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unixronin: Galen the technomage, from Babylon 5: Crusade (Default)
Unixronin

December 2012

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Thursday, October 6th, 2005 09:26 am

Triggered by no less than three posts I've just seen in communities I read:  If you're trying to sound clever and erudite, you won't achieve it by trying to use fancy foreign words that you can neither spell nor pronounce.  It just makes you sound and look like a pretentious ignoramus.  The word you mean when you type "Wa la", for example, is spelled "Voila", and it isn't pronounced the way either of those looks to a non-French-speaker.  The same applies to "Boo coo" and "Beaucoup".

I don't have the energy right now to dig out the rest.

Thursday, October 6th, 2005 06:34 am (UTC)
That's too funny!

I generally use "Vi-Ola." Violas are funnier than, say, Cellos, and both are funnier than spelling it "Wah-La" (I've never seen that -- I would hope they're doing it on purpose? trying to be funny?).
Thursday, October 6th, 2005 06:48 am (UTC)
The people I've seen do this seem to seriously think that, well, that's more or less how it sounds, so that's how it must be spelled.

(Amusingly enough, this is invariably native English speakers, and English is probably one of the more dangerous languages in which to make such assumptions -- ploughing roughly through is enough to make you cough, even though you have a dictionary.)