The latest episode of the excellent “Still Processing” podcast is all about apologies – celebrity apologies, personal apologies, how our willingness to apologize or not is shaped by the culture we live in. It’s really good.
I thought this episode of Radiolab about apologies was rather good too.
I think anyone who has worked in TV or radio, whether reading the news or speaking extemporaneously on a subject has made mistakes. Same as sports announcers. Deciding some guy is a racist because he jumbled some words is pretty damn judgemental.
Now maybe I feel this way because I have a degree in Radio & TV Broadcasting, I don’t know.
It’s probably best to just assume everyone is racist until they prove they aren’t. It’s the only way to be safe.
Avenue Q has been right along, no doubt!
Fire them all!
THAT IS NOT TERRIFYING AT ALL.
God damnit, leave that shit on 4chan.
Aw come on. That’s been posted here a bunch of times. It’s the first thing I picture when I see the unedited one.
It’s weird how this tongue twister just keeps happening. At least it’s on a Fox station so it’s more understandable.
Weirdly, the second one is more understandable to me. If I was a local news guy, I’d be totally overly-conscious about it because of the first guy. And of course, being too conscious of it is the best way to end up saying it.
I don’t get the first guy, though.
This is exactly what I would be worried about happening. Thinking about slipping up so much that you end up saying exactly what you were trying to avoid saying.
I would probably just tell my boss, I am going to say “MLK Jr Day”
Or just drop the “Junior” all together. Martin Luther King was the man’s name. The fact that he was the second of that name in his family is not all that important… I can’t imagine anyone is going to confuse him for his father.
Maybe I’m missing something. Was the “Junior” particularly import to him?
Even if it wasn’t, I think the ship has sailed. That’s the name of the holiday, so unless they rename it, news organizations in particular are going to call it by its name. That said, I’ve never once been corrected by calling it “MLK Day” instead of “MLKJ Day.”
Yeah, honestly the Junior is extraneous, I don’t know why anyone would use it outside of a history book at this point. It’s not like anyone is going to confuse the famous person with their father that no one has heard of.
Are you suggesting that this would help to avoid accidental slips? My understanding is that it is the “King” part that resulted in issues.
You can’t just change the name of a famous person to make it easier for certain people to say. That’s kind of ridiculous.
It was speculated on above that it was the “K” sound in King combined with anticipation of the “oon-yer” sound in “Junior” that causes people to slip up and say “koon”.
Nonsense. We do that all the time.
Yeshua was apparently too hard for non-Hebrews to say, so we call him Joshua. And for some reason we modified even that to “Jesus” in Latin-speaking countries. And for that matter, we don’t even all agree on how to pronounce the name in Western language.
An-Nasir Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub would probably be pretty pissed off that we call him Saladin today. He’s probably want to lop off all our heads. Though to be fair, he’d want to do that anyway.
We say “Mahatma Gandhi” even though his first name was Mohandas. “Mahatma” is a title; it just rolls off the English-speaking tongue better.
And yeah, I’m being pedantic and not really looking to pick a fight. I just enjoy lecturing on changing pronunciations over the centuries.
Honest question for the group though: Is the “Junior” or “the Third” or whatever after someone’s name actually on their US birth certificate? I ask because my family doesn’t generally hand down names, and on most forms I’ve seen they ask for that in place separated from what I would term the “main” name.