A while back on a talk radio show, the guys were joking about traditional radio DJ’s. They were making bogus song intros in forced radio-announcer voices.
One of them said the station’s call letters (WNEW) and made a careful point of exaggerating his pronunciation: “It’s not double-yoo, it’s dubba-doo,” he said.
That got me thinking: Is that what those lightning-fast announcers are taught to say to get those W’s out?
I have been listening extra careful to news and traffic announcers and I’m almost certain that they are saying “dubba-doo” instead of “double-yoo,” but it’s difficult to discern.
Is this true? What other odd little pronunciation tricks to they use?
Well, there’s the trick where they blather over the intro and outro of a song until you find yourself screaming “SHUT THE FUCK UP!” at your car radio and scaring your passengers.
When I was in school, we spend a lot of time with the “W”, making sure it was pronounced “Double U”. That was so bad at one point in school that when we were writing copy for air checks we had to right W’s as UU (such as BMUU). There was so much emphsis in school that it becomes a joke around some stations. This may not be the case with these two guys, but it was the case with me.
My high school had a radio station, at which I was a DJ in the mid-'90s. The proper pronounciation of “W” was drilled into our heads quite firmly by the station manager (who was also a popular local commercial radio personality).
