I was watching an episode of Judge Judy (I know, I know) today and the plaintiff was complaining that the defendant was bullying her online. The P stated that the D had posted unkind memes featuring her.
But here’s the thing. The defendant pronounced it me-me. She did it twice.
Gawd, what an ignoramus I shouted inwardly. Me-me! I had a good mental laugh over that. She even said it twice.
But then I noticed that nobody in the audience (gallery?) so much as smiled. Neither did Judge Judy, nor Bird, the bailiff.
I immediately wondered if it was I who was ignorant. Had I been pronouncing me-me wrong all these years. Were other folks snickering at me behind my back whenever I said “meme”?
So of course I did the Google and reassured myself. But I was sweating for a moment.
I have had those moments as well. I didn’t feel the need to google the me-me thing ( I was watching too!) but sometimes when I use a GREAT word but I have only ever seen it written, not heard it.
Along the same lines it was “mascarpone” for me. I would routinely find presenters on food network pronounce it to rhyme with phone. After many such instances, this had me doubting myself. I always pronounced it ending in “ay”.
I don’t post anything on this board until I have googled it to confirm that I’m not making a fool out of myself.
A large portion of the posts I type out get quietly deleted without ever being posted.
[At this moment, I am strongly resisting the urge to google whether “google” or “Google” is correct. I am going to post this and let the chips fall where they may.]
This might be a slight hijiack. But I’ve done audience work for judge judy. I guarantee you that nobody is paying attention to the cases to have noticed. Everyone is doing their damnedest to stay awake. It’s a loooong day of tedious petty cases and if you pay attention you will get outraged with them, yourself, everybody, humanity. Often leading to an outburst, then dismissal without pay. All $50ish. Which, if you are reduced to doing judge shows for a living, is good money for Hollywood dregs.
But then again, the vast majority Hollywood dregs doing audience work probably wouldn’t know the difference even if they heard it.
I’ll shoot my mouth off with confidence, then double think what I just said and add that I could be wrong. If I really doubt what I said, I’ll stop and check it myself. So yeah, I do it all the damn time.
All the time. Even when a point is in argument but I am 99% sure, I have doubts.
Well if you want to be technical, the last syllable is more of an “eh” than an “ay” in Italian, though yours is “more correct.”
I really thought you’d be talking about how all the TV chefs pronounce it “maRRRscapone.” Like 3/4 of them do so.
Your browser will autocorrect it to capital, and Google (and Xerox, and Kleenex, et al.) are often interested in not letting it become generic lower case, but the more descriptivist account is that lower case is fine. Basically, religious wars have been fought on more solid terms than “google” vs. “Google.”
This happened to me earlier in the present election cycle. Trump said something like wind turbines are un-American because they kill a lot of eagles. I guffawed and nearly jettisoned some partially chewed pretzels. Then I gOoGlEd it. Dadgum it! Seems those confounded contraptions really do slap a few flag birds into the promised land. Mind you, Trump is still a wholesale jackass idiot. But eagle thing… Had to choke down some crow.
Honestly, this happens to me almost every week in my line of work. Someone asks one of those tax questions that is of the “not even wrong” variety, but suddenly I’m like “Wait… what if this is a loophole I just haven’t heard of?”
There are such loopholes now and then, like the a court ruling on medical deduction for wigs. Cosmetic and non-deductible, right? Ah, but they were allowed for cancer patients because hair loss is a symptom of the chemo, and so the wig is a “treatment for a medical condition.”
So now someone comes in to claim their special, sovereign-citizen, total-nonsense, heard-it-from-my-barber tax deduction and there’s just enough doubt in my mind that I waste an hour trying to prove that something doesn’t exist.
Half of the posts I draft never see the light of day because I can’t confirm that something or other I’m trying to say is as true as I thought it was when I started writing. I learn as much from trying to write bulletproof posts as I learn from reading other’s posts.
As for the wind turbines, there are tons of data demonstrating that wind turbines are killing machines for most larger birds, not just eagles. This has been a green-on-green squabble for years.
Today. I was reading some previous documentation in a patient’s chart and read the previous nurse’s teaching that insulin is produced by the spleen. I burst out laughing then had a horrible moment thinking “am I wrong???” but no, a few seconds later my good sense reasserted itself :smack: and I regained my confidence in the pancreas as the source of insulin.
