Lately, I’ve been reading a lot of internet forums of… lesser quality… than the SDMB. Normally I am not prone to being picky about spelling and grammar, but I have to say, whenever I read something like this:
I immediately and permanently conclude the author is an illiterate, inbred, uneducated moron.
The word is voilà.
Now, I understand things like to vs. too, loose vs. lose, your vs. you’re, and similar minor errors that can trip people up. If you’re in a hurry, or just don’t pay attention to details, mistakes like that are perfectly understandable, and not worth getting excited over.
But “walla” - using that spelling implies that, in your entire life, you haven’t read enough written material (or enough written material of sufficient quality) to learn how the word is actually spelled. A “w” instead of a “v”? That’s not a fucking typo. Well, maybe if someone typed “woila”, I could understand that they just forgot how to spell it. But “walla”? What the fuck is that? What happened, did you not make it all the way through the first hooked-on-phonics DVD?
The same goes for “ludacrist”, which implies your highest level of reading achievement is being able to select the correct CD of shitty rap from your local music store.
The most annoying thing about seeing things like this is the implication that there must actually be people who go around pronouncing the words like that. Saying “walla” instead of “vwah-la”, or actually saying “lew-da-crist”.
yeah, yeah, English isn’t everyone’s first language, blah blah blah…
If you really want to read some of the intellectual dregs, try perusing the comments section at the bottom of your local newspaper’s articles. Some of them make “how is babby formed” look lucid and insightful.
“Then, instead of expensive mouthwash, he had breathed on Hogg-Enderby, bafflingly (for no banquet would serve, because of the known redolence of onions, onions) onions.”
“Walla” is also a Middle-Eastern (or maybe just Israeli) word that can’t really be translated to English, but is used in the somewhat surprised confirmation of the receipt of information. As in:
“So it’s spelled ‘voilà’? Walla.”
(Possible English translations include, but are not limited to: “gotcha”, “really?” and “no shit”)
Some people don’t pronounce the v. It is very soft, and tends to blend with the [w] sound to many English speakers’ ears. This is a quite normal phenomenon called lenition.
Alessan: But is it pronounced with an accent on the first or second syllable? Voila has it at the end.
