technique

[nevers]

something i've been thinking about recently: correctness vs. casualness. lauren did a phone interview about a play of hers that's being produced this winter, and it was transcribed and edited and sent to her for review before publication. she asked me to look it over. she really liked the way it sounded casual and off-the-cuff and was glad that

Comments

[sitonmykarma]

This is all so interesting - and yes, I know what you mean about enunciation in singing. I think I appreciate it more when it's a big group and/or a fast song and can feel how if it were less enunciated it'd be a train wreck (the specific song I'm thinking of is Benjamin Britten/"This Little Babe" but I suspect that it apples to choral work like that in general, for me

[nevers]

man-DAY-ta-ry! i had no idea.
the other night i listened to an australian classical-music radio podcast and i'm not sure if i'm learning how to pronounce composers' names correctly for an american or just for an australian, haha. presumably names are the same everywhere, i.e., they're said the way the owner said them, but one never knows. (dvorak has a j sound before the -ak? all those years of copyediting TONY classical music listings and i never knew.)

i wonder if i would feel self-conscious. it hadn't occurred to me, but probably i would.

[sitonmykarma]

Yes, I think the j sound in Dvorak is right, though that is apparently (confusingly) not how Dvorak keyboards are pronounced. There should be a post like this one but for composers instead of artists: http://greg.org/archive/2010/05/18/if_you_see_something_say_something.html - I mean, maybe there is and I just don't know it.

[flexagon]

Totally fascinating post. One of the most fun conversations I've had in recent times was last Thanksgiving when my whole group of friends started ragging on each other about pronunciation things that drive them crazy. :-)

Various words and things that I have thought about:

heisenbug used to get on me for the way I said "milk", which was like "melk", rather than explicitly having a short "i" sound as in "imp" or "will". After a while I tried to change this, and I'm aware of it, but I think I often land halfway between the two vowel sounds now.

The word "either" -- I used to find "eye-ther", as opposed to "ee-ther", really pretentious-sounding, but now I sometimes say it. All these years on the east coast will change a girl, apparently.

Sometimes heisenbug says "with" with a voiced "th" sound. That is, the "th" from "either" or "seethe". I still find this incredibly pretentious-sounding and I hate it and can't say it that way.

[nevers]

whoa... i thought "with" was SUPPOSED to have a voiced "th"! i'm pretty sure that's how i say it and i have never given it any thought. i thought the unvoiced folks were wrong. (checked m-w and they agree with you, preferring unvoiced.)

[auranja]

I think it would be delightful and hilarious if you were to search for a good photo of a prototypically casual, slightly lopsided, messy braid, and use your technique to replicate that one messy braid as precisely and faithfully as possible. I'm imagining you striving for a precise imitation of that one braid every time you wore a braid, as your own secret. If I were ever to meet someone with that secret (well, and find that secret out) I would collapse with pleasure.

I have a friend who uses "who" when "whom" would be grammatically correct, even though it grates on him, just to blend in.

[_swallow]

just loved this comment :)

[nevers]

hehe! fun idea, although it would feel like such a waste of time to put so much effort into creating something sloppy. i feel like in that case, the way to get me to be sloppy would be to create an extreme time constraint. doesn't work as well for sloppy/casual movement, though.