I hate to sound like a member of the liberal elite, but I’ll say it: I read the news. Garfield, Dennis the Menace, Peanuts, The Family Circus — hell, I’ll even read Doonesbury if I’m feeling particularly high falutin. And on my way to reading these, the important part of newspapers, I have to flip through the other boring pages, so I sometimes notice the headlines. This is how I have become a fountain of knowledge, able to rattle off newsy little bits of information such as: “The temperature was a high of 67 degrees yesterday,” and, “Hillary won the popular vote.”
As an informed citizen, I recognize my obligation to partake in discourse regarding national and global affairs. I love a healthy debate. I crave the free exchange of ideas. Nothing gets me more excited, other than all forms of dessert. I even started a podcast to encourage my peers to join me in these discussions. My podcast is called, “You Are Wrong and I Will Tell You Why,” and it should be up on Spotify in the next few decades. Production’s been slow because all my guests keep cancelling. By the way, if you would like to be featured on my podcast, please shoot me an e-mail! It is a low-pressure situation. You barely even have to talk. Each episode is 90 minutes long, but I talk for 87 of them, and then there’s a two minute word from our sponsors. Basically, I just need you to state your name and an opinion on anything, and then you can just sit back and let me tell you how wrong you are. If you don’t have any opinions, no worries. State a fact — I’ll dispute that, too! I’m like a younger, hotter Fox News!
But back to my point. In my recent discussions with fellow news readers, I’ve discovered something incredibly alarming. Just last week I was talking to a couple of my many, many friends, when one of them said: “We really need to change our approach to addressing the problem of nuclear weapons. It’s like we’ve forgotten that we were the ones who dropped the atomic bomb.” I gasped. This statement blew me away for two reasons. First, I have never read a history book and thus did not know we had dropped the atomic bomb, so I was, like, very shocked by that. We are such a peaceful people, I just couldn’t believe it. As FDR once said, the only thing we have to fear is nothing, because we have done nothing wrong ever.
But what really threw me for a loop was that when my friend said, “nuclear weapons,” he pronounced it like the word, “nucular.” Here’s the kicker: nucular is not even a word!
Here is how you should say the word: new-clear.
Here is how you should not say it, and yet so many do: new-kya-lur.
I’m worried, America. It is about time we start pronouncing our words correctly. After all, what does it say in the very first line of our constitution? I don’t know for sure as I have never read it, but those founding fathers seemed like they had a lot of sense. When they sat around the table making their deeply racist, sexist arguments, they pronounced stuff correctly. We owe it to them to follow in their footsteps.
Who are we, if not a country in which we put most of our resources into telling everybody else in the world how superior we are? Let us be superior in our pronunciation!
Who are we, if not a people that goes abroad to foreign lands with foreign languages, yet insists on speaking our own language no matter what, talking really loud and slow, as if that’s somehow going to make people understand? When we scream in English at the poor salesman who does not understand (and really has no obligation to understand, because after all this is his country, so we probably could have learned a word or two in his language, but anyway), let us scream our words at him correctly, angrily, properly pronounced!
Nucular is just not a word, and I can be silent no longer. This is a national issue, one that I will fight tirelessly, until I get tired, and then I’ll probably let it go. Anyway, to hear about other stuff you are doing wrong, come be on my podcast. Please. Anybody?
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