'Ambience'/'Ambiance' and Let's Hear It for the Weasels

I was thinking the other day about the animals that we refer to as the very embodiment of certain types of people. (It was a slow news day.) You know, like, "He/she is a real ..." Here are some that came to mind:

chameleon
weasel
pig
jackass
gnat
dog
snake
skunk
bear
fox
dinosaur

And that's all I have to say about that.

On an unrelated topic, I was typing out my backside yesterday about "ambience" versus "ambiance" -- trying to say from memory which is right/wrong/preferred. So today I figured it was time to look it up:

Webster's New World College Dictionary says it's "ambience," but notes "ambiance" as an alternate spelling.

Merriam-Webster agrees. It prefers "ambience" but allows "ambiance."

American Heritage's fourth edition disagrees, preferring "ambiance" but allowing "ambience."

In the French, my Harrap's Mini French Dictionnaire, much to my surprise, spells it "ambiance" (I thought the French used the "e.")

And that's all I have to say about that.

Wonderings and Googlings (Wherein I wonder about words, then I Google them)

"supermarket" -- 44.7 million Google hits
"grocery store" -- 18.9 million Google hits

Sort of shoots my theory that people don't really use the word "supermarket" in their everyday lives. Must just be my little corner of the world.

This reminds me of the time two years ago when I was in the Minneapolis Public Radio studios to do an interview about Grammar Snobs -- an interview I was very grateful to get. The show host asked if I needed something to drink. Then she saw I was holding a soda and said: "Oh, you've got your pop."

She left the room and I marveled to the other woman there. "Pop. Pop. Hmm. Wow. Pop."

It was just idle word wondering, which I often do. I didn't realize it could have sounded like mockery until I heard a disembodied voice say, "Yeah, we say pop," then realized the host was right on the other side of the glass and I was sitting in front of a microphone.

Color me Jesse.

The Unbearable Lightness of Beanie

It was the late 1990s and I wanted a cheeseburger. Settling instead on a reasonable facsimile thereof, I walked into my local McDonald’s. The place was swamped – like David Hasselhoff-sighting swamped – and my prospects for scoring a meal before low blood sugar levels laid me flat on the dirty, french-fry-strewn floor looked bad.

As if to taunt me, there was plenty of food within reach – pristine, untouched hamburgers and cheeseburgers and McNuggets and full orders of fries. They were piled up in the trashcans, most with nary a bite missing.

It was the era of the Beanie Baby.

Being a surly Gen X type, I harbored the requisite disgust for this collecting craze. Yet I had to admit that I liked the name Beanie Baby. The words rolled off my tongue just so. They were literally fun to say. I would never in a million years join the herd of lemming-like Beanie Baby buyers. But my very contempt provided me with opportunities to say “Beanie Babies,” often accessorized with a carefully selected expletives.

In 1999, Beanie Baby manufacturer Ty Inc. raked in $1.25 billion from sales of these little plush toys, according to a 2004 Los Angeles Times article. Many factors contributed to this success. The company’s strategy of manufactured scarcity – the lifeblood of the collectibles market – was a major factor. Its alliance with McDonald’s helped, too, causing crazed collectors to buy food they didn't want just to score the free toy that came with it.

But, as a word person, I find it impossible to believe that the company would have had the same results had it named them “Small and Pliable Plush Animals” or “Miniature Stuffed Toys” or “Pieces of Colorful Fabric Sewn Around Stuffing and Plastic Pellets in Shapes Resembling Mammals and Sea Creatures.” Even something actually decent like “Tiny Teddy and Pals” or “Li’l Squeezes” probably couldn’t have borne the craze for these surprisingly bland little toys.

That’s my impression, anyway.

The reason I have Beanie Babies on the brain has to do with another fast food chain. Burger purveyor Jack in the Box has rolled out a line of smoothies (fun word, huh? Smoothies. Smooooothies). Commercials keep telling me they’re available in “mango, strawberry banana, and Orange Sunrise.”

Mango I get. Strawberry banana I get. Orange I get. But what’s this “Sunrise” business?

It could mean that the smoothie is not exactly orange but really a combination of orange and other citrus flavors. Or it could mean it contains a shot of tequila. I don’t know because, as a 21st-century American consumer, my expectations of words have been reduced to almost nothing. I know perfectly well that the words hurled at me every day may or may not have any meaning at all. Sometimes, marketers’ words are fired at us in the most literal sense possible, “Buy now!” Other times they’re thrown in just for sound -- the hypnotic and pleasant sensation created by combinations like "beanie" and "babies," the improved rhythm achieved by adding the word "sunrise" to the line of copy, "Mango, strawberry banana, and orange."

Either way, these words come from businesspeople more interested in impressions than meaning -- people counting on our not paying attention. And, either way, the effect is the same: Marketers drain the meaning and impact out of words.

Is this a bad thing? I don’t really know. I just worry about a system that banks on our brains being asleep. And I feel bad for the deflated little words, too. Under different circumstances, “sunrise” could convey a vivid, beautiful, meaningful image. But in my world, “sunrise” has more to do with TV commercials in which a sweaty jogger dangles his mangoes in another guy’s face. Thanks a lot, Jack.

Words I Hate Today But Reserve the Right to Change My Mind About Tomorrow

haute

Over the last two years, I’ve been lucky enough to be interviewed on perhaps three or four dozen radio shows. During these interviews, a lot of the same questions crop up – stuff like “Are you bothered by ‘between you and I’?” (Yes.) And, “Is it wrong to say, ‘try and’?” (It should probably be avoided.)

But only one question is guaranteed to come up every time. It’s the one that precedes the formal interview: “How do you pronounce your name? Is it CAAH-sa-GRAHN-day or CASS-a-GRAN-day?”

In other words: Should we pronounce the A sounds as we would in Spanish or Italian, or should we anglicize them? Both are correct, obviously, but I opt for the latter pronunciation. When saying my own name, a Latin A sounds downright pretentious. The anglicized Cassagranday sounds to me more relaxed and less affected.

It’s the same reason I don’t roll my Rs when I order a burrito or belly up to the barista at my local Starbucks to order a “cwoissan.”

The way I deal with foreign/adopted words is: If there’s an accepted American pronunciation, such as “cRoissant,” I use it. For less common words, I try to observe true-to-their-mother-tongue pronunciations only to the extent they can be spoken in an American accent.

I happen to know the correct pronunciations of “Al Qaeda” (the Q part, anyway) and Kadafi. But they both involve consonant sounds that don’t exist in English. So I pronounce both Qaeda and Kadafi as if they started with a K sound, and thereby eliminate the danger that someone will try to perform the Heimlich maneuver on me.

Foreign words in English are wonderful when we can reach a sort of harmony with them. But “haute,” to me, just doesn’t sit right on an American tongue.

Don’t construe this as anti-French sentiment. I love French. In fact, French class is where I first discovered my passion for English grammar. So my dislike of “haute” is in no way a lack of appreciation for the French language.

Say “haute couture” with a French accent and it sounds nice. Say it with an American accent and it sounds not just silly but self-conscious. Compare this to, say, “aujourd’hui” – pure music in a French accent and good clean fun in an American accent as well. But “haute” is another beast.

I suspect I'm not alone. This would explain why why, though I often see “haute” in print, I almost never hear it spoken. Most telling of all, this may be why the how-to-pronounce-it recordings of two major dictionaries disagree.

Click the little sound symbol on Dictionary.com’s pronunciation for “haute” and you’ll hear “ought.” Click on the entry below, the one authored by the American Heritage Dictionary, and you’ll hear a slightly fancified version of the word “oat.”

And that, to me, is why we haute to find a replacement for this word.