Irk's relative, maybe?
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PHILADELPHIA (WPVI) – Thomas Jefferson University is apologizing for one of its graduation ceremonies.
During the commencement on Thursday, several names were dramatically mispronounced.
It happened during the school’s College of Nursing graduation.
The school said it happened because of the way the phonetic spellings were presented on the speaker’s cards.
The presenter did apologize.
Thomas Jefferson University released the following statement:
"The leadership and faculty of Thomas Jefferson University extend our sincerest apologies for the mispronunciations of the names of several of our graduating nursing students during our recent commencement ceremony. This ceremony is a celebration of the significant achievements of our students, and each graduate deserves to have their name honored correctly on this pivotal day.
We also recognize that commencement is not only a milestone for our students but also a deeply important day for their families and loved ones who have supported them throughout their educational journey, and we are deeply sorry for any disappointment this may have caused. The mispronunciations occurred due to the way phonetic spellings were presented on the speaker’s cards, which was noted when the presenter apologized during the ceremony. This unfortunate error does not reflect the immense respect we have for our graduates and the value we place on their hard-earned accomplishments."
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My last name is just four letters, of which two are vowels and two are consonants. There are two common five-letter words in English which have my last name as the last four, and that portion of each word is pronounced identically to my name. And yet, people stumble all over it regularly. Around here, for those whose first language is not English or something North European that uses the relevant spelling combination, I can understand their confusion. While my surname is common in Ohio (and is the name of a small town in Colorado), it’s not even close to common in Texas, and the two-letter vowel combination it contains is not used that way in Spanish. I can readily understand the difficulty they have when presented with the complexities of Southern Asian names and Icelandic extra-letter and multiple languages’ variations in how something like a “j” may be used.
What is particularly embarrassing is when someone stumbles while trying to cope with my name due to unfamiliarity, even though their first language ought to lead to their getting it right, simply because they haven’t encountered it before and have become sensitized to the issue of name mispronunciation.
@werehatrack I’d always thought of your last name as being “Hatrack” but I see my error now. Your name should actually parsed be “Werehat Rack” — and the English words that rhyme with “Rack” would be “crack” and “track.” (We can ignore brack, frack, and wrack as not being very common.)
Probably the best part of this fun exercise is realizing that we need to count “C” as a vowel to get the counts correct. I’ve seen C used in different ways before, but never as a vowel. I love learning new things!
@werehatrack @xobzoo And we still don’t know how to pronounce “xobzoo.”
@Kyeh @werehatrack Sorry; I’m still
planningthinking of tossing one out there “soon” … I just want it to be “complete” and therefore including all the other related things. I should probably drop that notion (but I won’t).Sounds like someone fired their aide before a ceremony.
@pakopako Plausible. Also possible that they had a 'bot autofetching an AI-generated phoneticization instead of one that was requested from the relevant person. But taking enough care to have avoided this stupid mess would imply that they thought it was important before they fucked it up, and that they were smart enough to know that the only way to get it right was to actually go to the sources. Either of those issues provide a path to failure. Personally, I think it was both; they didn’t really care that much about the names, and had not checked to see how badly they’d get mangled by the official choice of “guidance”.
/8ball Will they find a different and even more headdesking way to screw it up next year?
Outlook good
@pakopako @werehatrack Y’all expecting too much of college-educated Peter-principled minions who showed up to their job interviews holding their participation trophies and their doctorates of “education”.
<defn>Education Department. The one that accepts students with the lowest SATs and turns out the graduates with the highest GPAs.</defn>
@pakopako @phendrick At the college level this happens because most of the teaching staff is now “adjunct professors” who are paid roughly 40% (or less) of what one with tenure could get. Pay low-bidder rates, get people who can’t get anything else. (At the public-school level, damn near all the teachers are paid at levels and harassed over minutiae that will drive almost anyone competent away.)
My mother’s landline answering machine does this all the time.
@Kyeh OMFG voicemail transcriptions.
@Kyeh @werehatrack The best come with transcriptions of calls from a non-native-English speaker. Like this message left by our housekeeper and transcribed by the Google Voice bot:
Hi Jackie, I forgot my daughter and my one more drugs downstairs.
We briefly expected visits from the DEA and/or Child Protective Services, but no one showed.
I want to see the actual “phonetic spellings” that were used (and I’m curious how they were generated). I’m also wondering
I recognize that some names are unusual and not pronounced quite as expected… even when they otherwise look like English words… but I would expect Allison, Sarah, Molly, and Thomas are pretty straightforward for anyone living in the US long enough to not have a foreign accent. Especially paired with their very typical last names.
(I’ll grant a pass for Maeve Elizabeth Brostoski, since the common name is sandwiched between two uncommon ones.)
Oh, also this classic:
@xobzoo Way back in middle school, we had a PE teacher that had a lowbrow military drill sarge vibe. He would start each class with roll call, yelling out last names from his clipboard. He would mispronounce one particular student’s name every single time and the student would correct him each time. Next class, repeat. For the entire school year. (I’m pretty sure he wasn’t doing it intentionally - he just wasn’t very bright.)
@macromeh @xobzoo Cantstandya!
I’m a proud graduate of Thomas Jefferson University. Luckily, they got my name right when I graduated 17 years ago.
(Fuck - it’s been 17 years already?!)