Poetic Feet and Mayor Pete

If you’re at all like me, at one point or another in your education, you had to learn poetic meter — all that stuff about iambic pentameter and whatnot. I think I had to memorize all of the different types of “feet” in seventh grade: iambs, troches, dactyls, and so on.

At the time I thought that learning all of the different types of feet — the technical name for which is prosody — was completely useless. It turns out, however, that understanding prosody has one fairly specific use: explaining the difficulty that many have when it comes to pronouncing the last name of Presidential hopeful “Mayor” Pete Buttigieg.

Needless to say, the spelling of Buttigieg itself raises issues with respect to pronunciation; it’s certainly not as straightforward as “Warren” or “Sanders.” To address this problem early in his political career, my understanding is that the politician’s campaign issued a fairly straightforward pronunciation guide: Buttigieg sounds like Buddha Judge.

If they had left it that, all would have been relatively well–at least insofar as getting comfortable with pronouncing Mayor Pete’s last name is concerned. After all, we can all say “Buddha,” and we can all say “Judge,” and, perhaps most importantly, we can say the two words in rapid succession without tripping over either of them.

The problem, however, is that Buddha Judge wasn’t quite right. The “uh” sounds needed to be “eh” sounds. Thus, a subsequent note went out to the press. To wit (and in my own words): Instead of Buddha Judge, it’s actually Boot Edge Edge.

While this new pronunciation guide solved one problem, it caused another. This is where understanding prosody comes in handy — at least insofar as it gives us some terminology we can use to describe the problem.

While the original guide to pronouncing Buttigieg may have gotten the vowel sounds wrong (giving us “uh” when “eh” would have been more appropriate), what it got right was the type of “poetic foot” we should use when pronouncing Mayor Pete’s last name; it’s what’s known as a dactyl, which is to say that the three syllables in his name follow an accented-unaccented-unaccented pattern. Other dactylic words include battleship, endocrine, and fallacy.

By way of contrast, what Mayor Pete’s campaign gained in correcting for the pronunciation of the vowel sounds, they lost in (for lack of a better term) poetic footage. Boot Edge Edge consists of three accented syllables and does not roll off the tongue easily.

Yes, we can say “Boot,” and we can say “Edge,” and we can also say “Edge” again, but three accented syllables rarely follow each other in nature. Perhaps this is why my seventh-grade teacher never gave us a word for the phenomenon. But it does have a name. It’s a molossus.

Not only does lack of practice make it, perhaps, somewhat difficult for some people (myself included) to pronounce a molossus like Boot Edge Edge but, more to the point, that pronunciation is prosodically incorrect. As noted earlier, just as Buttigieg should be pronounced with “eh” sounds instead of “uh” sounds, it should also be pronounced as a dactyl and not a molossus.

Unfortunately, there’s no combination of words in the English language that will give us both the correct vowel sounds and the correct prosody as a reference point for pronouncing Buttigieg. I’m slightly tempted to say that it starts with “booty” and ends with “jedge,” but the long “e” sound in booty is still not quite right and “jedge” is not a word.

On the other hand, my purpose here in all of this wasn’t so much to provide a solution as to explain the problem in the kind of excruciating detail that only my seventh-grade English teacher would truly appreciate. As far as solutions go, I’ll leave that to Mayor Pete’s campaign team.

There’s a reason the banner says “Pete” and not “Buttigieg.”

 

Everybody Should Be Reading Philip K. Dick All The Time

When Kellyanne Conway introduced the world to the concept of alternative facts back in January, sales of George Orwell’s 1984 skyrocketed. Right about now, though, I imagine everyone who bought a copy of 1984 might be finishing up and looking for something new to read. My suggestion is anything and everything by Philip K. Dick. A little while ago, I wrote about The Man in the High Castle, and like that novel, the vast majority of Dick’s novels are about worlds in which everybody’s sense of reality is based on stories, myths, and lies. Not to put to fine a point on it, but one of his books is actually called Lies, Inc.

Of course, there are loads of PKD (that’s what the hip kids call him) novels. In 1964 alone, he published five novels, and one of them, The Penultimate Truth, is a great place to start. It depicts a world in which the vast majority of people live in underground “ant tanks” because they believe that Earth’s surface is completely uninhabitable. They believe this because they’re fed a media diet of lies by the tiny minority (the top 1%, perhaps?) of people who live on the surface. Even the apparent ruler of the free world, Talbot Yancy, is himself a lie — or, more accurately, a simulacrum of a human being, an electronic puppet whose strings are pulled by the so-called “Yance-Men” who write his speeches and control his public image.

While it’s certainly tempting to draw parallels between Yancy and the current President of the United States, I won’t go there (though, technically, I just did). What I consider the truly interesting parallel between The Penultimate Truth and the world we’re living in today is the role that the media plays in shaping our understanding of the world.

In particular, the media has woven a narrative in which the world is a scary place. This narrative has been in place for decades. It’s reflected in the twin broadcast news rules stating that “if it bleeds, it leads” and “if it burns, it earns.” In other words, to boost ratings, TV news outlets have traditionally spiced up their broadcasts with news of violence and impending doom — so much so that most viewers of TV news believe that the world is a much more dangerous place than it actually is. The result is a world where people are afraid to leave their homes for fear of being mugged or molested by strangers, gunned down by madmen, or blown up by terrorists.

It’s important to note that the current POTUS didn’t invent the “scary world” narrative, but he has definitely and expertly used it to his advantage. His campaign hinged almost entirely on scary stories about terrorists and so-called “bad hombres” making the world — and America in particular — a scary place. Needless to say, that rhetoric hasn’t ceased. To hear him speak, you’d think the world was under attack all the time. And people tend to believe it because it’s in line with the story that the news media has been feeding to us forever.

Of course, the POTUS has upped the ante by employing “alternative facts.” Such facts range from embellishing on the number of people who attended his inauguration to fabricating terrorist attacks both at home and abroad that never occurred. He has also ingeniously pinned the guilt of lying on media outlets that are actually telling the truth while simultaneously endorsing conspiracy theorists who support the fictions he is trying palm off on the American people.

The intended result of all of this is presumably a world much like that depicted in The Penultimate Truth — that is, a world where everybody relies on a media that presents alternative facts for information about the world in which they live, a world in which people are terrified to step outside of their homes, let alone travel abroad, to see what the world is really like.

Without spoiling the ending for anyone, I’ll conclude by drawing parallels between the Penultimate Truth, the world of alternative facts, and Plato’s allegory of the cave. In his allegory, Plato depicts a world in which people who have lived in a cave throughout their lives imagine the cave (and a parade of shadows that dances across its walls) to be the only reality that exists. When one of the cave dwellers leaves the cave, that individual is struck by a series of increasingly startling revelations: the shadows aren’t reality, there’s more to life than the cave, and the world outside of the cave is so bright as to be blinding (but try telling any of that to the people who have never left the cave).

All of this essentially plays out to one degree or another in The Penultimate Truth, and it’s also strikingly similar to the world in which we find ourselves today. To learn the truth about their world, the characters in PKD’s novel need to leave their ant tanks and ascend to the planet’s surface above. To figure out that the people the current administration wants us to fear are in the vast majority of instances just like ourselves in all the ways that matter, we need to venture out — outside of our locked doors, beyond our tiny lives, beyond our closed circles, and beyond our nation’s borders.

In short, we need to confront the shadowy world of alternative facts with the light of truth. As PKD’s novels suggest, it isn’t always easy (and the path can be rife with danger), but it can be done. We just need to look away from our screens in order to do it.

2paragraphs: an interesting site

Just a quick note to say that I recently discovered an interesting site called 2paragraphs. Launched earlier this month, the site offers articles on books, culture, sports and other topics that are always two paragraphs long. Of course, I may be a little biased in my assessment of the site, as they were kind enough to run a profile on me, but I do think it’s a website worth checking out.