Sunday, November 12, 2006

N - U - C - L - E - A - R

The word is 'nuclear'.

It's pronounciation is 'nuclear'.

The technology may be complicated and beyond the wit of most of us but not the word, surely!

But it is, it seems, beyond the linguistic skills of the majority of announcers, newsreaders and presenters on Dubai's radio stations.

Why do they say "nookyoolar"?

Look at the word! How do you get 'nookyoolar' out of that sequence of letters?

It's driving me crazy - I know, I need to get out more, but it's just one of those things that really gets under my skin.

What with North Korea and Iran having ambitions in the nuclear department, and the Arab world now also considering nuclear power for desalination plants and whatnot, the word - or rather the non-word, the mis-pronounced word, the teeth-gratingly annoyingly mispronounced word - is popping up with relentless regularity.

It is not 'nookyoolar'. It is 'nuclear'.

Please, please, please, someone, anyone, STOP THEM.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

lol!!! tht irks u!!
some ppl in dubai elogate the aaz in words....instead of al ain its al aaaaainnn......just a minor example

trailingspouse said...

My pet peeve is people (I guess I mean Brits) who insist on calling this place Dewbai. There is no diphthong guys! It's Doobai (emphasis on the last syllable), or if you're Arab, more like Dbai, or there again, maybe Do Buy?

Seabee said...

"Queue-wait" is another that annoys me.