Correct mispronunciations

Hey, did you notice that gas prices were the lowest they’ve been in a long, long time the last few weeks before the election? Yee-haw, that was shore real swell, twarn’t it?!? OK, seriously, this jerking of the national puppet strings is so transparent, so predictable and so blatant, you wonder if Geppetto just got named CEO of Texaco.

But how truly merciful and generous of our benevolent petroleum overlords to trickle down some petro-relief. And how oh-so-very timely. We can beg and scream and moan about getting bent over the couch and dry-humped to the tune of multi-billion dollar quarterly profits by these jowly robber barons all we want, and nothing ever comes of it outside of a token Congressional committee hearing that gets headlines for a day. But threaten their relentless chokehold of Congress with the possibility of the Democrats grabbing one or maybe both Houses, and gee, looky here, the price of unleaded just went down to $2.40 a gallon. Hope those fat fux who call the shots at Seven Sisters Inc. can squeak by in the fourth quarter when their net income drops all the way down to a measly three or four billion.

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You know what us Nevadans need to do? We need to quit having a goddamn heart attack anytime someone from out of state says “Nuh-vahd-uh.” There’s been a lot of sports stuff happening in Louisville, Ky., lately, and that meant lots of talk about the proper pronunciation of the city’s name. I didn’t know there was any problem here. I’ve always said Louie-ville, just like any non-Kentuckyite. I had no clue the locals call it “Lou-uh-vull.” So what? As locals, they can slur it into whatever slang vernacular they want. As somebody who lives 2,000 miles from the place, I call it the way I learned it. Louie-ville. And if I ever travel to that city, I’ll be happy to say Louie-ville, thereby daring to expose myself as a non-local. Maybe a real local will appreciate that I’m not trying to be a phony local and buy me a beer. Or a friggin’ mint julep.

This line of thinking leads very quickly to us. For years, I’ve been completely OK with this uptight attitude that dictates that you must say “Nuh-vadd-uh,” and if you don’t say it with that flat “A”, well, sonuvagun, you have just committed one major gaffe and a half. “Good lord, son, are you from … from … out of town? Well, I never …” What a ‘tude, coming from a populace dependent on out-of-towners! Where and when did we get so damn pissy about this? Every time somebody from somewhere else says “Nuh-vahd-uh,” we immediately go into our official state swoon and correct the poor shlub as if he’s just taken a leak on the guacamole dip. You get the sense that the last thing political advisors tell their charges before they hit the stage is, “and for God’s sake, don’t say Nuh-vahd-uh! You could blow the whole election!”

We gotta get over it.