Tetsuo Time

I just found this article. Talks about how some people insist on mispronouncing the names of things like OS X which is pronounced Oh Ess Ten.. or Ubuntu which is pronounced Oo-Boon-Too, or Linux which is prounced Lih-nucks. I wrote this as a comment on the Digg page for it:

You know what, this isn't the first time I have talked about or encountered stuff like this and I've come to this conclusion just now. Personally I like to say things the official way they are said like for example OS X is pronounced Oh Es Ten by Apple. But I see there are people who insist on pronouncing it Oh Es Ex anyway. I'll tell you what, I wont try to correct you to make you say Oh Es Ten if you don't try to correct me and make me say it as Oh Es Ex. I was pronouncing Ubuntu as You-bun-too before but now that I know the real pronunciation I will try to use it. But it's not like I get the chance to say it to another person in real life. Also a nice thing about reading stuff on the internet is you can read it the way you want so others may see OS X and see it as Oh Es Ex but I see it and I see Oh Es Ten.

This does kind of hit home for me a bit though because I have a last name that people tend to mangle. It kind of reminds me of how in Star Trek Data said Day-Tah is his name and Dah-tah is not. It also reminds me of one of the characters in fonejackers where there is a guy who calls up people acting like an arabian(?) guy and pronouncing things like DVD as Doovde. Some people can mangle just about any name... like the name Wendy.. some people say it as Windy... my family would.

Well, like I have said for other things... you can't control others but you can control yourself so that's what I'm going to do but that doesn't mean that a person can't state their opinion... it just doesn't pay to get in other people's faces with it. All you'll get is people getting upset and calling you pompous.

A recent digg item linked to an article about the origins of OK. The article says that OK came from a time when intentionally mispelled words where popular and it actually stands for "Oll Korrect". Some people said that they thought it is just an abbreviated version of "Okay". But I just can't agree with that. In my opinion the ay part in that version is superfluous. I mean say OK and then say Okay. The kay part is just saying the letter spelled K phonetically.

It's like with Men In Black. They had people like Kevin who became Agent K and they even show them delete all the letters of an agents name except the first letter and that becomes his designation. Another example is James who becomes Agent J. Starting with the novelist who did the novelisation they started typing it out as "Kay". The wiki article says their designations correctly but fandom doesn't. I've made the mistake one time of arguing with the web master of a certain Men In Black fan site about it. Zed is also not correct inside the united states where it would be pronounced Zee. But either way it's just the letter Z spelled phonetically. The web master said the author of the novelization chose to write out all the designations phonetically because he didn't want random letters on the page. They also said that they aren't names.... but that's the point. They aren't names and they aren't random letters they are designations created from the first letters of their names made to anonymize the Agents. One more example would be if I became a MIB my name would be shortened to T making me Agent T but certain people would spell it as Tee. =P I wonder what they would do if there was an Agent W.. call them Agent Dub?

But then again I sometimes make mistakes like that like one time I argued with someone about the correct way to pronounce Mac OS X. The correct way is Mac Oh Ess TEN because the X is a roman numeral. The way they where saying it was Mac OS ECKS, pronouncing the X phonetically. I tried to tell them that's how Apple always says it and they have even specifically programmed the text to speech in OS X to pronounce it as "Oh Ess TEN" when you have it speak it. But they just yell at me saying they don't have time to study how Apple pronounces things and they'll pronounce it however we want. The same sort of conversation happened with the MIB fan site web master. I'm surprised people haven't pronounced iPod as Ip-pod (Ip rhyming with lip).

I don't argue with anyone on the correct way to pronounce or spell anything anymore besides because to some people it just doesn't matter. I've been accused of being snooty by those certain people and maybe I am but that doesn't mean I'm wrong.

Not that I'm actually saying Okay is wrong or even other versions like kk because they have become slang but I personally use OK.

Wow.. this became longer than I thought it would be!