Mispronunciations: radio and TV news

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Mispronunciations: radio and TV news

Postby kal » Mon Jul 25, 2016 11:13 pm

Not sure if there is a global thread for this sort of thing already.

Heard this evening on CBC TV local news at 11 pm, in a segment referring to recent drug overdoses in Surrey...

" ... most of the overdoses have occurred in the Whale - ey neighbourhood ..." i.e. pronounced whale eee.
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Re: Mispronunciations: radio and TV news

Postby mccrady » Tue Jul 26, 2016 8:52 am

Place names can be tricky even for experienced people if they're working in a new market.

I remember one guy talking about Quesnel as Quez-Nell. And when I first came to Edmonton I never would have guessed that Waskatenau (on the highway between Edmonton and Fort McMurray) was pronounced Wah-SET'-Nah. You have to be prepared to ask around.

Geography can always trip up the unwary broadcaster. I once happily did a road report which advised my audience that the leg from Kootenay Bay to Balfour (near Nelson, BC) was "wet". Kootenay Bay to Balfout was, and still is, a ferry run.
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Re: Mispronunciations: radio and TV news

Postby Neumann Sennheiser » Tue Jul 26, 2016 9:16 am

mccrady wrote: I once happily did a road report which advised my audience that the leg from Kootenay Bay to Balfour (near Nelson, BC) was "wet". Kootenay Bay to Balfour was, and still is, a ferry run.


I bet one of your colleagues set you up for that one; you were new?

Next weekend is my annual pilgrimage to the lakeside vacation place near Gray Creek on Kootenay Lake so I'll be on that ferry at least a couple of times for trips to Nelson and Kaslo ( one of my favorite little towns anywhere. Like Cicely Alaska, if Cicely was something more than TV fiction).

Back on subject: When Hart Kirch was programming CJME in the 70's, he had a policy of sitting down with new, from-out-of-town hires with a city map of Regina and Saskatchewan and going over in detail all street and town names. That's how I learned to say Forget Street without sounding like an idiot on the air ( I, of course, discovered a myriad of other ways to achieve that).
"You don't know man! I was in radio man! I've seen things you wouldn't believe!"
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Re: Mispronunciations: radio and TV news

Postby mccrady » Tue Jul 26, 2016 9:34 am

I bet one of your colleagues set you up for that one; you were new?


I was fairly new ... and also getting around by shank's mare at the time, so had no opportunity to drive the area and get familiar with it.

But it wasn't a colleague who set me up. That report was ripped and read straight from the BN wire. I often wonder how many others got caught by it.
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Re: Mispronunciations: radio and TV news

Postby jon » Tue Jul 26, 2016 12:06 pm

Mistakes happen even at stations that pride themselves on "Quality". September 1972 at CHQM: I heard the first newscast of a Newsman fresh off the road from his last job in Montreal. Co-Kit-Lamb.

Despite the fact that it was a weekend afternoon, someone at the station heard it and explained the error to this new guy on the block, and he aced it when reading the same Coquitlam story in the next hour's newscast.

The recent one that comes to mind though is far worse because it does not involve a new arrival from out of town getting local things wrong: "Sunny-s and Sheets" for the Islamic groups Sunnis and Shiites. Heard during a PM Drive Newscast here in Edmonton. The announcer was young enough that you would think it would have been in the high school curriculum, but it certainly says bad things about the institute that issued the announcer's Broadcasting Diploma.
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Re: Mispronunciations: radio and TV news

Postby Toomas Losin » Tue Jul 26, 2016 8:49 pm

It's not local but one of the more interesting mispronunciations I've heard was while listening to South African radio online, at the time of that derailment in Québec, and I heard the newsreader mispronounce Québec with a click sound. Sloppy, but I grinned when I heard it because I knew that "Q" (and "C", among others) are used for the clicks in local languages. Someone noticed the error, as later news broadcasts were correct.
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Re: Mispronunciations: radio and TV news

Postby xwdcatvb » Tue Jul 26, 2016 9:32 pm

jon wrote:Mistakes happen even at stations that pride themselves on "Quality". September 1972 at CHQM: I heard the first newscast of a Newsman fresh off the road from his last job in Montreal. Co-Kit-Lamb.


Local geography is a minefield. I forget the circumstances, be they radio or TV, but decades ago I heard the Victoria area municpality which is home to the Canadian Forces base delivered with a French slant as Eskimo.

More recently, during a steady stream of stories from Burns in the central part of the state immediately south of Washington, Pastor Mansbridge's stand-in on CBC's 'The National' got me so riled with repeated references to "Or-ree-gone" that I fired off an email. It worked! The next evening out came "Or'-uh-ghin"...
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Re: Mispronunciations: radio and TV news

Postby thehighwayman » Wed Jul 27, 2016 7:46 am

Back in the spring of 1972, when I was ND in Whitehorse, the afternoon jock had to read the 2 pm newscast. The kid was new, about 19 years old, but I hit the roof when he referred to the Sioux first nation as the Sigh-ox .....
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Re: Mispronunciations: radio and TV news

Postby slowhand » Wed Jul 27, 2016 7:53 am

thehighwayman wrote:Back in the spring of 1972, when I was ND in Whitehorse, the afternoon jock had to read the 2 pm newscast. The kid was new, about 19 years old, but I hit the roof when he referred to the Sioux first nation as the Sigh-ox .....

Kid probably just watched too many Gangster B Movies from the 1930s. Cy Ox would have been a great name for "Muscle" of the era.
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Re: Mispronunciations: radio and TV news

Postby DJ Specs » Thu Jul 28, 2016 1:37 pm

One of the most annoying as of late is announcers pronouncing Vancouver as VanQuever. Hear it on several stations especially CKNW, CKWX.
What a sly guy... Radio Vibes..
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Re: Mispronunciations: radio and TV news

Postby slowhand » Thu Jul 28, 2016 1:56 pm

What is the consensus these days? van-COO-ver is what I remember.
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Re: Mispronunciations: radio and TV news

Postby kal » Tue Aug 02, 2016 4:36 pm

As heard today on the all-news radio station, in reference to a phone dropped from a plane over Stanley park ...

"... it must have fell 2500 m ..."

This of course isn't a mispronunciation but a grammatical error. It should have been "... have fallen ...".
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Re: Mispronunciations: radio and TV news

Postby Sevareid » Tue Aug 09, 2016 8:33 am

I was working in the newsroom at CKNW many years ago when a young newser mentioned that traffic was backed up on the 'Pattooloo' Bridge, (which of course was named after former BC Premier Duff Pattullo). John Ashbridge was typing away on a story in the newsroom and heard what she said on the monitor. He muttered under his breath: "Well, that would have surprised good old Doof".
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Re: Mispronunciations: radio and TV news

Postby slowhand » Tue Aug 09, 2016 8:40 am

Refresh my memory: pa2lah is what I remember, with emphasis on the Two.
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Re: Mispronunciations: radio and TV news

Postby J Kendrick » Tue Aug 09, 2016 10:00 am

Try dealing with the name Gitksan Wet'Suwet'En when you're on the air in Prince Rupert.

No matter how one says it, someone will invariably disapprove...
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