To correct or not to correct
Image: Can you keep a secret? via PhotoPin (licence)
For months I had been holding on to a new word, but I had yet to speak it aloud, unsure exactly how it was pronounced. ‘Mon-tony-us’ I loudly declared during a break in the four-way discussion. ‘The road trip was ‘mon-tony-us’. It was over 20 years ago but I still remember just how wrong I was.
There are words that we know and even want to speak, but simply don’t utter because we are unsure how they are pronounced or whether they are right for the context. Often they are the names of characters in a book, foreign words or obscure words that don’t often occur in everyday parlance. And sometimes they are everyday words that we have been misusing for years and no one has brought the error to our attention.
Tricky situations arise when someone uses a word in the wrong context or when it is pronounced incorrectly. We have all experienced that moment when our great story has been interrupted by someone saying something like, ‘You mean dock the boat, not park the boat, because you park cars, not boats – don’t you?’ Then your flow and confidence sink like the Titanic and all sense and humour is lost.
However, in technical writing and translation the wrong word can mean something entirely different.
Take the case of badly translated menus:
‘Our wines leave you nothing to hope for’ – Swiss restaurant menu
‘Steamed red crap with ginger’ – Vietnamese restaurant menu
‘Sweat and sour chicken’ – Chinese restaurant menu
Or the not so humorous examples of legal contracts where judgements have hinged on the misuse of a word or punctuation mark.
So when in doubt, gentle correction is the best way forward. But don’t surround the unwitting perpetrator screeching uproariously: ‘MON-TONY-US!’, ‘MON-TONY-US?’ – HA! – after all, no-one ordered the chocolate mouse.
