01.10.09
Plumb and Dumber
Radio air personality Gary Burbank often referred to himself as a pronounsker—of course the reference was tongue-in-cheek (as an aside, “tongue-in-cheek” is good attitudinal form but bad physical form for a radio comedian).
Gary used the word so often that when I wrote comedy bits for him, I typed “Pronounsker:” to introduce the lines to be spoken by an announcer in, say, a fake commercial or in a wildly concocted routine about a blue-collar worker most familiar with clogged drain traps suddenly tapped as a journalist to report on the sadly enduring Mideast conflict. After a time, I embellished the word pronounsker, whimsically ballooning it to Pronounskiator at one point, and then taking it even ridiculously further to Pronounskiationist.
Oh, wait, I didn’t concoct the above-mentioned routine about drain-trap man, wildly or otherwise. History concocted it.
Drain-trap man is the McCain-campaign-annointed Joe the Plumber, who was recently hired by some website or another to cover the recent turmoil in the Gaza Strip. When asked by Fox Gnus about how he had prepared for the assignment, Joe said that one of his biggest challenges was to learn how to pronounciate the names related to the conflict.
Pronounciate? Maybe Gary and I wildly concocted Joe the Plumber after all. And if we didn’t, at least we created Joe the Plumbinatiationizerist Enunskiationizingmeistererer.
We want royalties.
And check out Jon Stewart’s coverage.
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Fritinancy said,
January 10, 2009 at 7:25 pm
You gotta know how to pronounciate if you’re gonna conversate. http://is.gd/eOr8
SoupAddict Karen said,
January 12, 2009 at 1:53 pm
In the first read-through, I was duly amused (’cause, ya know, Bill’s an amusiationist). But, by the time I got to the end of the second read-through, my spine had a case of the shudders and my thought showers were overflowing. And not in a good way. In lieu of the many comments I could make, I’ll just say a susurrant prayer for the future of our crazed “user-content-controlled” social-networking society, and hope the media powers-that-be remembered to check whether this dude is licentiated [Note to Joe: a correct, if pompous, "-iate" form of "license"] to do this kind of work…
Bill Brohaugh said,
January 12, 2009 at 8:28 pm
Dammit, Karen. You keep forcing me to revise by business card. “Amusiationist.” That’s, what, the third business card you’ve forced me into?
SoupAddict Karen said,
January 12, 2009 at 9:57 pm
You need to keep it fresh, Brohaugh. [Snap]