In the Blue Corner, it’s the contender you love to hate, weighing in at 120 pounds of total pretentiousness and upper-class snobbery, it’s the delicate, puffed-up, featherweight, Reser-VWAH!
Boo! Hiss!
And in the Red Corner, it’s The Champ, weighing in at a hulking 250 pounds, it’s the mass of the masses, the down to earth, salt of the earth, Reser-VOR!
Yay! Woooooo!
But what’s this? Stepping into the ring, it’s a new contender, and it’s a woman! She’s sponsored by Connex, she’s smooth, confident, professional and focus-group approved, it’s the striking middleweight… Reser-VWOR!
Reser-VWOR? Coming home on the train last night, I thought I’d hear what the disembodied Connex “Next Station” woman had to say on the issue of how to pronounce ‘Reservoir’. I thought she could easily go one way or the other, but never expected her to go bang up the middle, forging this new, hybrid, son of a motherless goat.
I’m not sure about ‘VWOR’. Maybe it is the best of both worlds: a cultural adaptation that retains the spirit of the original; but it sounds a lot like “Phwoar” to me, and brings to mind Rik from The Young Ones, secretly reading his Cosmo magazine behind the locked door of his bedroom.
I don’t know. It’s too hard to make a decision. Maybe I’ll just have to stick with ‘Rezimate’?
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I must confess that I never in my wildest dreams imagined that the 'correct' pronunciation was '-VOR'. To my mind the '-oi-' following the 'v-' firmly signals a silent 'w'. Too much French in my formative years, I suspect.
ReplyDeleteBut then, what would I know, squinting North across the Yarra from my vantage point in Hawthorn. (which does not, much to the surprise of call centre operators in Texas and Bangladesh, end with an '-e')