\u2022 Spring is in the air, which means that in America, major-league baseball is on the air. In San Francisco, two members of the hometown Giants\u2019 broadcast team are former major-leaguers Mike Krukow (pronounced CREW-ko) and Duane Kuiper (KY-per). The team\u2019s publicity department refers to these popular announcers as \u201cKruk\u201d and \u201cKuip,\u201d which we are meant to pronounce \u201ccruke\u201d and \u201ckipe.\u201d But baseball greenhorns see \u201cKruk\u201d and \u201cKuip\u201d and say \u201ccruck\u201d and \u201cquip.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2022 In Hollywood, good things have started to happen for a talented young entertainer called King Bach, who got his start by making YouTube videos.<\/p>\n
Most readers over thirty will look at the name and pronounce it \u201cKing Bock.\u201d But once you learn that the young man\u2019s real name is Andrew Bachelor, you realize that \u201cBach\u201d is supposed to rhyme with match<\/em>.<\/p>\n Why the haywire spelling of celebrity nicknames nowadays?<\/p>\n The culprit is \u201cbranding,\u201d which a business website defines as \u201cthe process involved in creating a unique name and image for a product in the consumers\u2019 mind.\u201d By the way, note the cynicism lurking in that phrase \u201cconsumers\u2019 mind\u201d\u2014shouldn\u2019t it be \u201cminds\u201d? Evidently, marketing departments view the public as little more than a pliable homogeneous organism.<\/p>\n Why can\u2019t Krukow and Kuiper be \u201cKruke\u201d and \u201cKipe\u201d? And why doesn\u2019t Andrew Bachelor call himself \u201cKing Batch\u201d? Apparently, a commandment of branding is that you may lop letters off if it makes the moniker more catchy, but you must not alter the spelling to make the pronunciation more reader-friendly, because that would taint the brand and perplex the pliable homogeneous organism.<\/p>\n Subverting long-established conventions of phonetic spelling with sobriquets like \u201cKing Bach\u201d and \u201cKruk\u201d and \u201cKuip\u201d may irk some of us, but these corporate misspelling tactics mirror the popular culture\u2019s penchant for glib but irrational abbreviations. Consider the mass acceptance of \u201cmic,\u201d which has been driving word nerds batty for years.<\/p>\n \u201cMic\u201d is a bogus abbreviation of microphone<\/em>. (Chances are, your neighborhood pub has a regular \u201copen mic\u201d night on its calendar.) But for decades before the intrusion of \u201cmic,\u201d the word was mike<\/em>: \u201cIke is good on a mike\u201d went a line from a popular early-1950s jingle about presidential candidate Dwight D. Eisenhower.<\/p>\n There is also a verb to mike<\/em>, meaning \u201cto place a microphone near.\u201d But if you buy into \u201cmic,\u201d what would the past tense of \u201cto mic\u201d be? Was the speaker micd? mic\u2019d? miced?<\/p>\n A bicycle is a bike<\/em>, not a \u201cbic.\u201d So let\u2019s get over this dopey notion that a microphone is a \u201cmic.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u2022 Spring is in the air, which means that in America, major-league baseball is on the air. In San Francisco, two members of the hometown Giants\u2019 broadcast team are former major-leaguers Mike Krukow (pronounced CREW-ko) and Duane Kuiper (KY-per). The team\u2019s publicity department refers to these popular announcers as \u201cKruk\u201d and \u201cKuip,\u201d which we are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,25,49,37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2177","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-abbreviations","category-humor","category-pronunciation","category-spelling"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2177"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2177"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2177\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}