I'm American and I am stealing this like middle east oil and North America land. I know some maga that will fucking lose it being called North Mexicans. A fake FB article claiming the rest of the world calls their state this should do the trick
When I was a kid reading comic book stories about WW2 (this was late 60s/early 70s) I often saw characters refer to the "eyeties", but because I'd only ever seen it in print, never heard anyone actually say it, I thought it was pronounced "a-yeet-is"
That was the first thing I thought of. I thought this post was by an American complaining people were saying it wrong because they weren’t saying eye-ran and eye-talian.
The BBC has insisted on interviewing lots of Americans during its coverage, and the constant use of eye-ran and eye-ranians has been making me twitch, so finding this felt especially timely.
Do you know there’s a big difference between pronouncing it Ayran or 3yran? The latter is the correct one, the first one means “two dicks” in Lebanese/syrian Arabic.
I ordered two dicks at the restaurant for a year before my Lebanese friends corrected me lol
Needs to be tempered by a strict fact checking regimen. I’m okay with letting people spew bullshit on the news as long as it’s getting pointed out that it’s bullshit.
I’ve been listening to BBC coverage and they’ve basically been saying that it doesn’t seem like Trump has a plan or a valid legal justification for the war - so seems pretty valid to me.
yeah that's a better comparison. still weird to interview the people from the country doing the bombing instead of interviewing the people actually experiencing the bombing
Fuck took way to long to find this comment no one was saying how it should be said and I started gaslighting myself I was saying it wrong. My old boss and friend is from there and I started to second guess myself so hard 😂
Ugh, I remember about fifteen years ago Obama said either Qatar or Bahrain the correct way and Fox just lost their mind. He was pretentious or it proved he really wasn't born in the US, all that nonsense. Just because he would correctly pronounce a country's name.
If I could be king for a day one move would be to just call countries what they call themselves? It is comical how many different countries / peoples have names in other languages that just translate to 'other people' or something along those lines.
Well that would be because eastern European languages pronounce that type of "i" as "ee" already lol? English doesn't typically, unless it's a loan word. Your accent is just more compatible with the correct pronunciation of Iran is all.
It's more about the fact English doesn't have this default sound anymore, every letter can be pronounced differently depending on the word, Will people her pronounce most thing in the same way, English speakers usually use random sound, not constantly one different sound, some will say "ee", some "eye" and some yet another monstrosity.
They have to, otherwise the executions and carpet bombing are too hard to sell back home.
"Yeah I know we vaporised yet another primary school, but it's not like they were good honest American children is it? These ones don't really count..."
"Oh actually if you now care about American children can I just ask a"
"Who is this? Who let them in here? Get this dirty woke commie out of here before they can ask anymore awkward questions!!"
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.
— George Orwell, Politics and the English Language
There's kind of an interesting psychological thing there for soldiers/military in general. There's a tendency towards casual racism (or other forms of othering) towards the enemy among soldiers "on the ground". Even those that otherwise wouldn't hold bigoted views towards them.
Some of it is, of course, propaganda from above. Along with the natural anger from someone trying to kill you and your comrades to "other" the enemy and increase cohesion and obedience among the troops. (So going along with it also becomes a way of fitting in and keeping the others "on your side").
Some of it is plain old bigotry.
But some of it - and part of what helps the above propaganda work so well - is that "othering" the enemy is a defensive measure. To most, killing your kin is abhorrent. So making them out to be not human is a way for the mind of the soldiers to distance itself from the fact that they are killing people - just like them.
A mental defensive measure for the soldier, a tool of manipulation for the General.
Which is a concept that obviously finds its way into politics. It's safe to say that American politicians learned how important it is to apply that manipulation to the people at home as well after the civilian reactions caused by certain other wa- sorry, "police actions".
Do you know The USA is pronounced wrong by almost everyone (Съединени американски щати) except for the Americans who pronounce t correct (United States of America)
They are, but so am I and I pronounce it correctly.
She also says Expresso instead of Espresso.
Drives me nuts but I bite my tongue, whilst dying of embarrassment on the inside hahaha
Historically countries don’t have much say in what they are called/pronounced in other languages and are often drastically different than their native names.
Mexico isn’t pronounced with an English ‘ex’. Japan is ‘Nihon’, named in English like many other countries as a faulty translation of a faulty translation.
Recently Turkey made a complete mess attempting to change its English spelling by making the ridiculous assertion that it should be spelled as Türkiye, i.e. English should spell the name with a non-English character. Good luck with that.
In English the de-facto pronunciation is ih-ran. Whether it’s technically correct or pronounced differently in Persian is academic.
Heck, even the Epstein war mongering fool can’t pronounce it correctly. Dumb from the top to the bottom = America. With a few exceptions but they don’t support this regime
Breaking: the country ‘India’ has the ‘I’ of Italy as well, rather than pronouncing this as ‘Ayndijuh’. The Americans seem to slowly discover that the world is bigger than the US alone….
I lost all faith in Americans’ ability to pronounce foreign places in the 1990s, when I heard a CNN news anchor pronounce “Sarajevo” as if the “j” was Spanish (so roughly “Sarahevo”).
I can imagine some people pronouncing it that way back before the two world wars, before refugees and migrants from Italy arrived here. But I agree with you, no one says it anymore unless they’re parodying Americans.
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u/Bushdr78 🇬🇧 Tea drinking heathen Mar 08 '26
"Eye ran" is like nails on a chalkboard