Transcript: Bip Bip Bip: Showbiz's Lost Language

Everyone’s fluent in the industry's slang. But making TV? Not so much

This is Rob Long with Martini Shot for The Ankler.

There’s a well-known English novelist whose name is Anthony Powell — he wrote a series of novels set in 20th century England — but his last name is actually pronounced Po-well. Like, pole dancing.

But he’s sort of a specific kind of author, so if you try to show off that you know who he is, you really do need to pronounce his name right, Anthony Powell, or you’ll look like a poser. Ironically, his novels are mostly set in the world of people who are posers and people who don’t like posers, people who say Powell and people who know to say Pole, but then again, it’s spelled Powell. So it’s sort of a trap, isn’t it?

Magdalen College at Oxford is pronounced Maudlin, for some reason that I don’t even care enough about to ChatGPT. And I know that some people pronounce the word “patina” as “pateena,” but I say “patina" and that’s the way it is, though the kind of people who argue about patina pateena — or even, let’s be honest, the kind of people who use the word in the first place — are sort of insufferable pains in the ass, right?

And there’s a wonderful Buddhist writer named or spelled Thich Nhat Hanh, which is pronounced Tik Nyat Hawn, according to the person who corrected my pronunciation years and years ago, who insisted he was a devoted follower of the great Buddhist teacher and writer, but really, how devoted could he really have been, running around correcting people and making them feel bad for saying Thich and not Tik and Han and not Hawn? Not terribly Buddhist, I don’t think. At least the English people who know how to pronounce Anthony Powell won’t correct you. They’ll just pronounce it properly a few seconds later and enjoy your quiet mortification, and their excuse is that they’re English, and English people are terrible snobs. But what’s the Buddhist’s excuse?

What I mean to say is, we sometimes use lingo or language to divide people into sections. People who pronounce it Powell, over here. People who say Thich Nat instead or Tik Nyat, over here.

That used to be the case with show business slang, too.