Dear Dr. Boli: I hear that some African countries are planning to stop the practice of allowing billionaires from other continents to come in and hunt rare wild animals for trophies. But how can they do that without ruining their own economies? What engine of revenue will they put in the place of the traditional safari? —Sincerely, Dr. Arvin Stanley, Prominent Economist.
Dear Sir: Dr. Boli has not been consulted by any of the governments in question. But if they were to consult him, he would have a suggestion ready to hand. They can allow the billionaires to come in as usual; but instead of being given guns and turned loose in game reserves to hunt lions and rhinoceroseses for so-called sport, they will be turned loose in the same reserves, and a certain number of local citizens in good standing will be given guns and allowed to hunt billionaires and keep whatever trophies they thus acquire. This will be at least as exciting for the billionaires, and probably a great deal more so; and it will solve the problem from two points of view. We have too many billionaires and not enough cheetahs and wildebeests. It may seem cruel, but any ecologist will tell you that sometimes it is necessary to cull the herd.
We at your neighborhood Food Festival supermarket would like to apologize to all the many disappointed customers who informed us that they were unable to drink the portable stick vacuums advertised in the Food Festival Finds section on page 7 of our Thursday circular. Yes, it is true that our loyal man Herb, who once again was in charge of the circular this week, inadvertently left the R out of the word “portable,” which caused understandable misapprehensions among the readers of the description. When we use the word “understandable,” we are treating our customers with that generous assumption of good will which has always characterized our policy toward our friends and neighbors. As for the small number who threatened us with lawsuits, we should like to remind them that, if they do pursue legal remedies, they will find themselves in a courtroom where they will be required to persuade a judge that they really are as stupid as they claim to be, which might be a stretch even for some of you yokels.
Sir: It is high time we reined in these out-of-control cops. Just yesterday one of them gave me a speeding ticket yet again, just because I was doing 67 in a 15-mile-per-hour school zone. Of course I never actually pay these speeding tickets, because that would just be a waste of money that I could more profitably spend on cigarettes, but still the annoyance of having to stop for five or ten minutes and say “Yeah, yeah,” over and over again is more than enough to make me say the police need to be put under stricter supervision.
What these cops fail to realize is that the laws do not apply to me, because I am better than other people. I don’t mean I’m a better driver than most people; that goes without saying, since everyone I know is a better driver than most people. And anyway, I took out my muffler long ago so people could hear me coming, and most of those kids got out of the way in time. No, I simply mean that I am a higher class of human being. I am a patriot, which you can tell because I have not one but two American flags flying from my vehicle. I am a Christian, and the right kind of Christian, not the kind who gives free food to worthless layabouts, but the kind who believes in kicking a homeless person for Jesus. I mean, would Jesus go around handing out bread and fish to people he didn’t even know? And I even have a “Support Your Police” sticker on my back window, because I believe in law and order for inferior people.
But where law and order go wrong is when cops start thinking the law applies to people like me. So what I propose is a civilian review board, made up of course of the right kind of civilians—good, honest people who own large, loud cars and don’t slow other people down just because there’s a bunch of stupid kids with backpacks in the street. And I propose that this board should wield both a carrot and a stick. It should use the stick to wallop bad cops who pull good people over, but it should use the carrot to poke them in sensitive spots.
Meanwhile, since we just had an election, we’ve got a bunch of fresh-faced newbies coming into our councils and our legislatures who are looking for ways to be useful. So write your city councilperson, your state representative, and your prothonotary, and tell them these cops have to be brought under control. —Sincerely, Bubba “Howard” Mangle, Lincoln Place.
Miss Rutherford Mysteries. Fleeing the postapocalyptic wasteland that her village had become after all her neighbors murdered one another, Miss Rutherford settles in Croydon. But all is not as idyllic as it seems in Croydon, as Miss Rutherford discovers when her dog Jemmie finds the body of a tram driver in the recycling bin. Starring Dame Wilhelmina Frimp as Miss Rutherford, with special guest Anthony Quagga as Jemmie. Check local listings.
A few days ago, when we were talking about how the alphabet used to represent sounds but no longer does, Dr. Boli mentioned his popular parlor trick of pronouncing difficult Scripture names as though he knew what he was doing. One of our oldest and most frequent correspondents, “von Hindenberg,” writes, “I’ve heard ‘Elisha’ morph more and more frequently into El’aye’sha in just the last decade.”
Dr. Boli hesitated for several days to answer this comment, because he was not sure whether he had interpreted his correspondent correctly, and he did not want seem critical of a correspondent whose participation over many years has added immeasurably to the pleasure Dr. Boli takes in producing this Magazine. We decided to write this long answer as an article partly because it seems to illustrate an interesting phenomenon, partly because it gives us an opportunity to explain how you, too, can have an impressive parlor trick for very little effort, and partly because we had nothing else prepared for today.
We hope Herr von Hindenberg will forgive us if we have misinterpreted his figured pronunciation, but it looks to Dr. Boli as though what he has identified as a “morph” is the correct English pronunciation: long I, accent on the second syllable.
We should say the correct English Protestant pronunciation. Until the late twentieth century, Catholics had a different set of Scriptural names, using the Latin spellings of the Vulgate, so that Elisha’s name was Eliseus (el-i-SEE-us). In the King James Version of the Bible, Protestants had to deal with these spellings when the names came up in the New Testament and the Apocrypha, so that it was necessary to explain to schoolchildren that Jesus meant Elisha when he said, “And many lepers were in Israel in the time of Eliseus the prophet; and none of them was cleansed, saving Naaman the Syrian” (Luke 4:27). Later Protestant versions regularized the names, using the Old Testament spellings in the New Testament as well.
With the New American Bible, American Catholics adopted the Protestant forms of the names, but it seems to Dr. Boli that they have been a little tentative about their pronunciations ever since. In particular, he has heard many Catholics say “e-LISH-uh” for Elisha, and sometimes even “e-LEESH-uh.” But so far he has not seen any printed reference that gives anything other than the standard English pronunciation.
The rules for the English pronunciation of Scripture names, in the spellings that Protestants and Catholics now agree on, are simple, and they are only three in number:
1. Forget any smattering of learning you might have come across about Hebrew or Greek. We are speaking English, and the names have English pronunciations.
2. Every syllable is pronounced; there is no silent E.
3. Look in a pronouncing Bible (or a Bible dictionary) to find the accent for any name you come across.
That last one feels like cheating, but it is the easiest way to deal with the problem.
Some editions of the Bible go all out on pronunciation helps, marking all the syllable divisions and the length of every vowel, so that “Elisha” might come out “E•lī′shȧ” (the dot over the A meaning that it is pronounced with the indistinct “uh” sound linguists call the schwa). That is distracting for ordinary reading, so most Bibles that give any indication of pronunciation simply mark the accents: “Eli′sha.” But even these use a very simple code to tell you the length of the vowel in the accented syllable. If the accent mark comes directly after the vowel, the vowel is long. If the accent mark comes after an intervening consonant, the vowel in that syllable is short. Thus Eli′sha (ee-LIGH-shuh, with the I long), but Elish′ama (e-LISH-uh-muh, with the I short). You will notice that the unaccented syllables are not determined by this method, but that scarcely makes any difference. No one will notice whether you say “ee-LIGH-shah” or “uh-LIGH-shuh”; it is the accented syllable that matters.
Once again, we hope our correspondent will forgive us if we have misinterpreted him; and if we have not misinterpreted him, we hope he will not think we have meant any unkindness. He gave us a free subject for an article, and subjects for articles are valuable commodities.
