Hansard does not show that, when the acting leader of the Liberal Democrats, Dr Vincent Cable (as he likes to be called, having a doctorate of philosophy from the University of Glasgow), made his response to Mr Gordon Brown’s speech in the debate on the Loyal Address, something went wrong that took the steam out of him.
‘I fear that the Prime Minister now cuts a rather sad figure,’ he began. ‘He was introduced to us a few months ago by his predecessor as the great clunking fist, but the boxing story has gone completely awry.’
But Dr Cable pronounced awry as OR-ee. Fellow MPs, like so many schoolboys, mocked him by calling out ‘Or-ee’ as the good doctor attempted to go on. ‘Like a great boxing champion, as he once was, he has somehow made himself unconscious falling over his own bootlaces [‘Or-ee, Or-ee’, the hecklers cried] and is now staggering around the ring, semi-conscious and lost, and hanging on to the ropes,’ Dr Cable continued but, like the figure in the simile which he drew, he stumbled and ended lamely.
Everyone finds sooner or later that a word he has seen in print is pronounced differently from the way he imagines. The results can be more or less infuriating. I don’t much mind people saying heinous with the first syllable pronounced hee instead of hay, but I do get annoyed at people who pretentiously use the term machismo and pronounce it as if it had something to do with Highland clans. Contrariwise, machination has a first syllable that should be pronounced mac. The trickiest of the machs is probably machicolation, pronounced ma-CHICK-olation.
Veronica has just reminded me of a couple of popular songs that stress the wrong syllable of a word.
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