You done messed up, A-A-Ron!

May 11, 2024 3:54 PM

Thomas Jefferson University apologizes after commencement presenter flubs names. Unfortunately for the hapless presenter, the name cards used the International Phonetic Alphabet, a technical rendering used mainly by linguists. kænt rid ðɪs? Don't let it happen to you! Learn how to pronounce IPA spelling today, test your skills, or just entertain yourself with the world's most unintentionally hilarious soundboards.
posted by Rhaomi (24 comments total)

Insubordinate... and churlish.
posted by dobbs at 4:10 PM on May 11 [21 favorites]

I'd have thought that ~everywhere had cottoned onto the system where the put the namesayer at the foot of the stairs to the stage and you just tell them your name right before you Ascend, and they repeat approximately what you said.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 4:35 PM on May 11 [4 favorites]

Granted, I graduated 15 years ago, but we definitely wrote our names + pronunciation on a card. I remember the undergrad advisors with them on a giant ring. This was math graduation, though. Who knows what the actual commencement did. No one I knew went.
posted by hoyland at 4:39 PM on May 11 [1 favorite]

is this where the phoneticians nitpick the IPA representations in the links

(kidding, kidding, that would be incredibly tedious)
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 5:12 PM on May 11 [2 favorites]

Usually mispronunciations are at best cringe-funny, but that was absolutely hilarious.

I'm sure someone thought using an arcane (to the presenter, anyway) pronunciation notation would remove all ambiguity. The social scientist equivalent of engineer's disease. (I had someone ask me once when travelling why my foreign language phrase book didn't use IPA, and I felt a bit defensive about saying "because I'd have no farging idea how to pronounce anything.)

Incidentally, according to Kory Stamper's book about editing at Merriam-Webster, the dictionary system of describing sounds via the "a-as-in-father" has the benefit of being ambiguous. You will, generally speaking, learn the pronunciation of a word that matches how people using your dialect would say it.
posted by mark k at 5:18 PM on May 11 [16 favorites]

Back in the 90’s I had to report for jury duty here in San Francisco, a very multi-cultural city. At one point, some guy came into the jury assembly room to take roll. Unless your name was John Smith, he would stare at the paper, and them haltingly try to pronounce it. After three or four attempts, one of the people sitting there would raise their hands and say, I think you mean me, or something. They would then say their name and he would check it off. This went on for like a half an hour. I sat there thinking how could they let this happen.
posted by njohnson23 at 5:58 PM on May 11 [4 favorites]

I bequeath all of these new, fascinating names to the trans community.
posted by brook horse at 6:02 PM on May 11 [6 favorites]

Paging L'Carpetron Dookmarriott
posted by signsofrain at 8:06 PM on May 11 [8 favorites]

wet, wʌts ðə prabləm wɪθ juzɪŋ aj pi e?
posted by zompist at 9:05 PM on May 11 [8 favorites]

Yes I had a weed drink but this post is the funniest thing I have ever seen
posted by chococat at 10:11 PM on May 11 [3 favorites]

I am really not looking forward to 10 years of right-wing social media recycling the video clip into posts about "DEI (wink)(wink) professor unable to pronounce 'Elizabeth'".
posted by Nerd of the North at 10:12 PM on May 11 [5 favorites]

As a resident of Philadelphia and neighbor of this school, I would like to be very clear that I cannot stop giggling.
posted by Tomorrowful at 5:55 AM on May 12 [2 favorites]

I have been a name announcer at a college commencement. It’s a damn hard job, pronouncing hundreds of names correctly, in a near-metronome cadence, but like a human, not a robot, into a microphone in a basketball arena. People have told me that would be a nightmare assignment, and I could see why. It’s exhausting, too.

For name pronunciation, I set up a table at commencement practice and told the assembled grads, if your teachers always messed up your name, meet me over there and make sure I know how to do it right, but DON’T try to write a phonetic version on the name card in your packet, let me do that. It worked great and was actually a lot of fun.

The last year I did that job - which I loved - I tripped over the very last name. Just a little. But enough to haunt me with thoughts of the guy’s family hearing that.
posted by Caxton1476 at 6:34 AM on May 12 [8 favorites]

When people with non-Anglo names get their name mispronounced, they're told it's no big deal and expected to just suffer it in silence. We get derided when we call it a microaggression, because even that is too much acknowledgement.

When people with Anglo names get them mispronounced, IT MAKES THE EVENING NEWS.
posted by AlSweigart at 7:05 AM on May 12 [16 favorites]

How to pronounce the top ten Chinese family names.

How to pronounce African names that start with

Americans try to pronounce Indian names (with side eye given at who is assumed to be "American" here)

If you can learn to pronounce "Dostoyevsky", you can learn to pronounce these names too.
posted by AlSweigart at 7:24 AM on May 12 [3 favorites]

The problem with "how to pronounce" guides is that at best they're going to tell you about how people in China pronounce Chinese names and how people in African countries pronounce African names and so on. This might be great for most international students, but it's going to fall flat on its face when it runs into [x]-American families who might well say their name very differently.

In the end you just have to ask people.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 7:51 AM on May 12 [2 favorites]

TIL I don’t know how to pronounce Dostoyevsky. Luckily this is of minimal concern.

Thanks for the links AlSweigart!
posted by brook horse at 8:20 AM on May 12

At my commencement they let you send in your name in IPA or a recording of yourself saying it if you were worried about it being pronounced correctly, and then had someone checking at the top of the ramp. Doesn't seem that hard.
posted by Canageek at 8:31 AM on May 12

Oh my God, this is my nightmare. I have been one of the name readers for my entire university’s commencement for about seven years. I pride myself on working really hard to learn a lot of name pronunciations.

On the other hand, we have had this exact problem in miniature. Every year, some joker fills out the phonetic pronunciation card in IPA symbols. I’ve studied linguistics so I can read them, but the other name pronouncer is an accountant who can’t read them, and every dang year she has gotten that student, and they have gotten their inevitably very common White person name butchered.

But I have to admit, I really enjoy being the name reader. Commencement as a faculty member is extremely boring, and I would much rather have a job to do. I get a lot of compliments and thanks for my work. When I first volunteered, I was warned that I would be stuck with the job until I retired, and I said I was OK with that!

We have a lot of Hawaiian and Polynesian students with long names but they’re phonetic and you say every syllable. I find myself having to practice Vietnamese names the most. But my mess ups are usually on names that look unambiguous but in fact are very ambiguous. Like “Halley.” You’re never going to be 100% accurate.

I got the university to invest in a software called name coach that lets students record an audio clip of their names and attaches it to the graduation roster for the announcers to practice. (It’s not even that expensive as software packages go—if you are in a similar situation I recommend bugging your school to get it!) but I also attend the graduation rehearsal and let students check pronunciations with me, and I also go looking for people who I am worried I’m going to mess up. I guess this is possible because our school is very small…
posted by Tesseractive at 10:23 AM on May 12 [9 favorites]

I volunteer for the pizza lunch at my kids' school so every week I'm in a classroom reading kids' names off a list so they can come and get their pizza slices. Thankfully I've seen a lot of the kids at various sports practices so I know their names but even when I've been mindful of getting the names right I still mess up a couple every now and then. Having to announce names in front of thousands of people really sounds like a thankless job and yeah just have the graduates say their own name. I'm sure some of them will use the opportunity to say a funny name or give some political message but that'll be on them and not the poor announcer.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 12:21 PM on May 13

Wait, how did the IPA get dragged into this? I just saw the Washington Post article on this and they included a photo supposedly of the name card for one of the mispronounced names. There's no IPA there. It both has the name ("Sarah Virginia Brennan") spelled out normally, and then the kind of non-IPA phonetic breakdown you'd see in any random dictionary or pronunciation guide ("S'AIR-uh vuhr-JIHN-yuh BREH-NUN"). It's slightly weirder than usual ("usual" would be something like "SEH-ruh ver-JIN-yuh BREH-nen"), but it's nothing like IPA, and the actual spelling appears first, in a bolder and slightly larger font than the phonetic transcription.

If that's the same kind of card the announcer had, then don't blame the IPA because it doesn't seem to have been present. (If that's not the same kind and they went out of their way to have two separate kinds of transcription, then that's even more bizarre than the announcer just ignoring half the information they were given, which is what seems to have happened?)
posted by trig at 12:59 PM on May 13 [2 favorites]

A friend of mine named something like Jennifer Blackstone (long but very common first name, last name is two one-syllable English words) wrote “like it’s spelled” for the “how do you pronounce your name” question when graduating. I wonder what this announcer would have made of that
posted by madcaptenor at 2:15 PM on May 13

This feel like something some pretty simple text-to-speech software could solve. Have the students enter their names and hear the result. Then allow them to make modifications to it, perhaps using IPA, until it sounds correct. Then at the graduation the computer can just say the names.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 11:55 AM on May 14

Pronouncing "uh" and "uhr" with /u/ makes me wonder if the person reading the names ever studied German.
posted by The Tensor at 12:46 PM on May 14