You're putting your accent on the wrong si-lah'-bul

Tags:

DRIVER'S SIDE DIATRIBE
By Al Vinikour  

I love navigation systems that have become part of so many vehicles no matter what segment they’re found in. I’m talking about factory-installed systems, not Tom-Toms or Garmin’s or any other brand of aftermarket system. There’s something comforting about heading to a new destination, no matter how far from home it is, and knowing the chances of getting lost are about as great as seeing the Loch Ness monster (providing you generally don’t drink).


But lately I’ve noticed that even though it seems to be the same woman who directs you to your destination in most of the vehicles that have a nav system (as we call it in the trade) she’s in desperate need of pronunciation training.

Case in point: Several months ago I was at an event for a luxury car manufacturer at the Hotel Bel Air in Los Angeles. I had been following the route the company had programmed into the nav system as I went on an hour-long circuitous route from Los Angeles International Airport to the hotel.

Needless to say it was a beautiful drive that went by the ocean, through mountainous terrain, through neighborhoods where you’d have to be rich to be poor and finally on the local roads that led to the hotel that swept by its golf course. There were a lot of nosebleed-named streets but the one that apparently tongue-tied the Nav Babe (as I so fondly call her) was Bellagio.

I think the only person not familiar with the name “Bellagio” for the famed Las Vegas hotel is Charles Manson and he has an excuse; he’s been under the weather AND lock-and-key for the past 3-4 decades.

Obviously I found another person who didn’t know how
to pronounce Bellagio because the instructions I received from her said, “In one mile, turn left onto Bel-a-geoꞌ Street. What a stupid ass! There she is, working in a $125,000 vehicle, and she can’t pronounce a common word to that element like “Bellagio.” But wait…there’s more!

The street I live on is named Pinehurst Drive, like the famed golf course near Fayetteville, North Carolina. Pinehurst sounds simple enough, doesn’t it? Well not according to the Nav Babe. I don’t recall what vehicle I was in that employed her but just for the halibut I programmed in my address when I was coming home from a meeting downtown, and when she instructed me to make a right turn she said, “Now, turn right on to “Pinꞌ-a-hurst Drive.” I would have ripped out that idiot’s circuits if it was my own vehicle but instead I had to endure her display of limited education.

I know there are thousands, if not millions of different streets found in this country and that vehicle navigation systems are nothing short of phenomenal. But if they can find a way to put eight great tomatoes in that little, bitty can, how come they can’t un-garble the mouth of this mechanical maid and have her give correct pronunciations?

After all, even I learned to speak understandable sentences when I was a kid and would be at a family dinner. Some member of my dysfunctional family would ask me a question about school or sports or some other nonsensical thing and since I was called on so seldom my bulldog mouth would overload my canary ass and sounds that could loosely be described as words would fly out of my matzo hole. 

To be honest about it I don’t think Obi Won Kenobi could detect an inkling of what I was saying and the rumor was he could speak languages and dialects that would run into the thousands. So I’d either get smacked alongside the head and sent to my room or I had to sit at the table and take deep breaths until I could utter something that sounded intelligent whether it was true or not.

I feel the same way about the Nav Babe. She has the benefit of thousands of circuits and endless technology. But sometimes she gets flustered and for what she’s getting paid this should not happen. What should happen is for some out of work, non-tenured language professors be hired at the various electronics firms that make these systems and have them run through the pronunciation of every highway, street, avenue and road within about a 500-mile radius — the general area the vehicle will traverse during its working life. Anything beyond that would be superfluous because even if the names are mispronounced it could be explained as a “local dialect.”

So in closing I can only suggest to the basꞌ turds who design navigation systems to pay some attention to what the woman is saying and stop being so narcissistic and letting the poor Nav Babe take the blame for errors made in design.

Otherwise, the emphasis should be properly pronounced, yūr fired ꞌ.