When words get in the way, Bush goes phonetic - Yahoo! News
How do you keep a leader as verbally gaffe-prone as U.S. President George W. Bush from making even more slips of the tongue?
When Bush addressed the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday, the White House inadvertently showed exactly how — with a phonetic pronunciation guide on the teleprompter to get him past troublesome names of countries and world leaders.
[…]
It included phonetic spellings for French President Nicolas Sarkozy (sar-KO-zee), a friend, and Zimbabwe leader Robert Mugabe (moo-GAH-bee), a target of U.S. human rights criticism.
Pronunciations were also provided for Kyrgyzstan (KEYR-geez-stan), Mauritania (moor-EH-tain-ee-a) and the Zimbabwe capital Harare (hah-RAR-ray).
No doubt that this is hardly unusual, but one gets the impression that Bush needs the phonetic help more than most.
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I know this isn’t really bad as anyone would have trouble with SOME name, but it makes us look bad.
Comment by Talmadge East — Wednesday, September 26, 2024 @ 8:01 am
Did he mention Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov in his speech?
I am still trying to figure out how to pronounce the Turkmen dictator’s name. Hopefully Condi was able to tackle it successfully yesterday as she embraced the human rights violator during a meeting yesterday in NY.
Comment by Ratoe — Wednesday, September 26, 2024 @ 11:23 am
[…] This post from this morning made me of the following classic SNL bit, starting at 1:30 (thru to 2:50ish): […]
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