Wordcracker: Coo-pon or Cue-pon?
Posted: September 4, 2009 Filed under: Language, Vocabulary, Wordcracker | Tags: Coupon, Language, pronunciation, speech 4 Comments »Now for something fun and pertinent to our recent economic upheaval. If you live in the United States, please participate in the following poll. To aid us in our research even further, please leave a comment restating your answer and providing any explanatory information you might want to offer, especially what part of the country you are originally from and what part of the country you live in now. I’ll leave this poll active indefinitely in hopes of accumulating enough answers to draw reasonable conclusions. Thanks!
Advertisement
Here is a quirky yet irrelevant observation about the sound “ew,” as in “cue-pon” (which is how I say it). There were a number of international participants in the recent teacher training I attended at American Ballet Theatre. We got hung up one day on two words that sound obnoxiously similar, but mean very different things: “dessous,” meaning under, and “dessus,” meaning over. These are French words, of course, because ballet is, well, French. But you really have to BE French to catch the subtle difference in pronounciation. “Dessous” is (kinda) pronounced “da-sooo,” whereas “dessus” is pronounced “da-seeeeew”–you’ve really got to screw your lips up in a most unattractive way to say it correctly. So, I can ask my dancers to do jete dessous (a movement that is thrown under), or jete dessus (a movement that is thrown over). But evidently that sound–the “ew” sound–does not exist in all languages. The Italians at the workshop had a terrible time with it.
Maybe they just need to come on down South and learn how to use some cue-pons.
Ew. That’s so French. One of the reasons that after two and a half semesters of French in college, I started all over with German.
Oh, goodness. I immediately chose “coo-pon” without any conscious thought. Of course, after I had already submitted my answer, I said “coupon” aloud and suddenly realized that I did indeed say “cue-pon”. Please forgive me for my blunder. ( :
That’s okay. It’s just a bit of silly fun, although it would be nice to know what part of the country you are in. Perhaps you should have chosen the last option: “confused” :-)