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February 1, 2007

Animal Skin

Every now and then I question whether I'm pronouncing a word correctly. Today's word is "chamois". That supple dull yellow cloth you wipe down your just-washed car with. That is if you're the sort that allows anything to touch your car before or after it's washed. Well, if you're an English speaking American, you certainly pronounce it "sham • ee". That's the way I had always heard it, even though I figured "sha • mwah" was probably "correct". Anyway, I actually utter that word out loud maybe once every two or three years, so it's not something I ever concerned myself with.

Where I'm headed, is that I found a chamois to be useful in blending the Zodiacal Light in a charcoal sketch I made of comet McNaught's tail a couple weeks ago. I'm headed to Phoenix tomorrow to give an astronomical sketching presentation to the Saguaro Astronomy Club and I wanted to bring it up. But being insecure as I am, I decided to officially look the word up just to be safe. I can't stand the possibility of sounding like those cosmopolitan types when they're hawking a food dicer on TV and they're all bubbly and excited about dicing up some "hal • uh • pee • nos" for whatever the heck they're demonstrating. And they really like to emphasize the pee sound when they say it. Bleh. It's still a touch better than "tor • til • yuhs" though.

But yeah, "sham • ee" is definitely the way to go in N. America. The French of course do say "sha • mwah". I have to imagine that the native Frenchians must wince to choke down the loogies any time they hear "sham • ee" come out of somebody's mouth.

Oh! I had a dream last night that I was checking out a Cologne-Mixer gift I was given. The theory in the dream is that you mix your own cologne out of several base fragrances. And those base fragrances consisted of Brut, Old Spice and several other cheapos in large quart-sized bottles. Yuck.

Posted by Jeremy at February 1, 2007 9:53 AM