Friday, October 9, 2020

Syn not Skin

While making my way through podcasts discussing Charlie Kaufman's I'm Thinking of Ending Things -- four already so far, with one left to go -- I'm becoming increasingly aware of a weird phenomenon.

In setting up Kaufman's career to date, there has been occasion, on nearly every podcast, for the podcasters to list some of his other greatest hits, including his 2008 directorial debut, Synedoche, New York.

Now, I lived in New York City for nearly three years in the late 1990s-early 2000s, and was always an east coaster before that, so I knew right away that the film's title was a play on words that invoked the city of Schenectady, New York. 

If you didn't live in New York, and in fact let's say you lived in Paris or Munich or Tokyo, you might have no idea about the existence of a city named Schenectady, New York. So you would endeavor to pronounce the film's title phonetically, as is actually how it is pronounced: "Sin-eck-doh-key." 

But there has been a small (?) subsection of critics who do know about the city and are also not very skilled at pronouncing multi-syllabic words. They have persisted in calling the film "Schenectady, New York," almost as though Kaufman misspelled it but intended us to pronounce it exactly like the city. (Or "Skin"-ectady, as I suggested in the title of this post, as it's really more of an I than an E sound.) 

For the record, that pronunciation is "Skin-eck-ti-dee." So, only the second syllable is actually the same. 

I have heard this wrong pronunciation from the mouths of two such critics on the podcasts so far, neither of whom seem like people who should have problems with multiple syllables. 

It's just really not how it's pronounced. Yet they were dogged in their pronunciation, even when others on the podcast had occasion to say the word and pronounced it "Sin-eck-doh-key."

I had a bit of a crisis about this because I was asked to pronounce for a friend, who runs one of these podcasts himself. He had no idea how to pronounce it, so he came to me. I told him.

And then I heard these two other podcasters go against me.

So I listened to pronunciations on YouTube, which seemed to support my pronuncation, and then I listened to a couple interviews with Charlie Kaufman, where I was hoping he would say the title but he didn't. However, from those interviews, I gleaned that just as Kaufman would not want to begrudge anyone their interpretation of his films -- and doesn't provide his own so as not to infringe on those -- he would probably invite multiple pronunciations of the title as well.

The thing that finally confirmed for me was a bit online that said that there was an entire page in the press materials when the movie was released that was devoted to the pronunciation of the title. And in that bit it lists this pronunciation as "[Sih-NECK-doh-kee]," which varies from mine only in a few typographical choices in how to depict the syllables, and by including which syllable to emphasis. (For the record, I emphasize the same syllable). 

So what explains those two podcasters and their stubbornness about mispronouncing the title that is by no means unique to them?

Who knows. Maybe they are just free spirits who refuse to be pinned down to a single perspective on a piece of art, something Kaufman would certainly endorse.

Oh yeah, one final thing I'll leave you with. It's one of many in a series by the YouTube channel PronunciationManual, and it's hilarious.

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