Would You Rather Be a Nutter or a Boner?

So I had to listen all through yesterday’s Vikings-Cardinals game to the announcers mispronouncing Brett Favre’s name, which really gets on my nerves. Whoever decided that one could choose for oneself how one’s name should sound, in clear violation of the laws of spelling? His name isn’t F-A-R-V. It’s F-A-V-R-E, as in, “Fah-vreh,” with a nice whirled R in that last syllable, but I guess that sounds too fancy and French for Mr. Blood and Guts. I was reminded of how through all eight years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, my father-in-law called him “Ree-gan” instead of “Ray-gun,” following the old “When two vowels go walking” adage—mostly because it annoyed any Republican within hearing range.[SIGNUP]

And now here comes the new Speaker of the House, and I guess he’s just way too refined to call a spade a spade and pronounce “Boehner” the way every freaking human being in the world except for him would say it, which is “Boner,” which may make us giggle a little but at least is straightforward and honest, unlike this bogus “Bay-ner” thing. Man up, Mr. Speaker! There are lots of people with embarrassing-sounding names who suck it up and make the best of it. Look at Mayor Nutter! Look at Lucious Pusey! Look at Craphonso Thorpe! Look at Kosuke Fukudome, for heaven’s sake. I date the whole trend back to when all of a sudden, out of nowhere, we were told that the seventh planet from the sun, which we’d been happily calling “Your-A-nus” for centuries, was now to be called “YER-in-us,” to spare the delicate sensibilities of … I’m not really sure who. Little old ladies? Five-year-olds? Shy, socially maladjusted astronomers?

So hey, Mr. Speaker. You let us worry about what to call you, and you worry about that deficit, okay? We don’t need to be told how to pronounce anybody’s name, except maybe Mike Krzyzewski’s. And frankly, we’ve got a feeling he’s lying about that, too.