Did you know that the National Broadcasting Company used to be considered the standard for pronunciation of English words in the United States? There was a publication called The NBC Handbook of Pronunciation by Eugene H. Ehrlich and Raymond Hand, Jr. It was, as the name implies a reference on how to say words in the English language. It seems to be out of print, but it is available on Amazon.com, although some sellers want a lot of money for it. http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0061811424/ref=dp_olp_2 was the link last time I checked.
The reason I bring this up is that in the first few minutes of NBC’s coverage of Pope Benedict’s visit to the World Trade Center site in Manhattan on Sunday morning, the NBC host called a guest the president “emetrius [sic])” of a university, and said the Holy Father was visiting “hollowed [sic]” ground. Meaning no disrespect to the thousands of people who died there, of course it’s hollowed ground: there’s a big hole in the ground where two enormous buildings and three-thousand people used to be. Even the spell-checker in MS Word knew I really meant hallowed ground when I was writing this post. Why didn’t the professional TV news person who was broadcasting the ceremony on Sunday?
