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Chris -- 2025-05-10
I noticed someone around here say “I hear spoken by people who are intelligent but who clearly do not read” and thought of a friend who wrote manusha for minutia. It took me a while to figure it out. I also went off on this mental tangent:
The name Marcia became Marsha before I was born, so I always accepted it.
Ditto for marshall, which was clearly martial, so I never freaked out about that either.
Why get all up in a lather (uh-oh) about Shawn (American? Ghetto?) , when Sean (Irish) is just as strange as Jean (French), which circulates as Ian, Hans, Juan, Joao, Giovanni, Ivan, Johann and, of course, our own beloved John? Isn’t Siobhan a woman’s name? I knew a gal named Shayvawn. She was definitely ghetto, but I suppose all the above have been at some time or other.
It also made me think of Chopin’s Minute Waltz, which we always pronounce as the division of time. I suspect it was originally dubbed the My-Newt Waltz, since it’s rather short. Of course, the 60-second slice of time is pretty tiny as timespans go, so I guess those words are the same.
So I’ll get off my high-horse (am I exposed with that one?) and swallow manusha. As my intelligent but semi-literate son likes to point out, “ya got it, didn’t ya?”. (GRRRRRR)
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