Punchline first, you should go check out this week’s podcast. I had a technique breakthrough on the recording with this one that I think shines quite nicely.
Last week I talked a bit about my process for making sure I don’t make an ass of myself with pronouncing things. This week’s story provided fun fodder for testing the rigors of my process. Do you know how to pronounce FFUCKYOU? That’s not something one generally thinks about or needs to do because it exists almost entirely as text. I’m used to hearing “Bee Arr Bee,” spoken with a healthy dose of hipster irony, but how often does one need to pronounce “IRL” IRL? It’ll be July before I can start accusing authors of doing things in their stories just to create challenges for the podcast, but I do wonder a bit how much the out-loud aspects of some of these things were on Erik’s mind when he wrote the story. He’s a poet, so it’s entirely possible he was playing with it on purpose. And that he can see the future, so he knew he could throw a fun challenge at me.
More likely is that I have a persecution complex and get too easily distracted by little academic things like how language evolves in text-dominant realms and how it interacts with spoken language when they wind up in shared space with each other again. Either way, you should see for yourself what I’m talking about.
Anaea Lay 