Duh-roo-ja-mont

As long as I'm complaining about French pronunciations, let me share a couple of beefs I've had with my professors this past term. After taking two lit classes this term, I have come to decide that all professors must take a credibility test before being allowed to teach. This credibility test ensures that the professor knows how to properly pronounce foreign names and terms so that they don't look ridiculous in front of the whole class, or at least in front of those who speak the foreign language where the names and terms come from.

Of course I'm going to have to focus on French here because that is the language that I'm familiar with, and because many French critics and philosophers are cited in our classes. But let me give you a few examples that have driven me nuts over the past two months.

La' Venir:

A professor was talking about Derrida's concept of l'avenir (or "what is to come") in class. She wrote on the board: l'avenir. A couple weeks later, she was talking about l'avenir again, but spelled it: La' Venir. Now, she was notorious for misspelling things on the board all the time (lectures would center around terms like sociolological and intertextextuality), but this was too painful to witness. First of all, if venir (verb meaning to come) were turned into a noun, it most certainly would not be feminine. Second of all, the apostrophe that comes after the La is now meaningless and superfluous. Third of all, and this is picky, I don't think that the French would have capitalized venir. I hoped to share some of my shock with my classmates. I looked around for the knowing looks that we would exchange when we found words like superficialuperficiality on the board but to my horror, I only saw my classmates dutifully writing La' Venir in their notes.

On the subject of Jocks Derrida...

No, I'm serious. My other professor actually called him Jocks. This is the same professor who helped a student who couldn't pronounce a name by stating firmly, "It's Duh-roo-ja-mont." I looked down at the passage the student was reading and found the name Derougemont. Now, I don't expect people to use their uvulas to pronounce the Rs. I don't expect people to say the name with an affected French accent. But at least try to approximate the French pronunciation with an English accent. She should have said "Duh-rou(g)-ma." (I didn't know how else to make the g into the soft French g, so give me a break.)

I know that I have an unfair advantage of having studied the language. I know that it's not the most phonetic language ever. But how can you look credible when you're talking about what Duhroojamont thought about Jocks Derrida's concept of La' Venir? I know that I probably foul up the pronunciation of Nietzsche but if I were going to be a professor and teach his philosophy, I might figure out exactly how to say his name before professing to know what he was talking about.