CHIMERA, THE MONSTER |
My dad read aloud to us a lot. A favorite book of his and mine was
Nathanial Hawthorne’s Twice Told Tales
and A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys. The two books, originally published
separately, were bound in the same volume we owned, and my favorites were Hawthorne’s retelling of many Greek myths. Before I took a fantastic course on
Greek and Roman Mythology at the University of Washington, that first exposure
in fourth grade was my base-line for everything I knew about Greek mythology (and I had to unlearn a lot of misconceptions that Hawthorne propagated based on his nineteenth century understanding).
PEGASUS, THE HEROIC |
I’ve read the word from time to time over my lifetime, each time imagining that’s the pronunciation, and never questioned it—ever—and never heard anyone else say it, either. Well, at least not that I realized, until . . .
. . . an NPR story about biotechnology’s push to intentionally create hybrid embryos from
several different species came on my car radio, and the announcer talked about
the creation of a modern-day monster, a “kye-meer’-uh.”
What? It took me a few seconds to make sense of this new word, and then a quick judgment that the announcer was mispronouncing chimera!
But wait—wouldn’t he have checked the pronunciation
before doing a radio program about it? A big ‘oops’ crossed my thoughts about
then, a big "Don't tell me it's my mistake!"
As soon as I arrived home, I opened the Mirriam-Webster dictionary on my iPad and touched the icon of the speaker on the word chimera—and, sure enough, I have mispronounced it for about sixty-six years. In my head, anyway. I don't think I've ever needed use the word.
As soon as I arrived home, I opened the Mirriam-Webster dictionary on my iPad and touched the icon of the speaker on the word chimera—and, sure enough, I have mispronounced it for about sixty-six years. In my head, anyway. I don't think I've ever needed use the word.
I’m smiling as I write this. I love how humbling a little
event like this can be. I’m smiling thinking about how my dad probably heard
the word mispronounced by his dad when A
Wonder Book for Girls and Boys was read aloud to him in the early 1900s. I’m smiling thinking how
hard we both would have laughed over this perpetuation of error, if I could share it with him. I
wish.