#1094 Srap

There’s no doubt I love the English language and how weird it is. If it didn’t have so many strange characteristics I would have been out of an avocation long ago.
Like I was reading about a hapless person the other day. And I wondered. Is anyone hapful? When you are hapless, you are unfortunate or you have no luck. So is hap a word for luck? Or maybe if having more hap means you have more good fortune, then it’s right to say hapless is the opposite of happy.
Which I know a person I met the other day wasn’t when she was trying to pronounce this restaurant’s name, Cicada. Having grown up near the insects of the same name, I was not stymied by the spelling. But if you think about it, Cicada is one of those words that could go a lot of directions and still have acceptable uses of the letters within.
It’s got 2 c’s in it and either one could be soft or hard. Like Celtic could be seltic or keltic. Funny, because Caribbean, even though it could be Kar-a-BEEE-an or Ka-RIB-e-an is never saribbean. The word facile is also never pronounced Fakile, whether one is being glib or no.
But cicada presents all sorts of possibilities to the uninitiated. It can be the correct sih-KAY-dah. Or it could easily be the slightly strange, kiss-SAY-dah. It could be kiss-KAY-day. Or it could be siss-SAY-dah.
Which sounds an awful lot like that Phil Collins song sue-sue-sudio. Yeah, let’s go to Siss-SAY-da for a sip of sangria.
Sih-KAY-dah could also very easily be Sih-cah-DAY. Or possibly Kah-sah-DAY. Or even Kah-SAH-duh.
Which sounds more like the restaurant this Cicada I’m talking about actually is. Kah-SAH-duh puts me in mind of casaba, as in the melon, or even a giant calzone-sized quesadilla.
“No, the quesadilla sounds too tiny. I’ll have the full kah-SAH-duh.”
K and C sounds are challenging that way. My favorite sign is for a place called Kennedy Creek Quarry. The letters K, C, and Q, all conveying the K sound.
It’s no wonder some Foreigners think English it’s a piece of srap...
America, ya gotta love it.