As a bookish type, my first encounter with a new word is usually by reading it instead of hearing it. I am therefore prone to mispronunciations.
So the other day when discussing bank regulation I wasn’t too surprised to learn that I’d mispronounced yet another word: apparently the “mp” in “Comptroller” is pronounced as an “n,” the word sounding exactly the same as “controller.”
While I normally accept my mispronunciations with equanimity, shrugging them off as the price one must pay for being more fluent in writing than speaking, two things about this mistake bothered me.
First, this mistake made me sound particularly stupid when I wanted to sound particularly smart. It is hard to convince others you know anything about banking regulation when you can’t even pronounce the title of one of our principal banking regulators.
It didn’t help that Garner’s Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage, which I consulted in the vain hope that it would justify my miscue, instead twisted the knife with: “To pronounce the -p- has traditionally been considered semiliterate.” If anything, my problem is probably due more to my being over-literate, but I take it as an insult either way.
Second, the word “comptroller” shouldn’t even exist, as it results from a misguided attempt in the 15th century to respell English words more closely to their Latin antecedents. “Controller” was respelled “comptroller” because it was thought that “controller” descended from the root “compt” (to count). In fact, it didn’t. So there was no need for this word to ever have been spelled in a way that would one day make me sound stupid.
As Garner observes: “Thus the respelling should never have been. But we are several centuries too late in correcting it.”
Or are we?
As we survey the wreckage of our financial regulatory system, deciding which agencies to keep and which to discard, we should carefully consider the fact that one of our banking regulators sports a misspelled title that has a tendency to make well-meaning but bookish types sound stupid. As if that weren’t sufficient grounds for its elimination, the title is also misleading, for the agency purports to control the currency when everyone knows that is something it hasn’t done since the Federal Reserve Act passed in 1913.
By my compt, that’s three strikes. You know what that means.
One Comment
“By my compt, that’s three strikes. You know what that means.”
O.K., I give; what does it mean? That somebody or something is out, presumably, but who or what? Are we going to abolish the title of comptroller, forcing comptrollers to call themselves “chief accounting officers” and the Comptroller of the Currency the “Director of National Banks,” or some such? But what about the effect of that on transparency! Or are we going to force a respelling to “controller” (already used by some less literate types)? If we do that, how will people who can pronounce it demonstrate their superiority?