Posted by We’re sure you’ve heard Donald Trump’s “Soo Chin Ten-Dull-Kerr and Vir-art Ko Lee” effort by now.
It is bad pronunciation. Very bad. So, so bad. Huge mistake.
But even if Trump doesn’t – as he once claimed – “have the best words,” this needn’t be a barrier to carving out a new career as a cricket commentator. A lot of cricket coverage is excellent, but most of us have caught a broadcast where no-one can pronounce anything at some time or other. We’re pretty sure Trump could get by on quite a few channels on nothing more than bluff and bluster.
Trump’s almost eye-watering refusal to acknowledge his own incompetence in almost every sphere of life also provides us with a valuable lesson about cricket. We’ve written about this in our latest piece for Cricket 365.
Request to remove the article picture and replace it with something more palatable please. Like a pool of sick.
Buttler the test batsman seems to have an anti-Trumpian approach
Afridi the ODI batsman seems to have a very Trumpian approach to cricket
Sehwag also seems to have the ability to forget what happened the previous ball. The risk for sehwag like batsman is they can’t evolve/adopt when their skills/eyesight starts to dull
I’ve been enjoying the commentators’ very different approaches to pronouncing Thai names.
Alan Wilkins, bless him, seems to be trying very hard to learn the exact, proper pronunciation of each name and does his best each time to state the full name. Studious. Possibly beyond the call of duty.
Ian Bishop has gone for the first syllable method; i.e. he clearly enunciates the first syllable, which tends to be straightforward…then he mumbles the rest hoping no-one will notice. “Boo…che…er…er”, “Kam…che…er…er”.
Nasser Hussein has been winging it in almost trumpian fashion, possibly figuring that his relative mastery of Indian pronunciation will get him through, while ignoring the fact that Thai is a tonal language with some stress and tone quirks of its own.
The women commentators on the whole have been using first names only, which is a variant of the Ian Bishop approach in a way, but without the “gentleman on his third G&T with voice tailing off” aspect.
“And I was quite, quite drunk.”
There were three Khatuns playing for Bangladesh today. At one point the radio commentators suggested they should use their first names to identify who was bowling. But a few minutes later came the call: ‘And another one of the Khatuns is up to the wicket…’
They are all characters, I’ve heard…
Khatun characters.
Sorry, that was a Micky Mouse pun I just made.
Of course Thais, by and large, also avoid pronouncing long Thai names. In my experience those with thirteen letter first names were invariably known as something like Lek, Poi or Ae which weren’t as much abbreviations as alternative every day names.
By the way does anyone else find Ian Bishop interviewing rather small women causes a sense of disorientation similar to that induce by the horrible scaling decisions made in the new “Cats” movie?