Inaccurate puns: one more strike at Kos!
There’s an article up at the NYT right now which I can’t access b/c it’s TimesSelect (fie!), but it’s called “Kos and Effect” and it’s about responses to David Brooks’ recent column criticizing Markos Moulitsas Zúniga and his liberal blogerific empire, Daily Kos. Problem: Kos isn’t supposed to be pronounced in a way that makes it punnable as cause. Notice it’s the final syllable of its founder’s name; he explains:
I started Daily Kos on May 26, 2002 (named after my Army nickname, rhymes with “dose”)
Yet we get puns like “kosmopolitans” and “kos he’s an asshole” (google didn’t turn up much else), even though Wikipedia even sets the record straight:
Daily Kos (IPA: [koÊŠs] in an American accent) is an American political weblog aimed at Democrats and liberals/progressives. Run by Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, (Kos from the last syllable of his first name, often mispronounced) a United States Army veteran….
Someone at the Washington Monthly had it right earlier this year, with the headline “Kos Call.”
I suppose this is a case where the word’s origins are just not well-known enough to be influential on pronunciation, as the word has taken on a life of its own, and mostly (until recently enough) in print rather than speech, anyway. You could also say that a pun like “kosmopolitan” is sort of a visual one rather than an audible one; same with “kos” if you consider that “cos” is a popular re-spelling of “’cause” in IM and message boards and so forth.
To be sure, Kos has better things to worry about. I never see TV so I have yet to hear anyone *talk* about DKos - anyone know which way Moulitsas says it?
[Retroactive disclaimer: You may have been referred here by a political blog, which happened to pick up this post and link to it, but THIS blog is not (for the most part) about politics. It's about language and linguistics, and so if I'm "nitpicky" about pronunciation - which I am - it's because that's what's interesting to me and most of my readers. This doesn't mean you shouldn't comment if you feel the desire to do so, but it does mean you should realize that if your comment is blatantly partisan or snarkily uninformed as to where the author of this blog is coming from, it will not be as appreciated as it might be elsewhere. Also, judging from some of the comments, it seems as though I'm being misconstrued as being in agreement with the anti-Kos camps, which I'm not, at all, FWIW.]




