i'd like to buy a vowel. there's this ad that plays constantly on the radio, something about how society judges you based on your vocabulary and verbal dexterity. it promises to increase your vocabulary and to make you the silver tongued belle of the ball -- in three weeks no less.

i'd like to think that i have an alright vocabulary, however, i'm severely lacking in the art of proper pronounciations. i've been caught red tongued once or twice, maybe more. some of my (and my sister's) more famous mess-ups have been used to regale friends time and time again. haha, real funny. enough already, i'm a fob okay? leave me alone.

the problem is, is that i read more than i speak. so while i can understand something perfectly when it's written down, and i can spell decently okay, how often do i use big words in my everyday speech? i mean, do people just throw words like "epistolary" into their normal conversations? if you're a member of my book club, apparently yes you do. but for everyone else, i've never heard the word "epistolary" -- or anything remotely similar -- slip out of their mouths.

i'm so jealous of people who can pronounce things properly. i mean, who actually knows how to pronounce "dostoevsky" correctly? much less use it fluidly along with "epistolary?" i had enough trouble spelling both words, and i have a dictionary at my fingertips.

on sopranos, paulie walnuts is talking about "sun t-zu" and he gets corrected by an enlightened knucklehead that it's actually "sun (t)zu" with a silent "t." paulie looked awfully dumb didn't he? so really, being able to pronounce things does make you look smarter.

i mean, isn't it better to not know a word than to use a word correctly but pronounce it all wrong? you might be ignorant or uneducated but at least you're not an ignorant show-off. "tis better to be silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt." so that's it, from now on, i'm just gonna keep my mouth shut. like forever.

actually, sorry world, i'm gonna have to keep on talking. but i'll try to keep my mispronounciations to a minimum as to not insult your ears. so, to this end, i've recently converted over to m-w.com from dictionary.com. sacrilege, i know. but the merriam-webster site gives you free audio pronounciations of words, so the betrayal is a necessary one. in case i ever want to really impress someone with the deftness of my tongue, i'll pause the conversation, go look up the word in m-w, and then come back to impeccably pronounce whatever word it was that i really needed to make my point. god i'll sound smart.

then again, i could just refrain from using words that i can't pronounce, but where's the fun in that?