SILLY BALLS

                       This is not just a mumble about enunciation;

                        there’s corruption in the Buro of Pronunciation.

                        Even financial parlance has lost its gloss,

                        since Treasurer Keating conjured gross from dross.

                        I’m disinterested, says the sec ker tree,

                        I’ll be in the lie bree temp er rarer lee.

                        Just as we still get a buzz from greasy,

                        So syllabic elision is nice n easy.

                        Lithe cricketers from the West Indies

                        are given the raspberry as flatulent Windies.

                        In one fowl swoop chickens lose their ken

And as Peter grows harder, he’s Peder by ten.

Should we continue on with d?

Or discontinue off with soft t?

How long before his ego becomes Pee doe,

as streamlined as Speedo at the Lido?

On-camra or sound-booth reporters

are jist as vunnerable talking pitchers,

intoning their words in broken units.

For the bird, they prefer Blue TITS to BLUE tits;

West MINSTER, rather than WEST minster,

Pry MINISTER, instead of PRIME Minister,

Governed by the rhythm of the autocue,

they mangle meaning in mindless mew.

One tele babe burbled:  Serve Ike all cans, sir –

a media euphemism for cervical cancer?

Roo ells to the wind are blowen, not showen,

for a syllable can also double, you must of knowen.

Therefore school becomes skoo ell;

basically, a crule place for a classic ne’er-do-well,

Where we PRO ject the first syllable of the verb,

for Yankee culture is uncool to curb.

                        Right throughout we REE search and COM pare,

                        unable to alleviate the stress of DESpair.

Unsooted to the English ass yume,

Ozzies drown in the spray of ash shoom.

We glottal stop the garlicky updraught from huge

by lowering the roof of the mouth to yuge.

Yet we aspire to haitch if we’re reglar guys.

Does turning a deaf ear stop the flies?

We insist on croyzants at French bread shops,

making them unsavoury like Mer Views’ muttonchops.

We do a laxadaisical knees-up to the hoky-poky;

on hotel lawns we stoop to croaky.

Will we ever grasp the nettle of punctuation,

if word mongers sting us with its quasi elimination?

                                                Michael Small

January, 1991