Hez-bowling

With all the shit blowing up in Lebanon and Israel, I have one really big problem with the whole mess:

Why can’t Condi Rice say “Hezbollah?”

If you don’t know, the correct pronunciation of Hezbollah is “hez-bol-LAH,” with the first two syllables said relatively quickly, and the accent on the LAH. Like how it’s “all-AH” and not “ALL-ah.”

Anyway, our Secretary of State, Ms. Rice, has trouble with this word – she says it “hez-BOWL-uh,” which is one of the most ignorant things I have ever heard in my life. It’s like me, in 10th grade English, thinking the word “corollary” sounded like the Toyota car name than ”Coral-larry” - it just sounds stupid.

What makes this even worse is that Rice is the US Secretary of State – our chief diplomat. I would almost expect GWBush to mispronounce this name, and not only because he butchers everything.

But for Rice, whose job it is to know these things, mispronunciation is a small, but important, gaffe. Perhaps Hezbollah is tough – it has been spelled Hizbollah in some outlets – but it’s pronunciation is pretty uniform.

Al-qaeda tends to range from “Ahl-Kida” to “Al-Kada” (tomato, tomahto), but it’s always close.

Rice’s mispronunciation subtly shows, whether she means to or not, that she doesn’t take the organization as seriously as she should. That’s scary.

*UPDATE* – Apparently, Rice is even further from the correct pronunciation than I thought – according to this guy Hezbollah isn’t an accurate spelling of the Arabic word – it’s closer to “hizbollah” or, even better as two words, “hizb allah,” which makes sense if the translation of the word is “Party of God.” In other words, when Condi says, “hez-BOWL-ah” she might seriously be saying “Screw you.”

**UPDATE** Jerusalem papers also print the the word as “Hizb’allah” which makes even more sense than anything else.