Plan B Forum

Is anybody else as bugged about the Arby's ads touting their new gyros sandwich, the one that has the Bonnie Tyler song "Holding Out For a Hero" as the background music and their James Earl Jones sound-alike inserting the made-up word "gyro" — which he mispronounces as "Euro" — wherever the song had the word "hero"?

This actually grinds my gears on two levels.  First, of course, is the mispronunciation itself.  The word is not pronounced like the unit of European currency; the correct Greek pronunciation is to ignore the leading 'G' and pronounce the 'Y' as 'yee' - so if there even was such a word it would be pronounced YEE-ro.

The second thing is that, at least as it applies to a food item made from a folded pita stuffed with sliced lamb and other fillings, there is no such word as 'gyro'.  The word for a single one of these "Greek tacos" is actually 'gyros'.  Despite ending with an 'S' the word is singular and would thus be correctly pronounced as YEE-ros; the plural (being a Greek word) would be 'gyri', pronounced YEE-ree.

And there you have my Daily Didactic Diatribe for Sunday, April 23rd.
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Now, cue the respondents who will claim that languages are constantly evolving; that "gyros" is just a loan-word anyway; and that American English usage of a foreign word does not mean that American English speakers are in any way, shape, or form obligated to pronounce the word correctly —
in five.....
four....
three....

-"BB"-

I did not know this. But it reminds me of one of my favorite peeves which is that kudos is treated as a plural, singular kudo. The original Greek is κυδος which means praise or enhanced status for some sort of accomplishment. Once sports commentators had got hold of the word, it was too late. Soon hubris (ὓβρις) will be a plural. I suppose I can to some extent live with the argument that English develops, and what was once wrong is now part of the language (for example, I have stopped objecting to disinterested = uninterested) but ancient Greek stopped developing roughly 2000 years ago. What was wrong when I was a kid is still wrong.

Another reason not to watch TV.

I'm with you on both levels of peeve, Bill. I think it's probably pronounced correctly more often in Chicago (home of Kronos Foods, world's largest manufacturer of "gyros cones" and probably the first to mass-produce them) than in most places in the US, but even here the singular "gyros" (γύρος) seems to be dropping the "s" at the end. As for pronouncing it like "Euro"...thats bad, but not as bad as some mispronunciations. I've heard "jeer-row" and "gyre-row" and even those same two variants with a hard "g" at the beginning, "gear-row" and "guy-row"!

I don't speak Greek, attic or otherwise. So I go with the ignorant American version with the soft J sound at the beginning and if it is real lamb, I want extra on that white sauce. For a long time, in the edge of UofD campus in Newark DE there was Daffy Deli, a sandwich shop run by three generations of Greek immigrants and whatever it was called it was all good take out food. I never did figure out how to eat the little rhomboid pastries with multi-layers of super thin pastry with honey and nuts without a mess. Sweet and sticky.

snailgate

All this talk about food makes me hungry for a Juy Row.

Awww jees, you awoke the pet linguistic peeve serpent and he's raging now.

I HATE IT WHEN PEOPLE SAY COMPETENCY FOR COMPETENCE!


I HATE IT I HATE IT I HATE IT !

Its ugly and hurts the ears.

yrs,
rubato

I'll make a mental note of that one.

Then again I'm sure he and that word are not often in close proximity.

Back to the OP--Bill, do you also say Yee-roscope?

We Anglicize lot of words, so why should this be any different?

And would a gyros be more like a Greek burrito rather than a taco? Although Taco Bell has gone and blown our minds with the new taco burrito! What's next? An enchirito?

Long Run wrote:And would a gyros be more like a Greek burrito rather than a taco? Although Taco Bell has gone and blown our minds with the new taco burrito! What's next? An enchirito?

I not sure, but I've always thought of a burrito as a wrap, while a taco is folded and has one side open, which is like the gyros I am familiar with.

Big RR wrote: I not sure, but I've always thought of a burrito as a wrap, while a taco is folded and has one side open, which is like the gyros I am familiar with.

And I've seen just the opposite, though there are plenty of pictures of it done both ways.

I had a similar reaction to Bill when the Plymouth Volare came out; it was spelled with an accented e (to put the accent on comfort). Apparently no automobile industry executives knew that accents actually do have a purpose (this one would move the stress to the last syllable, rendering it gibberish). But it looked "stylish" and made for a winning slogan.

I won't get started on how many American tourists in Italy I heard saying and "grahtzee" and otherwise substituting butchered Spanish words for their Italian equivalents, because, you know, those Latin languages are pretty much all the same.