Good [insert your time of day so this greeting is personalised]! How about them sports, huh? Okay, enough chitchat.
Today I want to talk about a word that is a bugbear of mine as I dislike all iterations in regards to how it’s said. This is a targeted attack, I’ll grant that, but it deserves it.
geyser (noun) (ugh)
1. A hot spring which intermittently sends up fountain-like jets of water and steam into the air.
Or, my preferred, more alliterative interpretation:
2. Giant gushy gust of wet.
The Macquarie Dictionary says that geyser can be pronounced either as ‘geez-ah’ or ‘guys-ah’. I’ve been raised in the former way to say it, so in my head, a geyser always spits out a bunch of elderly men before it moves onto the steaming hot water.
As a child, I said ‘geh-sher’, because I didn’t know what to do with the ‘y’ and apparently had a ball of cotton wool in my mouth. Child-Amber did have some interesting views on how to pronounce words, other candidates of note being ‘vehement’, ‘gambol’ and ‘anaesthetist’. To be fair, anaethetist wasn’t pronounced so much as I used to go, “Anehthththssssthththssthth,” until my Mum was forced to slap me back into reality. As an adult, I’ve switched to anesthesiologist because the introduction of more consonants is a godsend to someone with an occasional lisp.
Back to geysers. I think it’s a hard word to say and offer up a new one in its place:
wetjet
It’s fun! It’s splashy! It can’t be misconstrued! Picture it: “Old Faithful is one of Yellowstone National Park’s most famous wetjets.”
Perfect.
Feel free to leave a comment telling me that I’m totally right about this and continue to build up my ego. I mean, I know I’m right- even destroying one of my own photos of Old Faithful with ComicSans and dinky text placements doesn’t shake my conviction in this matter.
Ultimately, if you have a word whose pronunciation has always bothered you, it’s okay. I feel your pain and I will campaign on your behalf – unless I disagree with you, of course. Then I’ll probably just sit back with a cup of tea while you’re burned at the stake by Grammar Nazis. I’m fickle, alright?
Side note, apparently a wetjet is actually a brand of mop. Righto. It’s still better then geyser.