Bronical Bill the Sailor

I never understood people who habitually mispronounce certain words. It's not because nobody ever corrects them; chronic mispronouncers get corrected all the time, but they just don't seem to care.

The most famous case, of course, is George W. Bush's pet mispronunciation, "nucular" (I once had a science teacher who said it that way, too). But equally annoying are people in Indiana who refer to the state next door as "Illinoise," presumably because of all those immodest and noisy people who live over there. Then there's my friend Larry, who's always having trouble with his "prostrate" gland -- you know, that collapsed gland that's lying down there flat on the perineal floor.

And I've told him 100 times, "Larry, it's not 'prostrate,' it's 'prosTATE.'" He repeats it after me, but this repeated lesson has no effect on the poor swamp-cooler guy.

However, my favorite mispronunciation of all time is "bronical" (spelling uncertain), in place of "bronchial." I got this one years ago from a young friend who suffered from severe self-inflicted bronchitis, from his overuse of marijuana. The funny thing is, he could say "bronchitis," but he couldn't say "bronchial tubes." They instead became, and were always and forever more, "bronical tubes."

This particular mispronunciation conjured up a wonderful and lasting mental image, that of Bronical Bill the Sailor, a socially obnoxious denizen of the sea whose picturesque speech was sprinkled with salty jargon and crusty nautical terms, and who, like my friend, suffered from an acute and endless inflammation of the bronical tubes. Bill was always puffing on a clay pipe stuffed with equal parts Egyptian tobacco and Pakistani gold seal hashish -- the really good, dark brown stuff. Nobody wanted him around, as he coughed constantly, spraying droplets all over anybody unfortunate enough to be listening to one of his interminable, rambling monologues, and was in addition a prolific spitter.

That's the only use of habitual mispronunciations I can think of. They sometimes help someone with nothing better to do imagine what traits the worst person in the world might have.