IT’S NOT YOU, IT’S ME
Like many of you reading this, I mispronounced words growing up that I first encountered in books. These words gained a life of their own in the quiet hallways of my mind. This internal sense of sound and language had a tendency to trump the world’s, at least for a while, forming a music that was more reliably vital and personal than our shared lexicon. This is why it delights me when my students rhyme Goethe with both, pronounce ennui as anöoey, or say penal as an echo of banal (which is frankly an improvement); they are giving themselves away as autodidacts, and revealing the soundtrack of their interior life.
One of the first moments I recall this inner lexicon breaking the surface was in the midst of a second grade read-aloud: I was relating the dull happenings of a turtle who for some inexplicable reason had decided to visit a café, a word which I pronounced with confidence and vigor, rhyming it with . When Mrs. Hoffman, who wore cat-lady glasses and smoked