Saturday, December 7, 2019

Nobody told us how to pronounce Xavier



One of the side-effects of growing up on comic books in a country and culture that is pretty fucking far from anybody else in the world is that me and my mates were constantly mispronouncing the names of our favourite creators and characters.

We would see their names written down in stark ink on paper, but that didn't give us a clue how to pronounce any of them. The late, great Carlos Ezquerra might have been a favourite artist of all time, but I didn't have a clue how to say his name properly until an ex-Tharg was helpful enough to explain it to me, and me and my best mate Kyle genuinely thought the founder of the X-Men was named Professor Echs-ver for many, many years.

It's a lot easier now, of course, and it's a piece of cake to now find videos and podcasts where real people say real names out loud. The only excuse for mispronouncing names now is laziness, and the fact I can get incredibly tongue-tied when trying to make proper sounds. That's a me problem, and one I'm trying to get better at. Getting someone's name right is the least I can do.

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