There is a movie reviewer on my local public radio station (KPCC in Pasadena) who makes me cringe almost every time I listen to him. His name is Tim Cogshell, and he is on a frequent rotation with much better critics including Andy Klein and Henry Sheehan and Charles Solomon. Cogshell’s idiosyncratic cadence, tortured delivery and frequent repetitions are unsettling enough. But then he piles on the pain with a series of malapropisms and mispronunciations.
I’ve suffered in silence (apart from yelling at the radio) until last summer, when he repeatedly referred to the French designer Yves Saint-Laurent as “Yves Saint”, obviously under the impression that Saint was part of the first name, rather than the surname. This prompted me to log onto the station’s webpage and leave a snarky comment, asking who is this “Yves-Saint who TimCog keeps referring to?”
Cogshell set a new record for inanity in today’s show, which prompted me to finally break out of my writer’s block and blog about it. He began by referring to a filmic ‘oeuvre’, pronouncing it ‘ou-ver’ rather than ‘er-vrah’, as it should be (check the correct pronounciation here).
Cogshell then went on to riff at length about the current Django controversy among the African American community and complain about a series of films that have been ‘hoisted’ upon us. Hoisted? Surely he meant ‘foisted’? At that point I turned the radio off and ran upstairs to get my outrage down on record.
My message for Mr. Cogshell is this: I have nothing against folks incorporating foreign words into the English language. Au contraire, as a Latin graduate and Francophile I do it myself all the time. But please, take a moment to check the pronunciation. The internet has a zillion tools to make sure you get it right. After all, you are not just spouting off in a bar somewhere, you are on NPR!
A sceptical reader might look at the above and conclude: that’s three errors in six months, why the outrage? But these are the only ones that spring to mind. As a 50-something man, my memory is not what it used to be and, more pertinently, I have better things to do with my dwindling RAM than catalog one fellow’s crimes against the language for later regurgitation. Let me just say that regardless of his opinions on film, (to which he is obviously entitled), his language errors and lack of professionalism make him very hard for me to stomach. KPCC can surely do better than this fellow.
– Neil Fletcher
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