A Tragedy Anent The International Phonetic Alphabet

By Ford, Frank Bernard

A couple who pronounced. Everything perfectly, American with a whiff of British. Accent is too strong a term; one could, of course, say affectation, but we all affect, so what's the point?

They had taste in everything, style, were precise in everything.

Then one night, heading out to the very best French restaurant, he says he'll get the cur. No humor here..they had no dog...well not ever anything so obvious and debased, no matter what.

He never again mispronounced car or any other word, but she inexplicably started aging. Diacritical marks on her face, like words marked up in the International Phonetic Alphabet. Well similar - I'm just playing and I shouldn't. They were my friends - as best three academics could manage.

And as she aged he stayed youthful. I started calling him, secretly, Dorian Gray of the IPA, after Oscar Wilde's work.

How perfect John Betjamin in his poem depicting the sad end of that poet! Wit within convention. Why oh why can't other artists follow that example? That is, the tradition hands us perfectly lovely frames. We consumers of the arts do not have the time or patience for the periodic dismantling of them by those with wild eyes and shabby backgrounds.

At any rate, she has metamorphosised to Very Early Alzheimer's; he performs the perfect waiter.

And although she does pronounce every word, it's a scramble as to any meaning for hovering him.

Well what does anything mean, anyway? It's all simply a deal we make with each other, you must agree.