Hegemony

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is John Wilkins.

Hiya, John, where are you calling from?

I’m calling from San Diego, well, Oceanside, California.

Lovely Oceanside. What’s up?

That’s right. Well, my question is how to pronounce the word hegemony.

I was in graduate school, and there was a group of folks there who wanted to say that maybe it was,

Suggest it was maybe hegemony and not hegemony.

And I thought that to be wrong.

And so, you know, kind of as a latter day solution, I’d like a good answer from you if you could.

Hegemony. And hegemony meaning what? I guess we should define it first, huh?

Well, hegemony, as proposed by Antonio Gramsci, like a Marxist,

We wanted to talk about the revolution and why it hadn’t happened in certain areas.

And he wanted to say basically that systems perpetuated themselves because of culture, not necessarily because of power, and that cultural hegemony or ascendancy was a way to keep people hooked into a system like capitalism after a recession or a crash when they otherwise wouldn’t.

Say, for example, if they were culturally connected to the system, then they weren’t willing to overthrow it.

Right.

Okay, and you’re spelling it how, John?

H-E-G-E-M-O-N-Y.

Okay.

I think that your pronunciation is correct,

And all of the dictionaries I’ve checked agree with one small footnote.

It is hegemony.

It’s the same G that’s in geriatric or giant.

Okay, great.

None of them will include the G that is in great or grant.

So it’s hegemony.

What they do include, some of them, is the alternate pronunciation of hegemony.

That is not common, not standard, and probably going to get you laughed at if you’re speaking at the UN.

Well, it still seems like it’s a very similar G in either case.

Right.

Is that so?

The G is the same, but I just wanted to point out that there is another way to emphasize the word.

Okay, I see what you’re saying.

But hegemony, hegemony, hegemony, hegemony, that’s the one that you want.

Hegemony.

Yeah, I agree with that.

I mean, you can find lists of all the different ways that it’s been pronounced, but I would agree with Grant.

It’s that soft G. It’s the same G that you see in, well, you mentioned geriatric.

Perfect example.

Also from that same combination of Greek letters.

Right.

Okay, well, I hope we’ve settled this for you.

Absolutely. Thank you very much.

You’re welcome, John.

All right. Thanks, John.

Anytime.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Let’s put this on the list of words that I did not know how to pronounce

Until I turned to the dictionary and had to repeat it to myself a dozen times

Just to make sure I got it right.

I have one of those running lists.

How about homogeneity?

Homogeneity, homogeneity.

Right, exactly.

There’s this whole class of word that you encounter in written language long before you ever have a need to speak it.

And this is definitely in that list.

Yep, yep, yep.

Well, if you’ve got a question about a word and how best to pronounce it, we’d like to give you a hand with that.

Give us a call, 1-877-929-9673, or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.