Pronouncing Macabre

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Becca in Dallas.

Hi, welcome to the show. What’s on your mind?

So I was about, I think I was 17 or 19. I can’t remember exactly when, but I was at a friend’s house.

We were watching one of those ghost hunting shows, it was a ghost adventures.

And we had the subtitles on because her parents were in another room watching a show.

And the host of the show said the word macabre, which I know the word macabre. I’ve always heard it. I know what it means.

But when I saw the subtitles, I had to tell my friend real quick, pause it, pause it, wait a minute, because I realized in that moment I had never seen the word macabre written out, at least not with someone else to tell me that’s what that word was.

When I’d seen the written word macabre as a child, I thought it was pronounced macabre.

Macabre.

I didn’t have anyone to tell me that that was the wrong way to pronounce that.

So I grew up thinking that the written word macabre, or macabre as I thought it was, and the spoken word macabre were two different words.

We spent about 20 minutes, me freaking out, because I was mind-boggled, absolutely bewildered.

I was calling my mom, my dad, like, hey, how do you spell this word? How do you pronounce this word?

And my best friend was just sitting there. How could you not know this?

So macabre, M-A-C-A-B-R-E.

Martha, I think that one catches a lot of people up.

Well, yeah, I was going to say, Becca, if it makes you feel any better, I made the same mistake for years.

And as Grant and I always say on this show, I mean, if you mispronounce a word because of your reading, more power to you.

You know, good for you for doing all this reading and your mouth getting ahead of your head, as Grant said.

So, yeah, let’s talk about this word macabre, which is how you pronounce it, right? Macabre.

And you can also pronounce it macabre in English.

And it’s a word that comes from French.

And how was it used in this film that you were watching?

Oh, like I said, it was like a ghost hunting show.

So they were talking, the host was saying, oh, how he’s always had an interest in the macabre.

Right, right.

So the creepy, sort of grisly, horrible kinds of things.

Yeah, it’s an interesting word that has a history that’s kind of tantalizing.

It may have to do with the Book of Maccabees, which is part of the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox canons of the Old Testament.

And that includes stories about the martyrdom of Jewish heroes, the Maccabees, for refusing to abandon their faith.

And the suffering that they endured was considered exemplary, and they died holy deaths.

And then in medieval France, this story was commemorated with a dance called the Danse Macabre, or Dance of Maccabee.

And there were grisly depictions of this dance in medieval art.

You may have seen them, like there’s a procession in which skeletons are leading everybody from kings to peasants, you know, off to their death.

It’s sort of the idea that, have you seen that before?

I think so, yeah.

You know, it’s sort of this reminder that we’re all going to end up the same way eventually, which is kind of a macabre thought, I guess.

Two things to toss in here.

One is, one of the difficulties of this word, Becca, is that it still hangs on to a little bit of its Frenchness, even though it’s been in English for a very long time.

So even people who know the word still, you know, understand how it spells, still sometimes have difficulty saying it.

Because that weird schwa sound at the end that some people say is not really common in English.

Genre is another word.

But the other thing is, I was looking in my pronunciation guides here.

In the mid-1960s, the NBC, you know, the Broadcasting Network Handbook of Pronunciation, listed the pronunciation as macabre, with an E-R at the end.

Oh, wow.

But by the 1980s, that same manual and a new edition had changed it to macabre.

So even the word itself is not stable.

It’s the common pronunciation is growing more French as people try to sound a little more elite or they’re just more aware of its Frenchness, whereas perhaps in the past they weren’t.

OK, I’m glad to know I got maybe a little bit of the pronunciation right.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, macabre is pretty far, but you got the consonants.

But Becca, those sight words and book words, yeah, like Martha said, if you’ve got a big catalog of them, more power to you.

It means you learned them from reading and nobody’s going to put that down.

Yeah, you’ve got a big vocabulary.

I am proud of that, yes.

All right, take care and thanks for calling and sharing your story.

Thank you so much.

All right, bye-bye.

Bye, Becca.

Martha and I would love to hear your language misunderstandings, 877-929-9673.

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