When 'ee-vuhl' becomes 'de-vuhl'!

This topic of this post may seem absolutely irrelevant to you, probably because it is. It’s just a little post born of constant frustration with the ignorance of basic English words by French journalists.

Tonight, the French correspondent of Canal + ( a popular French tv station) Laurence Haim was in N-York to cover the summit on climate change at the U.N.. And of course, she talked about everything but what really matters.

Yes, she did report the visit of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to New York. As an illustration of the media circus around the Iranian president’s visit, she showed the cover of a tabloid, The New York Daily News, to the camera and said “ze ev-uhl has landed, ‘le diable a atteri’”, but ‘le diable’, dear Ms Haim is the “devil” in English, not the “evil”, one is religious and the other is moral!

It is one thing to pronounce words wrong, and not know that “evil” is pronounced “ee-vuhl” (after all, many other stupid journalists think the the “gooardian” is a great British newspaper!), it is another to confuse two basic words like “evil” and “devil”. It is the sort of thing you learn in 3rd grade.

And it is those people who don’t even know basic English who are tv correspondents IN the U.S., supposedly to analyze the politics there! Some journalists indeed.