Those who know me know that I'm pretty conservative. I've found it easier to support Bush most of the time than it was when Willie was in office. But I do hold one (maybe more than one) grudge against our chief executive, namely: pronunciation; specifically the word "nuclear".

My issues with this word go all the way back to the summer I spent at Oklahoma Baptist University participating in what they called the Academy. Our Academy class that summer studied nuclear energy. It was a time marked well by incidents at unknown places like Three Mile Island (younger readers may have to do a search over at Wikipedia -- I'm too lazy to link tonight). We were just coming down from a time when searching for alternate sources of energy because of crises in the world's oil-rich areas. On one of our first class meetings, almost immediately after the announcement of our study topic for the eight weeks that summer, we were cautioned to pronounce the word "nuclear" as it is spelled. We were reminded that nuclear has but one "u" in it.

So why, oh why, is it completely impossible for men (and women) of education such as George W. Bush (we'll assume that he has an education since his resume includes one of the Ivy-league variety) to say "NEW-kleer" instead of "NEW-kyew-lar" when they come across this word. Perhaps it falls to the fact that he is known by most of most avid supporters as "Dubyuh".

That said, here's my message to the wide variety of candidates (both red and blue) who have been campaigning for the Oval Office for (what?) two years now -- the election's about a year away, so we're in the home stretch now (for the novice reader, that was sarcasm): Learn to pronounce words. If you can't figure it out on your own, get a pronunciation coach. If you can't find one, I'd be glad to charge a few (thousand) dollars to join your staff (can't guarantee support, just pronunciation coaching).

Here are a few for you to work on in the meantime:

nuclear

harassment

grievous

mischievous