I once met someone called Goebbels whose family had lived in England for several generations- they all pronounced it with a long O like “nobles”.
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Make an “ee” sound, and round your lips. You’re saying ü.
Make an “ay” sound (as in “day”), and round your lips. You’re saying ö.
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I think that might be be correct. I’m aware of the (roughly) correct pronunciation (nowadays) but still default to how you describe before mentally correcting. I can think of conversions where I’d start with the ‘wrong’ pronunciation as an opening gambit.
And as corroboration, that immensely popular wartime shanty that still turns up in pubs and football chants ends with the rhyming:
…And Goebbels has No Balls at all!
[Edit for typos. Again. Hrm.]
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If goebbels was Latin, it’d be pronounced “Goy balls.”
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To contradict myself 
, it’s worth remembering that pronunciation of surnames do wander for, well, reasons:
I know of a ‘Laycock’ who pronounced it as ‘Laycoe’, (but a ‘Jeffcock’ who didn’t - or was it vice-versa’?), a ‘Jeremy Beadle’ who insisted on ‘BiddEL’ because of Jeremy Beadle’, and ‘Hyacinth Bucket’ is a BBC sitcom joke for a reason.
I could see how tweaking their pronunciation may have helped in the 30s and 40s.
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While that would have added an extra layer to the insult to a loyal Nazi and abominable human being, I think that was a bit subtle for that particular melody.
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This should be read by the host of every Sunday morning talk show:
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Turns out Trump isn’t especially Kennedyesque on this topic, either.
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You could think of them as toasting the man who burned them in effigy, or you could think of them as toasting the main audience draw that’ll pay for their early retirements. Poh-TAY-toe, pah-TAH-toe.
Yeah, but in Trumpworld, JFK is no hero. JFK’s only a hero because he got shot. He likes Presidents who didn’t get shot, okay?
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Having practically zero experience of political press conferences, Trump’s idea of what a “beatdown” is mainly comes from reading Dick Tracy comics.
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At risk of the (truly horrifying) prospect of even partial agreement with El Presidente; it seems likely that an unfortunately sized chunk of the media are enemies of the American people.
It’s just that the chunk I have in mind is the supine-regurgitation-of-press-releases-and-overt-propaganda-mouthpiece segment; rather than the ones who’ve managed to hurt the petulant little feelings of power.
One cannot really affirm the vital importance of a functional press to a functional democracy without the implication that people doing propaganda or PR work while purporting to be journalists are, at best, acting against the interests of its citizens; and, at worst, actively corroding the whole enterprise.
As, say, a quick tour through our gallery of Iraq war cheerleaders suggests; this isn’t exactly a theoretical group.
I don’t get the impression that these are the enemies Trump has in mind; but it is precisely the important role of journalism that makes people abusing it as cover both dangerous and despicable.
Sort of like the body of law and convention dealing with medical types in conflict zones: it’s because we agree that doctoring is a noble and important business that we condemn so strongly combatants who shoot at them or disguise themselves as them; and fear and loath those who turn medical expertise to applications in torture, human experimentation, and the like.(Unfortunately, we have a few of those running around, as well; but that’s not the point of the analogy).
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Yeah… no. I’ll agree the press has real problems: It presents issues in simplistic binary terms, whips up sensationalism at every opportunity, and is generally lazy. These traits fit the description of an average teenager, and not an enemy of the American people
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He was such an important man in the world, not just for the US. People admired him like he was one of our princes, here in New Zealand. Still do, even after all the years of haters trying to put him “in perspective” with their borax.
Florida rally is a turning point. Even John McCain is saying dictators get started by suppressing free media.
Trump and Co are switching to historical patterns to gain control.
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Oh, they have all those vowel sounds and more round our way. The Geordie pronunciation of ‘no’ is about right for it. And as for Ashington, a bit further up, well…
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I read somewhere that Trump watches a lot of cable TV. Of the unhinged ‘alex jones’ kind. If he truly believes what is told there, he probably also truly believes the mainstream media are a bunch of conniving liars conspiring to get rid of him for sinister motives.
In that light his tweet about MSM being the ‘enemy of the people’ is somewhat understandable. Still very worrying (also here from europe), but understandable.
I would even go as far as calling the cable tv an ‘enemy of the people’, and I think lots of people here would agree. Except for unhinged cable tv being, well…, unhinged, It’s almost perfectly symmetrical.
The us electorate becoming so polarized that it’s nearly impossible to tell which stories are real and which are made up (and I’ve also seen enough bullshit stories on the democratic side to see it’s not a purely republican problem, is the most scary thing to me.
It looks a bit like the ‘freedom of information’ brought by the internet does more harm than good, as the truth gets very hard to discern between the piles of made up garbage.
Interesting times
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Secretary of Defense Maddis has also said he has no problem with the free press, and that the military has no problem with the press.
I’m picturing the relatively sane cabinet members wincing and silently facepalming every time shit like this comes out.
Maybe muttering “25/4, 25/4 . . .” to themselves.
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I was wondering the same actually.
Also what DID happen in Sweden? I just live a few hundred km south of Sweden, so it would be comforting to know what is going on there.
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