For some reason, the main thing Radio Derb listeners took away from my segment on the appalling Hilda Solis, our secretary of labor, was that the lady has trouble pronouncing the English word “similar.” (She renders it as something like “simular.”)
As one listener observed, referring to Madame Secretary’s punctilious enunciation of Nee-ha-rah-wah and the like:
Perhaps Ms. Solis should put the same effort into learning to pronounce “similar” (it’s not “sim-u-lar”) in English that she puts into pronouncing the names of various countries in Spanish.
Another listener wants to know whether Madame Secretary refers to Deutschland, Zhong-guo, Suomi, Al-Mamlaka-al-’Arabiyya-as-Su’udiyya and so on with the same careful attention to phonetic minutiae. I am afraid I have no information on this.