Essays at Large Author:John Collings Squire General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1922 Original Publisher: H. Doran company Description: "Most of these papers are reprinted from the Outlook...a few...appeared in Land and water."--Pref. note. Subjects: Literary Collections / Essays Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illust... more »rations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: PRONUNCIATION THE conversationalist in this country has a thorny road to tread. A correspondent writes, poor thing, to ask me, in confidence, how he should pronounce " Quixote," a word he finds frequently cropping up in his talk. His natural inclination and early practice was to speak of Don Quixote as though the cavalier had an English " x " in his name. Of late years he has found, when in circles where people really do know things, a growing tendency to pronounce the name in the Spanish way -- which we may represent, though inadequately, by the spelling Keehotte. Now, my correspondent, being a sailor, is a shy and sensitive man. He feels sheepish. He does not want to drop " Don Quixote " out of his life altogether, as it is one of his favourite books, and he even has theories about it. But he is afraid. If he says " Quix " in the coarse English manner he fears that the experienced and supercilious landsman may stare at him as at an illiterate boor ; but he shrinks from tackling the other pronunciation, partly because he knows he couldn't do it without looking self-conscious, partly because he does not wish to affect an acquaintance with Spanish which he does not possess, and partly because he is sure he would never get it right. He might even be so far from right that somebody, not understanding or pretending not to understand, might make him repeat the outlandish syllables, a process which would cause him t...« less