Correction needed

Empty house this evening leads me to turn on the evening news. Do I regret it? Indeed I do. The TV announcer talked of the celebratory “doughnut like” pastries sold in Poland at this time of the year. In Milwaukee, they appear to be sold on Mardi Gras, which, of course, always falls on the Tuesday (today) before Ash Wednesday.

Being among the 1% of Poles that are not Catholic, I never quite understood why our own Polish (meaning IN Poland) Mardi Gras wasn’t really on ‘Mardi’ at all, but on ‘Jeudi’, or Thursday and we called it “Fat Thursday” (this year it fell on February 19). Maybe Poles need more than one day in the year to feel fat and happy. I don’t know. But this confusion wasn’t addressed in the news story. All our local broadcast did was show many un-Atkins Polish Americans buying the gloppy pastries today, meaning Tuesday, in celebration of our ‘Polish’ holiday, which, of course, is all wrong in my mind because that fell on last Thursday. But this in itself was not offensive. I am used to religious confusion of this nature.

What bothered me was the anchorman’s enunciation of the word itself. In Poland, we call the pastries “paczki,” pronounced Pawn-chkee. On our local Madison TV station I heard “poon-chkee.” Say it out loud. Laugh-out-loud ridiculous, isn’t it? Correct pronunciation is everything.