a thorough cough

[forumadmin]

Working on an event recently, I was struck by the difficulty faced by non-mother-tongue-English speakers in global companies who have to make presentations in English to other non-mother-tongue-English speakers when they get together for a conference.

During one particularly ambitious presentation, a latin-american speaker unsurprisingly made a hash of pronouncing a phrase something like 'a thorough approach to throughput'. I felt for him - and on the 'cans' (the audio headsets that connect all the technical crew) we evolved the following tongue-twister for any English speakers:

"They thought through though their thoroughly rough cough on a lough in Slough"

The pronunciations of 'ough' equate roughly (sic) to:

aw, oo, oh, er, uff, off, okh, ow

Anyone know any others?

We had the technology to introduce it 'on the fly' into the prompt screens but our clients were friendly, nice people so we had a laugh at the thought and decided to be merciful - and keep our jobs!

Moral: When you're a presenter, be 'thoroughly' nice to the tech crew!

Phil Swallow