There is a commercial on TV these days that features country singer Kenny Rogers playing cards with some friends. I think it’s a commercial for insurance—or maybe orange juice—or oven cleaner. It doesn’t matter, because I’m not buying whatever they’re selling, and whatever they’re selling has nothing to do with Kenny Rogers.
He’s just there to get a laugh as some guy says, “Playing cards with Kenny Rogers gets old really fast.”
That would be funny enough, because Kenny Rogers has dealt out plenty of money to plastic surgeons to try to keep his face from ever getting old—with laughable results.
But then Kenny starts crooning, “You gotta know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em, know when to walk away, know when to run.” And the other guys at the table just stare at him, as if Kenny has laid that lame joke on them a few hundred times too often while playing cards.
Although there’s no chance that Kenny’s crooning will convince me to buy insurance (or orange juice, or oven cleaner), he always catches my attention every time I see that commercial.
And it’s not his singing voice, or his wry joke, or even his taut-skinned face that grabs me.
It’s his pronunciation.
You would think that a country singer from Texas might be the last place you would turn for a lesson on how to pronounce things, but Kenny’s little commercial cameo should change your mind.
That’s because he may be one of the last English-speaking people on the planet who knows how to say “when.”
Try this test: Say the words “Know when to walk away” out loud, and listen carefully to yourself as you do it. You can sing it if you like. Go ahead, I’ll wait.
Well, what did you hear? Did the first sound of “when” and “walk” sound the same?
If so, then you’re only half right.
That’s because the “w” in “walk” should sound like the noise you make when you watch fireworks in the sky on Independence Day—“O-o-o-o!”
But the “wh” in “when” should sound like the noise you make when you blow out your birthday candles—noiseless, except for the sound of air blowing past your lips. The “wh” is voiceless, with no activity in your vocal chords at all until you hit the “en” part of the word. Put your fingers on your throat as you say the words, and the vibrations should demonstrate the difference.
If you already knew this, then you’re probably—I’m sorry, but I have to say it—pretty old. But if you have grandkids, ask them to tell you the difference between those words, and be ready for the blank stares.
Because I doubt that any kid in school has been taught that fine distinction of pronunciation anytime in the past several decades.
I say that because I used to teach English to seniors at Maine South High School in Park Ridge, Illinois—a fine school that sends a majority of its graduates off to college.
And one day about 20 years ago, after a student lamented that our language had all these words that sounded exactly the same—words like “weather” and “whether,” or “witch” and “which”—I pointed out to him, “Well, they’re pronounced almost the same, but not quite.”
And from the confused looks on the faces of the entire class, I realized that I had lost them.
I wrote those pairs of words on the board and asked the boy to pronounce them carefully. He did. They both sounded the same.
I asked the class if anyone knew where the boy had gone wrong.
Blank expressions all around.
Whatever the original lesson of the day was, it changed on the instant as I found myself teaching 18-year-old Americans how to pronounce words they had been mangling all their lives.
I attended grammar school during the 1950s, and I remember Miss Landoc drilling us with sentences of near homonyms. “I don’t know which witch I saw,” we had to read aloud, and “I wonder whether the weather will be good or bad.” She would have us hold a square of toilet paper in front of our lips as we read in unison, and if our tissue didn’t puff out on “whether” and “which,” and stay put on “weather” and “witch,” we would hear about it.
Most of us learned the lesson, even if we didn’t follow it religiously once we were back on the streets.
By the time we hit high school in the 1960s, American kids were playing pretty fast and loose with language. It was a time to shun formality, and as a consequence our w’s and wh’s merged to become a single fist of rebellion, whether the weather approved or not.
But if you listen closely to those born a generation earlier in the 20s and 30s—even Texas rednecks like Kenny Rogers—you’ll hear it.
It was drilled into them, and it stuck.
When those speakers are all gone, will that fine point of pronunciation die with them? Or will somebody come along to champion its resurgence?
I wouldn’t bet on that happening. With linguistics rules—as with cards—in the words of the Old Gambler, “You gotta know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em, know when to walk away, know when to run.”
And he said it with the sound of a candle being blown out forever.
