Now that the trolling on the Bourdain video is subsiding it was time to spice things up and crank out (think about it...) a video on the death of rapper XXX Tentacion. And this was cranked out in the truest sense, as this video was proudly presented as breaking news. And it’s pretty much a fail on all levels.
As was commented by someone else it was plastered with a clickbait title and proclaimed to be breaking news just hours old at the start of the video. A pretty clear sign that not a lot of thought was put into anything beyond the bullshit numbers that can be forced out of any story. And not being a rap fan myself I have the commentary to show me that multiple people were not just offended by being tricked by the clickbait title, but they also didn’t like the idea that his legacy is also tainted by the fact that his name wasn’t even pronounced right.
I can understand the defense of it not being important for the numerology. If I tried to correct grammar in all the comments I would do nothing with my life but bust on bad grammar in the comments. I hardly have time to go back and correct my own mistakes. When it’s important, like misspelling Manila as Manilla, then you’ll hear from me.
Here’s a video of butchered pronunciations and the correct pronunciation:
https://genius.com/videos/How-to-correctly-pronounce-xxxtentacion
Reporting in hindsight is always much easier, just ask any gematria user. So not knowing it would be of any importance I could suggest that any argument could have been bypassed by taking the less than two minutes it took me to research how to pronounce a name that you might not know. You know, like an astute researcher would do. Or do a common newscaster or sports commentator trick of preceding the strange name pronunciation with a “I’m probably going to get this wrong...”. But it’s just a name being pronounced wrong, no big deal, right?
No Derek, actually it is a big deal beyond just not worrying about if someone uses “Your” instead of “You’re” or mangled how to pronounce your latest target of victim shaming. Because again, you boldly proclaim in this video as well as others that gematria is a language. Which it certainly isn’t because a real language takes care of things like making sure that words get pronounced correctly. Things like “D” sounding like “D” so you don’t accidentally get Mom a card for Father’s Day. Here Dad! Why did you shave your legs, anyway? And if 33 can mean damned near anything it’s kind of difficult to know what the 33 translates to before getting to the point of worrying if the heteronym is pronounced like Polish the country or polishing your Gematria Mook (door)knob.
Instead we’ve opted for a tame, but still existent, variation of my often repeated Die heretic! anti-troll rebuttal. Die! A critic! And by chance XXX’s name could have been easier to get right if there were an accent mark. There are loads of words we use in English borrowed from other languages such as “resume” which mean totally different things when we drop the diacritics because we can tell if we’re looking for a new job or restarting our video after taking a short break to look up how to pronounce the name right. Context completely lost when converting words into numbers. My what a wonderful language you have there. Nothing says language like not using it for its intended purpose, oral communication.
This also gives me the opportunity to point something out that is just a pet peeve of mine. While I listen to videos and I hear Asia Argento pronounced like the band or the country I don’t make a big deal about it. (It’s Ah-see-uh). Now you’re supposed to be the expert and if the expert says that this is no big deal, fine. The letters and the numbers associated with them mathematically are important, you must be a math expert too. I haven’t heard you pronounce “trigonal” correctly yet. It’s not like Try-ceratops but like trihg-onometry.. A literate expert on words and numbers should know that. So that about wraps up the fail clean sweep.
Content sensitivity - fail
Words - fail
Math - fail
Reaction to criticism - fail
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