Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Entertainment/2012 June 8

= June 8 =

Who else did Marg Delahunty kiss?
The character Marg Delahunty from This_Hour_Has_22_Minutes hounds politicians with outrageous questions for comedic purposes. She even kissed the PM-elect once  on camera. I vaguely recall watching her kiss another party leader (possibly the late Jack Layton) on TV years ago. Did this actually happen or is it just a figment of my imagination? Did she kiss any other politician on the show? 173.32.168.59 (talk) 03:20, 8 June 2012 (UTC)
 * How long after the kiss was it before he became "the late" Jack Layton? Was it immediate, or did it take awhile? ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 06:27, 8 June 2012 (UTC)

Pronunciation of "Celtics"
In The Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations, Charles Harrington Elster says that one way to test the pronunciation of "Celtics" with a /k/ sound at the beginning is to "[go] to a Boston Celtics game and [yell] 'Go, KEL-tiks!'" and see if you "get out of there without being slam-dunked." Will the people at those games really "slam-dunk" you if you attempted to pronounce their team name starting with /k/ instead of /s/? 98.116.65.50 (talk) 03:30, 8 June 2012 (UTC)
 * No, they just think that your're either a) an idiot b) a pretentious prick or c) quite likely both. The correct pronounciation of both the basketball team name Boston Celtics and the Scottish association football team Celtic F.C. is with the /s/ sound.  The name of the ancient ethnic group, the Celts, is pronounced with a /k/.  Neither is a wrong prounciation.  Please read Etymological fallacy to understand why the names are not wrong.  -- Jayron  32  03:41, 8 June 2012 (UTC)
 * [edit conflict] No, they will either not understand you or they'll think you're a pedantic fool if they do. Say Kelt, Kelts, or Keltic if you are talking to academics who know the word is originally Greek (κελτος), which has no c- weakening.  Say Seltics if you are referring to the team beloved of those barbarous Bostonians educated by Latin speakers or their students.  Either pronunciation is cromulent.  You can even try "Go, Chelltigh!" if you want to be funny.μηδείς (talk) 03:46, 8 June 2012 (UTC)
 * Or to be really funny, try cheering for the Heat. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 05:18, 8 June 2012 (UTC)
 * Not quite. The English word comes from Latin (see Names_of_the_Celts) which does have the soft C. Hence "seltic" is the older English pronunciation, but in academic circles "keltic" took over, probably due to the Germans, who naturally spell it with a K. --Colapeninsula (talk) 08:40, 8 June 2012 (UTC)


 * What Jayron and Medeis both seem to be saying is that there's a place for /keltic/ and a place for /seltic/, and that it's important to keep them separate. That's fine.  It's just one of many heteronyms we deal with on a daily basis.  I'm a /Kelt/ but I've many times heard my people referred to as /Selts/, which I just let go with a shrug.  Surely the Boston and Scottish sportspeople and their followers have experienced the same thing in reverse, too many times to count. In light of that, what could explain the really extreme reactions that Jayron and Medeis are attributing to them?  --  ♬  Jack of Oz  ♬  [your turn]  09:18, 8 June 2012 (UTC)


 * The extreme reaction comes from the fact that there are people who insist that the fans of the sports teams are somehow "wrong" because they don't use the same pronounciation for the sports team names that are commonly used to describe the ancient people. People often do so to sound self important, as though they know that the sports teams should be pronounced with an "k" because they learned the ancient people's name was pronounced with a "k".  The OP essentially expressed the same sentiment in their question.  -- Jayron  32  12:00, 8 June 2012 (UTC)


 * I never really understood the claim that the pronunciation with a soft C is wrong. We don't use hard C pronunciations with other names we get from Latin, like Caesar.  I also don't understand why the Boston Celtics use an adjective as the name of their team.  John M Baker (talk) 16:03, 8 June 2012 (UTC)
 * Boston has a large Irish-American population. Clarityfiend (talk) 19:32, 8 June 2012 (UTC)
 * Yeah, but I guess what he's asking is: "why not the Boston Celts?" 92.80.62.79 (talk) 20:12, 8 June 2012 (UTC)

It's not an entirely unusual construction among US sports team names; see Philadelphia Athletics and New York Metropolitans. In those two cases the name is a variation of an organizational name (such as "Athletic Baseball Club"), but I don't know if the Celtics have a similar history. The Celtics name goes back at least this far. Orange Suede Sofa (talk) 20:32, 8 June 2012 (UTC)
 * NBA.com says founding owner Walter A. Brown named the team after the New York Original Celtics. Where did that team get its name? Beats me. (Maybe it's turtles all the way down back to the Garden of Eden Really Original Celtics.) Clarityfiend (talk) 04:07, 9 June 2012 (UTC)
 * There were a couple of Irishmen on the team, but it seemed to be an ethnic mixture. Regardless, the most obvious explanation is an association with the Irish of New York City. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 05:03, 9 June 2012 (UTC)

@ John M. Baker: Re your "We don't use hard C pronunciations with other names we get from Latin, like Caesar." I did a search and there are no hard C words starting with ce- or ci-, whether they be from Latin or any other language. Some people do pronounce cepha- words as /kefa/ (cephalic, Cephalonia etc). The only other item of note is the Zulu king Cetshwayo, who gets a hard C. Given all the soft C precedents and the total lack of hard C precedents, I have to wonder why the European settlers didn't spell his name Ketshwayo. -- ♬  Jack of Oz  ♬  [your turn]  09:31, 9 June 2012 (UTC)
 * According to Zulu language, c represents a dental click in Zulu and the IPA pronunciation given on the page for Cetshwayo supports this as does IPA which actually gives Cetshwayo as an example of a word which contains this click sound. Valiantis (talk) 04:03, 10 June 2012 (UTC)
 * Celeborn is pronounced with a hard /k/. Cetshwayo seems to me when I pronounce it as if it were spelled Tsetshwayo but with the fisrt consonants inhaled rather than exhaled.  The sound does exist in English.  (It's simply the 'tsk-tsk' or 'tut-tut' called clucking in disaproval.)   It's obviously not a /t/ but certainly not a /k/ either when heard.  A /k/ pronunciation sounds even worse to me than a Russian approximation of 'th' with /f/.  I'd have said Setshwayo as a way for them to say the name if I had been speaking to a non-Zulu speaking audience. μηδείς (talk) 05:29, 10 June 2012 (UTC)

Anyone remember an 80s (maybe 90s) US tv show about an architect?
Hoping to find the name. It was kind of a comedy/drama...all I remember is the architect would have a different home model in his office, and occasionally his boss/buddy would walk in and give advice about the current project. No luck googling it.

The scene I remember is the model house was built on two pillars. These supported the home on a steep slope. Throughout the episode, the architect was concerned that he couldn't figure out how to make it work. The boss/buddy walked in and said he knew what the problem was. "You can build it, but it'll fall down."

Thanks! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Shandon (talk • contribs) 15:41, 8 June 2012 (UTC)


 * Moondoggie works as an architect in the The New Gidget. There was a short-lived series about two architects in 1995 called Partners.  An even shorter-lived series, I Married Dora, aired in 1987.  Any of these, possibly?  --some jerk on the Internet    (talk)  17:52, 8 June 2012 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the ideas. Could be Partners...the actor's face looks familiar. But the 1995 date makes it less likely.Shandon (talk) 18:08, 8 June 2012 (UTC)

Movie "Hard, Fast and Beautiful" original source?
IMBD says that the movie "Hard, Fast and Beautiful" was written by John R Tunis, and I found a brief line that says it was based on one of his books. But I can't find any reliable source that says that, or which book it was. I'm trying to improve the article on him, and would really like to be able to use that info. If someone could provide me a link and quote the actual info, I'd be very appreciative. (My computer's having problems and won't access a lot of sites right now.) Thanks you very much. Tlqk56 (talk) 15:57, 8 June 2012 (UTC)
 * Most of the sources I can find—including the Bosley Crowther review used as a reference in our article on the film—say that the movie's script was based on Tunis's short story "The Mother of a Champion", which was published in the February 1929 issue of Harper's Magazine. (Mother of a Champion also seems to have been an alternative title for the film.) This Turner Classic Movies page, however, says (under "Screenplay Info") that the movie was based on Tunis's novel American Girl (1930). Perhaps Tunis worked the short story up into a novel? Deor (talk) 18:52, 8 June 2012 (UTC)
 * Halliwell's Film Guide (1994) states the film was written by Martha Wilkerson, after a novel by John R. Tunis, but does not elaborate. A 1991 article in the Los Angeles Times (Oswald, G. K. "Remembered, Yet Forgotten: The Writers Life of John Tunis." Los Angeles Times (pre-1997 Fulltext): 1. National Newspapers Core. Jun 30 1991. Web. 8 June 2012 . ) states "Tunis found himself in his sports novels. Through the '40s and '50s he never went more than two years without publishing one; he published three in 1943. He even saw "American Girl" made into the movie "Hard, Fast and Beautiful," though, like many an author after accepting the money, he rued having seen what Hollywood made of his book." --some jerk on the Internet    (talk)  19:36, 8 June 2012 (UTC)
 * A little on American Girl, from Smith, Leverett T., Jr. "John R(oberts) Tunis." Twentieth-Century American Sportswriters. Ed. Richard Orodenker. Detroit: Gale Research, 1996. Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 171. Literature Resource Center. Web. 8 June 2012: "Two years later Tunis again addressed the problem of commercialization in his only book-length adult fiction, American Girl (1930). As William Soskin observed in his 6 August 1930 review in the New York Post,American Girl integrated two closely related purposes: to depict the economic structure of a commercialized amateur sport (Tunis was later to do this successfully for high school football and basketball fiction for young adults) and to tell the story of the spiritual cost of an American girl's becoming a tennis champion." --some jerk on the Internet    (talk)  19:45, 8 June 2012 (UTC)

Thanks so much, everyone. Tunis did kind of re-write The Mother of a Champion into American Girl, so that makes sense that it could be considered either. I wish I could read the LA Times article, but I appreciate your quoting from it for me, and the other info. Thanks a lot! Tlqk56 (talk)