Phreee::::::TTTT! The united manager is no mo-nyet!

AFTER almost six weeks of abstemious football deprivation (read purgatory) – hidup tanpa bola, tidur tanpa bola, makan tanpa bola (live sans football, sleep sans football, eat sans football) – to borrow the cue from a nationally-televised ad campaign; the new football season is upon us.

Sorry local footie fans, I am not referring to our own Malaysia Cup but to events yonder in foreign shores – in them thar England. Politically-incorrect I may be but in terms of sheer coverage, reach and popularity, the English Premier League (which by virtue of it being sponsored by Barclays Bank and therefore also correctly-commercially called the Barclays Premier League) is the sports programme of choice which countless Malaysian football fans will be permanently dialled in from now till late May next year. That is the length of the BPL season that will keep us all engrossed, Asian bookies busy and office workers bleary-eyed to keep up with the continuous offering of top-class live games. Astro subscribers will tell you that the major portion of their waking hours will see them sitting in front of the telly most weekends in the late evenings or the wee hours of the mornings to catch the action.

The mamak restaurant trade – already operating round the clock – has become the de facto “stadium’ where football fans gather to indulge in their triple passion of stuffing themselves unhealthily silly, puffing away stick after stick and watching 22 fit men chase a round ball all over the pitch!

If there’s a redeeming point at all, it is that these band of merry men get their kicks totally alcohol-free; so there’s no bar-brawling or hooliganism to contend with.

What grabs my goat though is their singular inability to get the names of the protagonists right. These fans are fully aware of the handover of the reigns of management of Manchester United having passed on from the venerable institution - Sir Alex Ferguson - to former Everton boss David Moyes. What they are blissfully ignorant is how the name should be pronounced.

Important you ask? Important I say!

For argument’s sake let’s put the boot on the other foot. How would you react when a Mat Salleh television anchor is faced with a script that reads a common Malay name spelt M-O-H-D? Now if “Mode” springs from his mouth, you’d quite likely feel yucky and maybe reach out for the remote control and throw it against the television screen.

Our television anchors and radio sports commentators – some of the uncouth ones – read out Moyes as MO + YES. They are not wrong. No, they are VERY WRONG!

Those amongst the footballing fan fraternity who have bothered to find out know that M-O-Y-E-S; when read aloud comes across as MO + OYS (to rhyme with Boys or Voice).

I felt strongly enough about the subject that I actually rang up the newsroom of one television station last weekend to alert the female anchor who read out the sports news in the early evening. Guess what? They admitted their gaffe and from the next bulletin onwards, that particular television station banished MO-YES out to touch!

It does not help however when Arsenal Manager Arsene Wenger insists on calling the one-time Everton manager MO-YES, but he’s French.

It bothers me that our local fans do not attempt to go beyond sitting in front of the television set in their favourite mamak restaurant and engage in spirited football banter. Listen in to their comments and some appear to spew rubbish while others merely regurgitate what they read in the back pages of local newspapers. Those with a little bit more panache however can rival Shebby Singh, one-time fullback and football pundit – now otherwise fully employed in running the affairs of Blackburn Rovers in England.

Away from the football pitch, academia is not immune to this bout of mis-pronunciation too. Quite a few Malaysians are aware of the existence of Johns Hopkins university, that venerable university famed for its excellence in medicine. In fact, it is setting up a branch campus in Cyberjaya and pretty soon Malaysian patients will gain the benefit of their brand of patient care. But first they would do well to get everyone to address them right.

It is Johns – with an S; and Hopkins – also with an S! Does it matter if us Malaysians call it John Hopkins? Of course it does!

On Saturday Proton launched its latest model – the hatchback version of the Preve. What was the name given to this latest model to come out of the Proton plant in Tanjung Malim ? They named it the Suprima! I have no doubt they are thinking of something supercalifragilisticexpialidociously grand to showcase its super duper-ness. But Suprima?

Is this Spanish, Latin or Javanese? Neither – it is a mish mash of BM and near-English that the marketing and branding boys conjured for the lexicographically-relaxed and forgiving Malaysian market.

To me this is taking the easy way out – bastardise a foreign language to come up with what is seemingly local. I personally prefer if we had stuck with the original word – Supreme. Offered as the hatchback version of the Proton Preve (now this in itself is not a local word to begin with); I do not see how the promoters could not simply call it the Proton Supreme?

We may embrace wholeheartedly the joys of the English football game, but when it comes to ascribing almost-Anglo Saxon names to local cars, now that is a big NO, NO on pain of raising nationalist ire!

Perhaps that's why we find ourselves almost calling Moyes – Mo.....NYET!

RAZAK Chik finds it so grating when local football fans sing; “We want goal, we want goal,” to egg on their local football teams. What ever happened to the use of the article “a” in grammatically-proper sentence construction?