Hope and Fail

Hooked on phonics?

During his speech at Naval Air Station Jacksonville, President Obama mispronounced the word “corpsmen,” instead saying “corpse man.”

Today, we also send our thoughts and prayers to all the folks from Jacksonville on the front lines at this very moment: pilots and aircrews around the world, Navy corpsmen on the ground in Afghanistan.

Perhaps the folks typing the president’s speech into the teleprompter should do what broadcast news writers do: Write everything out phonetically, so the empty suit reading the script doesn’t say it incorrectly.

For the record, Webster’s says to pronounce “corpsman” as kôr’mǝn — with a silent “p” and a silent “s.”