Pronunciation

I was the kind nobody thought could make it. I had a funny Boston accent. I couldn't pronounce my R's. I wasn't a beauty.
- Barbara Walters

They spell it da Vinci and pronounce it da Vinchy. Foreigners always spell better than they pronounce.
- Mark Twain, 1835 - 1910

My father's name, when he came to America, was Kassell. At Ellis Island, the registrars changed it to Cohen. I honored my father's name by changing it back to its original pronunciation.
- Howard Cosell

Demosthenes overcame and rendered more distinct his inarticulate and stammering pronunciation by speaking with pebbles in his mouth.
- Plutarch, 46 - 119

I hold that a man has as much right to spell a word as it is pronounced as he has to pronounce it the way it ain't spelled.
- Josh Billings, 1818 - 1885

The golden rule when reading the menu is, if you cannot pronounce it, you cannot afford it.
- Frank Muir, 1920 - 1998

Wires

A woman's dress should be like a barbed-wire fence: serving its purpose without obstructing the view.
- Sophia Loren

In my day a reporter who took an assignment was wholly on his own until he got back to the office, and even then he was little molested until his copy was turned in at the desk; today he tends to become only a homunculus at the end of a telephone wire, and the reduction of his observations to prose is commonly farmed out to literary castrati who never leave the office, and hence never feel the wind of the world in their faces or see anything with their own eyes.
- Henry Lewis Mencken, 1880 - 1956

[Edward R. Murrow] believed that ... there had to be a message to start with, that in the beginning was the Word. Otherwise, he said, "all you have is a lot of wires and lights in a box."
- Alexander Kendrick

We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.
- Henry David Thoreau, 1817 - 1862

With electricity we were wired into a new world, for electricity brought the radio, a "crystal set" and with enough ingenuity, one could tickle the crystal with a cat's whisker and pick up anything.
- Theodore H. White, 1915 - 1986

Utility is when you have one telephone, luxury is when you have two, opulence is when you have three - and paradise is when you have none.
- Doug Larson