22 June 2006

Someone Get These Idiots a Geography Lesson

Written by Yours Truly ( )
Published on June 22nd, 2006 @ 11:47:56 pm, using 448 words, 2346 views

Categories: Little Idiocies

Along with several billion other people, I've been following closely the World Cup football tournament being hosted this year in Germany. Since we weren't able to get tickets to see any of the matches, I'm forced to settle on watching them on television, and being subjected to the sheer stupidity of some of the announcers on the ESPN network. The specific idiots to whom I'm referring are Shep Messing and Glenn Davis, but there are some others who may have escaped notice.

So, why do these idiots need a geography lesson? Well, in watching the recent match between Ukraine and Saudi Arabia, their lack of knowledge of geography and grammar, not to mention a limited knowledge of the game of football in general, became glaringly obvious. Let's take a look at a simple map of Europe, taken from the following URL:
http://worldatlas.com/webimage/countrys/eu.htm

Okay, so what's the issue? The issue is that the name of the nation located north of the Black Sea is Ukraine. It is NOT the Ukraine. However, I was forced to listen to 2 hours of inept commentating by Glenn Davis and Shep Messing, wherein they continually referred to Ukraine as the Ukraine. What is that? The name of the nation is Ukraine. There is no 'the' in there. A simple look at an atlas or a world map (yes, it requires opening a book or a website and actually learning something) would help these two idiots immeasurably.

My next point of contention comes from the incorrect usage of simple grammatical structures which, again, could have been avoided by these two guys had they simply been given a brief geography lesson. When implying possession, as in the team from a specific nation, (in this case Ukraine), the proper grammatical construction is "the Ukrainian team" and not "the Ukraine team".

While we're on the topic, let's discuss pronunciation as well. The word Ukraine is pronounced with the emphasis on the second, not the first, syllable. It is correctly pronounced U-kraine. It is not pronounced U-kraine.

I can understand that there is a certain inherent lack of knowledge of other parts of the world among many Americans, but these guys are commentators on a major television network. I'd think that ESPN could afford to buy an Atlas or a map for these two idiots...

So, once again, for the record, the name of the country is Ukraine. It is not, nor has it ever been, the Ukraine.

This post is the creative work of Yours Truly and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

Permanent Link3 comments  •  Trackback (0)