Pronouncing "Chutzpah"

Katty Kaye was holding the anchor for today's 3 PM (Pacific Time) broadcast of the BBC News that I regularly watch courtesy of KQED World. I am not sure whether or not she writes her own copy, but the text she was reading decided to describe Ayman al-Zawahiri's offer to answer questions from individuals, organizations and journalists an act of chutzpah. However, before I get to the question of whether or not this constituted an appropriate use of the word, there was a not-so-small matter of her mangled (to such a degree that I do not think I can reproduce it with phonetic spelling) pronunciation. It certainly would not surprise me to learn that the BBC standard of "received pronunciation" does not extend beyond the boundaries of English, let alone into Yiddish, which is not the national language of any country. Nevertheless, Ms. Kaye is currently stationed in the United States; and she would have had to be living an awfully sheltered life not to have heard the word uttered many times in the popular media over here. It is one thing for our President to mispronounce unfamiliar words, but this may be a case where even he is more familiar with uttering this word than Ms. Kaye is!

As far as usage is concerned, regular readers know that I have done a bit of research to make sure that each week's award is true to the term in both denotation and connotation. In that respect I am not sure I can quibble with invoking the term in its strictest sense; but the strictest sense of Leo Rosten's definition (which I have taken as my standard) does not really capture the extent to which chutzpah constitutes a basis for humor or ridicule. Zawahiri's act was certainly about as brazen (to invoke one of the terms in the Rosten definition) as they come; but I would still liken it more to the hubris of the Greeks, in the spirit, say, of Ulysses taunting the blinded Cyclops. After all, Ulysses' brazen act practically led to the destruction of his ship: The Cyclops was blind, but he could still hurl boulders in the direction from which he heard the taunts. Zawahiri is all but inviting intelligence agencies (not to mention any unaligned hackers who are motivated by nothing more than a good challenge) to turn his invitation into an opportunity to use the Internet to figure out just where he is hiding. Like Ulysses, he is all but inviting his enemies to hurl boulders at him; and that is far more hubris (about which, presumably, any BBC news reader is well educated) than chutzpah!

Needless to say, my vanity would like to believe that Ms. Kaye decided to invoke the term because this was the day I put out the weekly Chutzpah award. However, it is hard for the realist in me to believe that anything I have bothered to write would ever get noticed by the BBC! Nevertheless, I feel it is important to defend words against improper usage; and I would hold to the proposition that Stephen Johnson is still more deserving of this week's award than Zawahiri is!