THE POSTHUMOUS JOKER

Right. This is about words and pronunciations, so yes, feel free to skip over it. Though it does start with Batman...

... kind of.

This morning I watched a clip of Heath Ledger playing the Joker in the film, The Dark Knight. You might know that he won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for that role in 2009... and perhaps rightly so; he was great.

But he was also dead. The award was presented, as they say, ‘posthumously’.

Posthumous. How do you say that word? I’m asking because the narrator in the clip said:

Poast hyoomus

... and I spluttered, “What?” over my breakfast porridge.

That surely can’t be how you say that word? Post (as in lamppost), hyoo (as in Hugh Laurie) and mus (as in... well mus, I suppose). Post humous?

Porridge.

I scratched my head for a while, looking puzzled. Perhaps I’d only ever seen that word written down? Perhaps I’d been hearing it wrong in my head, just like I’d read ‘Por-taker-bin’ instead of ‘portakabin’ when I was eight, but surely it’s not that obscure, posthumous! I must have actually heard it somewhere!

I have been pronouncing it:

Poss thyoo mus

... Syllable stress on the poss, digraph ‘TH’ as it is in bath, and myth, and yes, Heath (the joker) Ledger... I never thought of splitting it out into post humous! That just seems mad.

I know what you’re thinking: it’s an American thing - you guys say stuff differently to us Brits, and that’s just the way it is: a matter of regional interpretation. Well fair enough, though I do have thoughts on US English, for another day...

So I did what any twenty-first century indignant would do, and looked it up. I went to dictionary.com and I went to the Cambridge dictionary site, and then I checked it with Merriam Webster.

And. Here’s what I found:

/ˈpɒstjʊməs/ = posstyuhmus

So I was half right, and so was the narrator who’d made me splurge porridge oats on my laptop. Both right, both wrong. No TH but no American ‘post’ (rhymes with toast) either, and certainly not split into two words so that you stress the humous bit!

Admittedly (and thankfully) it’s not a word I need everyday. At least next time I know how to say it. And listen out for it! Who knows, maybe I’m not alone in mispronouncing posthumous. What do you do?

Though, thinking about it, I wouldn’t correct anyone in person. But perhaps that’s how these things perpetuate? Politeness lets them lurk in the shadows of our vocabulary? 

Well, sometimes Batman has to let the Joker get on with it.