Tuesday, May 15, 2012

It's Spelled "Expensive"

Matt and I have been having this discussion as to how to pronounce the word "Leica," as in the camera and optics manufacturer.  At one time, I thought it was pronounced "lisa," but have pronounced it "like-a" for the past couple of years after hearing a bigwhig photographer pronounce it that way in a podcast.

Matt, on the other hand, claims that he had an uncle or a cousin or somebody who actually worked for the company and pronounced it "lay-ka."  So who's right?  Some imaginary uncle/cousin or a big name photographer that I think I remember seeing on some podcast at some time or other?

Since Matt is a habitual liar and not to be believed on such matters, I decided to take matters into my own hands and find out by going to the most trusted source on the internet- Wikipedia.  No help there.  So then I searched some photography forums, where there were crazy pronunciations that I had never even imagined and that would be hard for even a German to pronounce correctly.

So then I got an idea.

I went to leica.com and found their main office support number and called it.  Genius!  And within two seconds, I had the answer.

It's pronounced "Like-a," just as I had claimed.  I called Matt to gloat and he distracted me by talking about other things before our conversation went down a rabbit hole of discussing Peter Gabriel and Genesis albums.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Yep, it's like-a. I work in the semiconduntor industry. Although the metrics are now on the nano scale (28nm where I work) there are still a few dinosaur Leica scopes in the FAB. And if you think camera lenses are expensive, the scopes when we purchased them about 10 years ago were about a million bucks a pop.