The third and final Bush-Kerry debate is scheduled for next Wednesday at Arizona State University in Tempe.
Tem-pee? No.
Temp? No.
Tem-pay? No.
It's Tem-pee. Yes, it's odd. (I went to school in Tucson -- Too-sonn. Only the old-timers call it Too-sonn.)
Bonus point: Go ahead and call it a presidential debate if you're mentioning such a debate out of nowhere, or to distinguish it from the vice-presidential debate, but don't say President Bush and Sen. John F. Kerry did so-and-so in their presidential debate. Say campaign debate if debate alone makes you nervous -- it's a little redundant, but I suppose they could debate in a context other than the campaign. But to use presidential to elaborate on exactly what kind of debate Bush and Kerry might be having is to commit an impressively moronic combination of stating the obvious and saying nothing at all.
3 comments:
When I attended ASU, it took me a long time to be able to hear & pronounce the difference between Tem-pee and Tem-pee. Once, I even heard it pronounced Temp-a, as in the soybean food tempeh.
In a related matter, the following graf appeared in a Washington Post story that moved on the wire Monday night:
Both candidates are working Western battlegrounds ahead of the debate at the University of Arizona at Tempe. It appears that the error was caught on the Post’s national desk after the story went out on the wire, since a corrected version appears on the paper’s Web site. I’ll bet I can guess who made the catch.
Good guess, but I was off that night. I was, however, cc'd on a grateful note about a good catch from the writer to copy editor Doris Truong.
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