Some months ago, I was listening to MPR. I think it was Radiolab, but I can’t remember. It was one of those wonderful Saturday afternoon shows, and Radiolab seems like the show on MPR’s Saturday afternoon lineup that would talk about this sort of thing.
In short, I hadn’t heard of pho until I listened to this story in Radiolab. (I know. Shameful, considering Minneapolis doesn’t have a shortage of such a thing, especially considering the offerings we have on Eat Street alone.) And it wasn’t until my friend Amy took me to a restaurant called Pho 79 on that very street where I fell in love with pho. I think it was mid-January during a really long cold spell.
For those who don’t know, pho is a Vietnamese soup of broth, some kind of meat (I usually prefer these beef ball things), and rice noodles. Once it arrives at the table in a really quite large bowl that makes you think they brought enough for two, they usually provide bean sprouts and Thai basil and a lime or two for you to add, and then it’s also traditional to add some fish sauce and chili sauce, mix it all up, eat it with chop sticks and those deep ceramic spoons that you can sip from.
The word “soup,” though, doesn’t quite do it justice, as soup suggests something that’s kind of boring that’s made in three hours (including the simmer time). The broth of pho uses beef bones and oxtails that have been simmering for hours and hours, though. (No really… for hours and hours. I’ve seen suggestions for restaurant quality broth to simmer the broth for twelve hours or more.)
It’s a wonderfully delightful dish, pho, and I highly recommend eating it in the winter months when it’s very, very cold outside. It just seems like the most perfect thing to warm up to on a weekday evening after a long day. Really, it is. It’s fantastic.
Something that irks me, however, is that no one in this country seems to know how to pronounce it. (Well, no one in Minnesota, anyway. I’m not sure about elsewhere, as I haven’t had the chance to listen to other people on the outside pronounce pho.) Just tonight I was at Chino Latino in Uptown (that gold, glittering place on Hennepin and Lake), and I wanted a virgin drink, as I’ve been drinking way too much lately and my mind hasn’t been working properly very well. There was a drink that caught my eye called Auntie’s Pho. I asked the server what it was, as there wasn’t a description, and she had to look at what I was pointing to because she didn’t understand my pronouncing pho correctly.
“Oh! Aunti’e Pho is just like Uncle’s Pho,” she said, pointing out the uncle version on the menu, “except that it doesn’t have the alcohol.”
Needless to say, she pronounced pho incorrectly. I wanted to try to slip in a few extra phos (“Oh! It’s like the Uncle’s Pho except without alcohol! Cool!” / “Yes, the Uncle’s Pho.” / “OK. I’ll try the Auntie’s Pho, then.” “The Auntie’s Pho?” “Yes, the Auntie’s Pho.” “Are you sure you want the Auntie’s Pho and not the Uncle’s Pho?” / “Yes, I’ll have the Auntie’s Pho and not the Uncle’s Pho.” / “OK. So one Auntie’s Pho.” / “Yes. One Auntie’s Pho.” / “Auntie’s Pho, did you say?” / “Yes. Duh! I said Auntie’s Pho!” / “OK. One Auntie’s Pho.”) in order to passively and annoyingly try to get her to pronounce pho correctly (or, at least, get her to talk to her coworkers after and say something like, “So this guy was pronouncing pho wrong, and I didn’t know what he was talking about,” in the hopes that someone would respond and say, “Actually, he was pronouncing it correctly,” and then hopefully get more people to pronounce pho correctly), but I didn’t quite work up the nerve to pronounce it correctly a couple more times.
But, seriously. Whenever anyone pronounces pho incorrectly, my left eye squints ever so slightly, and my head jerks about 17 millimeters to the left while remaining on the transverse plane.
I think I have such a reaction because when I listened to that story on Radiolab some months back, they pronounced pho correctly (thus adding to the stereotype that public media is the more sophisticated media) so I heard it pronounced correctly the first time (granted, they did talk about the common mispronunciation later on), whereas I heard bruschetta pronounced incorrectly the first time, and so I don’t have quite the same dramatic reaction towards bruschetta being pronounced incorrectly than I do when people pronounce pho incorrectly.
(By the way, it’s pronounced pho, an assonance of fun and lung, not pho, an assonance of known or bone.)
(If you didn’t know how to pronounce it until now, maybe re-read everything up to here so that things might be a bit more funny. Or maybe they won’t. Maybe things will just be a bit more annoying.)
But, of course, the humanist in me must accept that language is living, and it’s thanks to the inherent malleability of the English language that we have so many more words than, say, French.
Still, we sound like idiots when we pronounce pho as if it rhymes with Margaret Cho.