Nailing the ‘trajectory’ of an assignment
It’s possible to live a long time without having to say the word “trajectory.”
But, since we’re here, try saying it a few times quickly. Not easy, is it?
Trajectory is a munchy word, needing teeth and jaw and tongue to produce. I learned this recently while completing an assignment that had me saying the word, over and over again.
I recorded the voice-over narration for a project about robotics. Because of coronavirus precautions, the work kept me out of the audio booth and sent me into the quiet of my car, where I recorded the tracks through a microphone plugged into my iPhone.
Not ideal, but surprisingly effective.
The problem was not the quality of the sound, it was my inability to say that word.
In robotics, trajectory is the planned path the robot will take. It’s easy to imagine the science and math required to set that up – and it’s a good thing I didn’t have to write that script. But even reading the script was so fraught with stumbles, trips and flubs – speaking of yucky words – I found myself doing take after take after take to get a clean read.
We hear often about words that sound unpleasant – moist comes to mind and ointment is pretty bad, too. And since we’re on the subject, unguent. But yuck as they may be, each of those words is easily pronounced.
Far fewer are the English words that are not unpleasant but are difficult to say, words like squirrel and qualm. Oh, and isthmus which, like trajectory, is not commonly required in everyday conversation.
And that leads me, oddly, to the show “Gilmore Girls,” which in all its breezy small-town goodness caused some irritation over the name of the main character. Rory is hard to pronounce, not because it is munchy, but because those r’s are way too close to each other to roll out easily. That same complication puts the word rural on those hard-to-pronounce lists. Roar isn’t much fun, either.
My challenge in that Subaru audio booth was to get a clean read on a few paragraphs of copy that included trajectory. The first pass was so choppy I turned off the microphone and practiced: “tra-JECK-tory. TRAY-jeck-tory. Jeck, Jeck, Jeck, Jeck. Tra-la-la-la.”
I sounded like the tree of birds over the driveway.
There were two pages of copy. Each one took me at least eight tries to get right, and the only thing standing between me and getting out of that hot car was that one word. The longest paragraph was the worst. I would get all the way through it with no stumbles and then get to the last sentence, whose last word was that one.
Trajectory.
And back to the beginning I would go.
Weren’t there more easily pronounced synonyms? Like path, route, orbit. Or something really basic, like way. I’m no scientist, so who was I to call for script revisions?
While recording the narration track and trying to get it right, I said trajectory at least 30 times – more times in those two hours than I’d said in the entire decades before. Those four syllables just don’t belong together. Try saying it 30 times – it would take a robot to get that right.