Tuesday, September 8, 2020

"A" as in "Keynes"

Remember Herman Cain? Following the Tulsa campaign rally, death by covid. Human sacrifice at the altar of President Donald J. Trump.
Anyway, "Cain". Put an "s" on the end of it and say it. That's how you say the name "Keynes". You can hear it at Oxford Learner's Dictionaries, and you can see it in their phonetic spellings of "Maynard" and "Keynes" where, for both words, the vowel sound in the first syllable has the same spelling. Sounds like Maynard and Kaynes.
You can read it in an article from Time magazine, 31 December 1965:

"... Keynes (pronounced canes) ..."
Say it with me now: Cains... canes... Keynes.

In Silent Witness season 1 episode 2 (from 1996) there is mention of a town in England, Milton Keynes, pronounced "Milton Keens". That's probably the correct pronunciation of the town's name. And it could be a source of the mispronunciation of the name of John Maynard Keynes.
Mispronunciation? At Khan Academy, Keynes has been pronounced Keens. (I thought I wrote about this, but I can't find it. Nor can I find the text at Khan Academy where that pronunciation was given. It's all video now, Khan.)
I find in the first 17 seconds of the Keynesian Economics video at Khan Academy a correction:
In the transcript, the two spellings are identical. But in the audio you hear "I often mispronounce him as Keens" for the one, and you hear "but it's John Maynard KAYNES" for the other. The speaker makes the correct pronunciation twice as loud as everything else. It's quite obviously a correction of what Khan had done before.
To beat this dead horse once again, consider Risks of Keynesian thinking, which is identified in Khan's sidebar as the follow-up to the Keynesian Economics video noted above.
21 seconds in, the word "Keynesian" is pronounced with no more than a tiny hint of the "A" sound in that first vowel. Then, 25 seconds in, the same word is pronounced with a pure "E" sound. The speaker stops mid-word and adjusts the vowel, but he obviously can't help himself: As he says in the earlier video, "I often mispronounce him as Keens".

But I have to forgive him all that, because he does make the correction and he does want us to know the correct pronunciation.
And note that the spelling is KEYnes even though the pronunciation is KAYnes.

From a google search:


From Wiktionary:

Etymology

From an earlier "Middleton Caynes" when the village was in the manor of the "de Cahaines" family.[1]
And, golly, the footnote reads:
As seen in a legal record of the 15th century: National Archives; Plea Roll, court of Common Pleas; CP 40 / 0717, for 1440; third entry, first line.
From 50 reasons to love Milton Keynes (what, only 50?)
Milton Keynes was originally envisaged as a London overspill zone, following the recommendations of governmental studies in 1964 and 1965 to build “a new city” incorporating existing towns such as Bletchley, Stony Stratford and Wolverton.
And this:
Unfortunately, it’s not true that Milton Keynes was named after two great, if ideologically opposed, economists. Nor is it true that the other name considered in 1967 for the city was John Maynard Friedman. However, the village of Milton Keynes – from which the 50-year-old city gets its name – was once Middletone, and owned by a Norman family named de Cahaines, from whom Keynes may have descended.
The article, written in 2017, puts the founding of the 50-year-old city at 1967. By the 1970s John Maynard Keynes was disliked and disrespected by many economists, and by the end of that decade Keynesian economics was generally rejected. It wouldn't surprise me if the man's name was mispronounced on purpose. (A teacher back in my college days pointed out that mispronouncing someone's name is a way to show disrespect. He was an interesting guy, that teacher, but finesse in showing disrespect was not one of his better qualities.)
 Mispronounced on purpose, just as the word Federal used to be capitalized but it no longer is because people no longer hold our government in such high esteem. Or so I once read.
From the Daily Mail, 9 Feb 2020:
Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made an awkward blunder when she mixed-up two economists while addressing the benefits of a four-day work week in a video shared on Instagram. The 30-year-old was asked by one of her followers to discuss the benefits of a shorter work week when she misspoke and referred to 'Milton Keynes'. Ocasio-Cortez later said she had confused a British economist, John Maynard Keynes, with Milton Friedman, who won the 1976 Nobel Prize.
At Fodor's, under Origin of town name Milton Keynes, Andrew asks:
To settle a debate we are having at work does anyone know how the town Milton Keynes got its name - was it something to do with economists Milton Friedman and John Maynard Keynes?
Jen replies:
Sorry, no economists. When the New Town was being planned in the late 60s, it absorbed a variety of villages and hamlets, and the name derives from the smallest of the lot.
DavidBaily adds:
There's a little more to the name: going back a few hundred years the village was named Middleton and the dominant family was the Cahaines and the two names became corrupted to become Milton Keynes
Sorry, AOC, no economists. Milton Keynes is a town in England.
Oh! And watch your pronunciation.

3 comments:

Jerry said...

This is the kind of quality, age-of-enlightenment content that I come to this blog to see.
(Jake liked your 8/20 article's title, by the way. "Grandpa is actually kind of funny!")

The Arthurian said...

Good thing you weren't looking for economics, Jerry. There ain't much there!

In fact this petty topic has been on my mind for a long time. The mispronunciation at Khan Academy is something I came across at least three years ago -- and it brought to mind the pronunciation given in the Time magazine article from 1965. But it was "he said, she said" and I didn't have a tie-breaker or, better, any actual facts to run with.

Also I came across the town name "Milton Keynes" a good while back. I thought that if it wasn't related to the two economists, it had to be one hell of a coincidence.

Then, not long ago, I found the Daily Mail story about Alexandria Whatsername and "Milton Keynes" and for me it was like a birthday present! I first heard of AOC from some MMT supporters on my old blog, when she (AOC) was talking shit about how great some of the MMT ideas are.

Keynes and Friedman are two of the most significant economists since Adam Smith, and if AOC knows so little that she could mix them up, well, she doesn't know much. But that probably didn't bother the MMT guys at all.

Then just the other day in a TV show I heard some guy say "Milton Keens", referring to the town in England. I figured that had to be the standard pronunciation of the town's name. So I called that thought a fact, and started writing.

It was my good luck that at Khan they had corrected their pronunciation of the economist's name, and that I found it when I needed it. So that's that.

RE: Jake's comment --
I was happy with that title, too. I guess there are two of us now who think I'm "kind of funny"!

The Arthurian said...

See also:
Are we all Milton Keynesians now?

It is by James Pethokoukis, to date the only one by him that I found interesting. Funny, even.