because it's perfectly legitimate for me to say valenTIMEs, but you cannot

I was watching a cooking show this afternoon, taking a break from my massive homework/study pile, and watched two guys (one tall and portly, one skinny and short and jumpy) make souffles. It was all about souffles for this episode: cheesy souffles, mini souffles, dessert souffles. It really was fairly unremarkable, especially considering I have no interest in cooking anything more difficult than boiled water these days, except that while they were mixing up some sort of mocha chip souffle, they got me.

"Now, for an extra shot of flavor, we're going to gently fold in some expresso liqueur."

Ohhhhhh. Now, I totally understand if the average person off of the street calls it "expresso", like it was some sort of speedy coffee. And maybe it's a better name for it than espresso, since after you drink it, life can feel like it's moving faster and you get all jittery and energized and jump around. But a chef on a cooking show, even a somewhat obscure cooking show, calling it EXpresso? Unforgivable. I felt all the hairs on my arms stand on end in indignation. You don't spell it with an x, so you don't pronounce it with an x.

And yes, all this comes from the girl who totally defended her right to say "valenTIMEs", who asks for bologna by the name "baloney", and who is frequently known to address her father as "dyad" (though that's less of a mispronunciation and more of a speech therapy defect on my part). But most of the time, my anal diction training personality rears its head and wants to staple things to peoples' heads when they say things like "irregardless" and "nucular" and "aks".

There are greater injustices in the world: genocide in Darfur, sex trafficking, the war in Iraq, even the 10 or so new varieties of penicillin I am probably growing in my kitchen sink as I type this. And though I may wholeheartedly try, I cannot ban every expresso-talkin' person from Starbucks stores or put a hold on, ahem, VALENTINE'S day until everyone says February and not "Febyooary". It would be hypocrisy on my part to proclaim that my mispronunciations are acceptable and yours are not. Especially since I would probably have a legion of French and Italian citizens on my butt for all the ways I've probably butchered their languages whenever I sang anything not English.

But if the world could be rid of the word "expresso"... sigh.