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Did Jay Mariotti Plagiarize the 'Chair?
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by Dan Lewis
In his column today on ArmchairGM fave Kosuke Fukudome, Jay Mariotti tells us how to pronounce the Japanese star's name:
- All together now: "ko-SUE-kay ... foo-koo-DOUGH-may"
That looked immediately familiar to me. Why? Well, because yesterday, Al from Bleed Cubbie Blue asked me how to pronounce it, given that I've become an accidental expert on the guy. I replied back with an I-don't-know, and gave him my best guess. I also added that guess to the Kosuke Fukudome page here, and it says "ko-SUE-kay foo-koo-DOUGH-may". If that looks similar -- heck, identically except for the ellipses, there's a reason. It is. And a quick Google search suggests heavily that no one else has used that pronunciation.
So what? It's, as our page says, is how the name is often pronounced.
The problem is that my pronunciation is basically made up. It's highly unlikely that anyone else concocted it the same way, for the following reasons:
- My pronunciation is, "grammatically," awful. It should be "koh-SOO-kay foo-koo-DOH-may", for consistency's sake.
- I've heard many pronunciations, including "koh-skay" and, for his last name, emphasis placed on koo, doh, and may. In fact, Al ended up using "koh-skay" even after he asked me, suggesting that our page may be wrong. I'm trying to get an answer on that from some experts.
- I added the pronunciation to the page early yesterday. Since then, the Sun-Times -- Mariotti's own newspaper! -- has had a link on the front of its sports page to our page.
So, there you have it: pretty damning proof that Mariotti failed to cite his sources, even when his newspaper was linking to us anyway. We're a wiki, here, Jay, and we're reliable, but you should cite your sources -- especially in case we're off by a bit.
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Look, I think that my pronunciation of Fukudome's name is right, but I'm not 100% sure. "Often pronounced" is accurate, but that doesn't mean that we're pronouncing it right, you know? It's like Chone Figgins -- I guarantee that, until you were told otherwise, you pronounced it phonetically.
The problem here is that Mariotti almost certainly got the pronunciation from us, and gave us no credit.