How's That Chee - Lay Mon?

Don't you find it annoying when you hear some gringo say 'Chill-lay', when they mean that long, skinny country on the west coast of South America?  I do.

I mean, back in the good old days everyone pronounced Chile just like that homographic kidney bean, onion, tomato and chile powdered stew, long simmered, often with ground or chunky beef, that you ate hot on a cold winter day and were glad to have it.  Or in the summer with a cold beer at a chile cook off.

Then the Politically Correct decided we were offending the Chileans with our crude, gringo mis-pronunciation of their fatherland's name, and instead of saying 'Chill-ee' anymore, they were going to say 'Chill-lay'.

The dunces!  If they were going to fix the vowels, why leave the other one broken?  Too difficult to get them both right? Only a third world country so why bother?  Maybe if Chile were a second world country, they'd have tried harder. What IS a second world country, anyway?

Meanwhile, the Politically Correct have invented a bastard child with their 'Chill-Lay' pronunciation and go on and on with it, like that Democracy Now presenter I listened to this morning on radio station KPFK while driving over to Barney's Beanery for a breakfast chile dog and a cold beer.

We may as well all go back to pronouncing it 'Chill-ee' as in the good old days; at least it's uniformly ignorant of the way Spanish pronounces the vowels.

Hey!  Maybe this 'Chill-lay' thang is just the old melting pot of America, still half melted, like the cheddar you sometimes find in your bowl of chile!

That noble, ancient concept of this, the promised land of freedom and opportunity, where every possible nationality and ethnicity comes together to form that more perfect union of self sufficiency, rugged individualism, blending the best of all thoughts and strengths into one giant, simmering stew of spicy goodness and democracy to force down the throats, uhh, I mean share with the world.  Whether they like it or not.

Naaah.