Whenever I go to The Strand, that huge bookstore whose canvas bag is carried by every other New York City girl, I run into a snooty employee.
Last year, I went there looking for a copy of Demian by Hermann Hesse. I found an attendant and asked, “Do you have any Hermann Hesse?” pronouncing Hesse in two syllables: Hess-uh. “You mean, Hesse?” she replied monosyllabically, eliding the “uh.” “Well, yeah. I guess,” I said. And she guided me to the Hesse.
I was pretty sure Hesse was German and pretty sure you say the “uh”: heffe, waffe, Deutsche. Back home I consulted Wikipedia, and indeed, the correct pronunciation in German is ˈhɛɐ̯man ˈhɛsə, complete with terminating schwa. It might be that in English, you drop the last syllable (I’ve heard luft-waff instead of luft-vaff-uh), but even if that’s true, was it necessary to correct my attempt at an original-language pronunciation, especially when there is no notable author named Hessuh?
I gave myself a year to cool off and returned to The Strand last week in search of a not-so-literary but still important book: the classic guide to software project management called Peopleware. At the info desk, I asked the attendant, “Do you have Peopleware?” “Peopleware,” he said. “What’s that?” I said, “It’s a classic book on software project management. He said, “The computer section is downstairs. It might be there. As for project management, I couldn’t tell you because I don’t know what that is.”
Really? You don’t know what project management is? Could you perhaps guess from the words project and management? What annoyed me, though, wasn’t the guy’s ignorance but the smugness with which he proclaimed it: his superfluous explanation that my area of interest had never registered in his brain and he didn’t care to parse it.
I expect some snootiness at a cool bookstore, like Spoonbill in Williamsburg or the Broadside in Northampton, but not at the big, boring Strand. They had better watch out or they might end up the victim of another Burke boycott.
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