On a scale of one to basketball: Can we stop calling them Woj Bombs?

It’s summer here in the NBA area of reality. That means there are no basketball games. There are no highlights. There are no moments of timeout footage to pore over as if a couple minutes of distress are explicitly able to define a player’s legacy.

While there is a lovely amount of quality basketball content to read at any given time, from both this site and at least two others, the only things new that happen are the scattershot breaking stories that arrive without warning like those squirrels that lived in the walls of the house you rented in college.

Well, there’s no one more closely tied to breaking news in the NBA world than one Adrian Wojnarowski. You could be having a pleasant Thursday afternoon in August and then bang, something like this happens:

Incredible content all around, I’m sure we all agree. On the internet of basketball, this is lovingly referred to as a Woj Bomb. This is wrong. Let me explain.

In the English language, there are very few instances of the sound [ʒ]. The term for this sound is a voiced postalveolar fricative. What’s cool is that you may not know that you already know what that is, but you do. Picture it as the sound of the second ‘g’ in “garage” or the ‘s’ in “Asia.”

I’ll show you what I mean. Pick some words. In fact, pick a bunch of them. If you need some ideas, look at the ones I’ve included in this article free of charge. Now say these words out loud with your mouth hole. Odds are that the [ʒ] sound isn’t coming up much. Maybe not a single time. That’s how it is in the case of the word “bomb,” and that makes that word real stupid and bad.

So when I say “there are very few instances” of this sound, what I mean to say is that it’s incredibly rare. In fact, it is the most rare sound in the English language. I’ve made a helpful chart here to show you that rareness in picture form.

Look how helpful that was.

That graph is every sound made in every word in the English language tallied and ranked in order of frequency. All your favorite sounds are there. The ‘z’ in “zoological?” That’s in there! The ‘f’ in “fraction?” That’s in there too! It’s one of the top-five f’s according to most people I’ve talked to about this exact sort of thing.

Now, when I say “every word,” it’s worth noting that accounting for all words understood everywhere is a literal impossibility. However, this a fairly representative sample. All this data was compiled from the Carnegie Mellon Pronunciation Dictionary which contains a total of 133,854 words, names, and proper nouns in the English language. Each word was broken down into individual pronounceable parts. Those parts are called phonemes, which is a cool word itself. You should learn it and use it, so you can impress your friends.

So in all those tens of thousands of words, the [ʒ] sounds only showed up 563 times. That’s about once in every 234 words. Compare that to [ə] which shows up 70097 times. That guy shows up more often than every other sound. You may recognize [ə] as the ‘e’ sound in “the” or the ‘a’ sound in “a.” Here are their frequency bars next to each other for the sake of spatial representation:

Here are their bars next to each other if they were depicted as skyscrapers.

Whoa. Very impactful, I think. Haunting.

Now let’s look at the word “Wojnarowski.” There are all sorts of letters and noises coming out of it. There’s a ‘w,’ which is nice. And there’s an ‘owski’ which is one of my favorite ways to end a last name.

However, the letter I most want to focus on is the ‘j.’ The pig says “oink,” and the cow says “moo,” but the ‘j’ says a lot of different things. I’ve heard people pronounce “Wojnarowski” a lot of different ways.

That’s the trick about Polish surnames; they’re difficult. For example, at various points in my life my last name has been pronounced each of the following ways:

• ruh – TOW – ski
• ruh – KOW – ski
• roo – TOW – ski
• roo – KOE – ski

And many more. That ‘t’ and that ‘k’ next to each other trips people up for some reason. It shouldn’t. It’s just three words one after another. Rut. Cow. Ski. That’s it. Boom.

I’d like to think, given my experience with one, that I could be considered somewhat of an expert on Polish surnames. I’d like to think that if I told you that Wojnarowski does or could have a [ʒ] in it that you’d say, “okay, Matt. Let’s go with that.” But let’s say that’s not the case.

My mom is a lovely human being. She too is very Polish. She loves her family, is a dedicated grade school teacher, and is a better cook than she gives herself credit for. And, as it happens, she also has the maiden name of “Wojnar.” This means she’s had decades of experience and fun with that same ‘j.’

How does she pronounce it?

That’s a clear [ʒ]. “Correct” her at your own peril.

I like when things are different. I like when things are new. When something happens that has never happened before, I get excited. The heart flutters, and the face goes all happy. I don’t think I’m alone in that.

We, as a community of people who enjoy basketball and discuss that on the internet, have a chance to do something unique within the English language. I’ve done the research, and it’s right in front of us.

There are three instances within the Carnegie Mellon Pronunciation Dictionary of a word having two [ʒ] sounds in it:

• Zhengzhou
• Zsa-Zsa
• Zsazsa

The first is a place name in China. The next two are separate but redundant entries for a name most recognized when it’s attached to the Hungarian-American actress and socialite Zsa Zsa Gabor. In all three, the existence of the double [ʒ] is within a proper noun.

Proper nouns barely count for anything. I could have a kid and name the thing whatever I want, and you’d have to go along with it. If it founded a city down the line and named the place after them, then what is the world to do? Nothing, really. So disregard those bullets. They don’t matter.

Are you ready?

Consider the following:

Wojsplosion.

Yeah.

Wojsplosion.

We could be saying that instead.

Wojsplosion.

Boom.

Wojsplosion.

If you’ve not been saying it out loud yet, you should. Take your time. Really let yourself feel the vibration of your vocal cords. It’s probably the first time in your life you’ve let your noise-making throat-mouth apparatus stay in that formation for that extended period of time. It feels unnatural, but it shouldn’t. That’s the power of the consecutive [ʒ]s. It’s incredible. It’s freedom.

This is the world we could be living in. It makes me physically ill to think that we’ve been referring to Wojnarowski’s tweets as “Woj Bombs” when the term “Wojsplosion” has been right there this whole time. It’s been a missed opportunity for the English language to include a word, to include a latent, identifiable concept with two [ʒ] sounds (because again, proper nouns don’t count).

Why continue? Why not just fix this right now? I can’t think of a reason not to. To be honest, I see no reason for you to be reading this sentence when you could be on Twitter telling the rest of the world that Woj Bombs no longer exist and Wojsplosions are here to stay.

And if somehow you’re reading this sentence, I assume you’re either out to hurt yourself or hurt me, and that’s simply not cool.

The end.