NEW YORK- The daughter of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist who headed the Manhattan project that developed the first atomic bombs, released the minutes of a secret meeting conducted by her father’s team of nuclear pioneers in March of 1945 that decided how the word “nuclear” should be pronounced. The minutes reveal that the men decided the word should be pronounced exactly as President Bush pronounces it: "nu-kyi-ler."At that historic meeting, according to Velveeta Oppenheimer-Lugosi, the scientist's only surviving child, “General [Leslie R.] Groves wanted to pronounce it ‘knucklehead-ular’ but my father thought that was too difficult to say.” Instead, Oppenheimer came up with "the very pronunciation that President Bush has brought back into vogue."
Ms. Smith revealed that her father assigned bizarre pronunciations to practically every English word. “’Tree’ was pronounced ‘travelanzia’; ‘dog’ was ‘duo-oj-enis,' and so forth,” she said. “The fact is, my father was crazy. We rarely knew what he was talking about, much like President Bush.”
