How Do You Say Hoechst?

There’s a street in Nashville, Tennessee called “Demonbreun”.  It’s a sure-fire way to tell tourist from local.  Anyone can bust out a “y’all”, but utter “Demon-brewin’” and your cover is blown.  Oh, and there will be laughter.

In science, there are a number of words that, if horribly mispronounced, can make us look like a hack and of course, will elicit laughter.  In many situations, a word’s pronunciation may be more stylistic – like you say “toe-may-toe”, I say “toe-mah-toe.”  This is not one of those situations.  This word has an answer.  After sitting through hundreds of seminars and group meetings and still not understanding how the word was actually supposed to be pronounced, I figured it’s time to get the answer.

I didn’t want the video to explicitly make fun of anyone for not knowing how to say “Hoechst”, so we dug into the Halloween box to protect the innocent… Although we probably could have used a hair and makeup team to really polish them off right, the “unknown actors” turned in rock solid performances.

During shooting this video, we could have made a second video, called “How do you spell Hoechst” since the first two signs I handed Sven were both misspelled… Although I did nail “Hookst” on the first try… I’m not implying anything, but maybe it wouldn’t kill a manufacturer or two to try marketing a new nuclear stain called “Hookst” or “Hukst”…