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Who is George?

> However; some of you keep referring to "George" and how he speaks
> these names.  Forgive my ignorance as I do not mean to utter some sort
> of sacrilege, but who is "GEORGE".

Oh, my ... I guess I haven't been posting enough lately. 

You know that guy in the Wizard of Oz who was behind the curtain and
had all the Ozians fooled into thinking he was some kind of major
diety?  That's me except I do it behind the veil of the Internet :-)

I've been around since 1990 and have been the major proponent of high
tech planted tanks patterned after the Dupla (German) school of thought. 
Check out the Krib on the WWW for multitudes of megabytes of my
blather.  Photos included. 

Now, defending my pronounciations ...

That video tape was made in Feb. 1992 and the only source of verbal
plant names at that time was the owner of the fish store in Ft.
Collins.  She would pronounce C. wendtii as "when-diddy-eye".  Even I
recognized that there were a few extra syllables there :-)

Since then, I met a guy (Paul Martin) in the Colorado Aquarium Society
in Denver who was very adept at plant names.  So adept I usually
didn't catch the name he was saying until he pointed out the spelling.
Later, Keith Rogers visited me and he is quite an accomplished
botanist and pronouncer.  So now I know:

hydrocotle = hydro-COT-i-lee  not hydro-COTtle

aponogeton = apono-GUI-ton (gui as in guillotine) not apono-GEE-ton

cryptocoryne - crypto-COR-ine (long i) not crypto-COR-eene
                 (or is that backwards?)

.. and a couple of others. 

Of course, friends in Germany call me Gui-org and friends in Sweden 
call me Yorch and friends in Mexico call me Whore-hey, so as long as
communication has occured, it doesn't matter a whole lot how it
sounds, eh?  
 
BTW, the video tape that was mentioned is a 90 minute "tour" of our
tanks as of Feb. 1992 and was made for the rec.aquaria group.  It was
distributed essentially free of charge to about 50 people on a round
robin basis.  Since about half of the people who signed up were
complete dolts and did not forward the tape in a timely manner, it
took almost 9 months for 6 tapes to be forwarded to an average of 8
people each (the famous Richard Sexton was the worst offender!).  I'll
never do that again.  However, if anyone is interested, I'll sell you
a copy for $15 (includes shipping). E-mail me for details. 

George