How do you pronounce "elitists?"

The thing we found most amusing over the fallout from the recent legislative hearings on global warming was the tempest in a teapot over the pronunciation of the title of one of the witnesses.

Christopher Monckton, a subject of the queen, is a viscount. Larry Dale Keeling, the petulant child of a Herald-Leader columnist in an upper-middle-aged man's body, recently devoted far too many column inches into correcting the pronunciation of Monckton's degree of nobility.

We at K-Pac are all well-educated and well-read, and we never knew that you don't prounounce the "s" in "viscount" or that it has a long "I" and not a short "I." Truth be told, we've never had reason to know that and never had reason to use the British title or to call anyone "My Lord."

But we shouldn't be surprised that liberals like Keeling know all about it. After all, they are the elitists of this state. And just as British nobility is a birthright for some, Democrats believe that control of this state and its government is their birthright.

(For the record, we believe the earth is getting warmer. The last few miserable summers and mild winters are evidence of that. However, we don't believe that global warming is irreversible or that the situation is reaching crisis stage. And we certainly don't want to see people losing jobs and Kentucky's economy, fragile as it is in our coal-producing counties, go into the tank because of Al Gore and his merry band of alarmists.)