I was heating up some Chicken Parmesan for lunch, and as always I thought, “Chicken Par-MEEE-zhun” as that is how we pronounced it in my youth, and it occurred to me that the mis-pronunciation of Italian food names might be a way to highlight my heroine’s adjustment to her new environment. I’d been trying to think of slang she wouldn’t know but pronunciation’s less jarring.
And then various characters weighed in on pronunciation and that was a whole scene, and then one of the ladies made a snide remark about oil workers and that was another scene.
And then it wrote it down on the refrigerator whiteboard and it all stopped, damn it. Do real writers just have these episodes all the time?