I just thought I’d point out that church ownership is the subject of a fair amount of litigation these days. For example: As more conservative (read: whackjob) Anglicans determine to depart from the mothership Episcopal Church of the USA, they desire to take their parish buildings with them. For the most part, the ECUSA has been successful in litigating to keep parish assets with members who want to continue to be part of the ECUSA. (Similar issues have plagued the ELCA-Lutherans and the PCUSA-Presbyterians.) No doubt DM is aware of this, which is why he insists on having the ownership of the buildings transferred to whichever overall cultie entity is managing Idle Orgs these days.

That was my favorite part of the video. That and the recitation of towns including Paw Paw.

Examples: AU-to-mo-bile becomes au-to-MO-bile. GAL-ax-y becomes ga-LAX-y, and probably other examples.

If there is a pattern, the mispronunciations are likely rule driven. The rules could either be from Hubbard’s own idiolect (his own person version of English — English speakers generally have their own slight variations), or from some regional dialect he picked up.

The fact that he never seemed to self-correct that he was mispronouncing words like automobile and galaxy seems consistent with an under-educated person whose narcissism came to block his overcoming those deficits.

Lots of people mispronounce. In some ways it is not important, if the meaning is clear. For example, Jimmy Carter pronounced nuclear as “nuke-yuh-ler.” I think at least one of the Bush presidents did, too.

Nonetheless, Hubbard’s mispronunciations are at least very ironic, given his emphasis on dictionaries and learning words.

I saw this first time it came out on Channel 4 in the UK…. for me, the funniest bit was how they managed to translate thousands of hours of auditing etc that make you a scientologist into being hit on the back of the head with a shovel. Whilst this was a personal favourite they did about 6 of them that were equally funny… Angelina Jolie, Simon Cowell, Elton John and Spice Girls.