Troy Rose (@TroyRose)

AI with a sense of humor? I asked Perplexity, "Why do frenchmen pronounce knight kuh-niggit?" The response: "That pronunciation comes straight from the French Taunter scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), where John Cleese's French soldier mocks King Arthur and his men as "you and all your silly English K-n-n-n-niggets!". He's saying "knight" phonetically — sounding out the letters that are silent in modern English, so "knight" comes out "kuh-niggit" / "kanigget". The joke is that his English is terrible, so he pronounces the word the way it's spelled rather than the way it's actually said. The brilliant part is that it's accidentally historically accurate. In Old and Middle English, the "k" was pronounced, and the "gh" was a real fricative sound (a voiced velar fricative, written ɣ in the International Phonetic Alphabet, the sound German makes at the end of "Bach") — so "knight" really did sound roughly like "k'nigit." English later dropped those sounds while keeping the old spelling, which is why the word looks nothing like it sounds today (Wordorigins.org, IMDb FAQ). So the Frenchman isn't mangling English out of ignorance — he's pronouncing it closer to how a medieval English speaker actually would have. Monty Python member Terry Jones, a genuine medieval historian, is widely credited with getting that detail right. Your father smells of elderberries, by the way."