Rav Schachter on Mispronouncing Garmi

I’m still catching up on Rav Schachter’s Gittin shiurim, after there was a delay uploading. This is from Gittin #69, about 4:40 seconds in. He is speaking about liability when doing damage via indirect action. There is full actual action, indirect action, called gerama, and something in between, called garmi. At least for those who maintain that garmi is not just a synonym for gerama.

He says:

… The gemara says gerama benezikin [sic] is patur. What if he’s mazik al yedei garmi? That’s the way people usually mispronounce it in the yeshivas — garmi. The encyclopedias and the fancy dictionaries, they say the correct pronunciation is gramei… If you say gramei, no one will know what you’re talking about! [Laughter in audience.] If you mispronounce it, everyone knows what it is, garmi. So garmi is somehow halfway in between adam hamazik beyadayim - if I take a hammer and I …

Note: In my transliteration above, “a” in garmi is a patach while “a” in gramei is a kametz.

Here is Jastrow with that pronunciation, specifically for דינא דגרמי:

Dicta’s Nakdan has either garmi or garmei — see bottom — but they don’t put the vowel under the resh.

Throughout the rest of the shiur, he continues to use garmi.

What Rav Schachter is essentially promoting is the use of Yeshivish Aramaic, rather than Academish. While it is a great thing to be precise and accurate in your pronunciation, the purpose of communication is to communicate, to convey information from one person to the next. The shared language is more important, because we are not trying to speak like grammarians, or even to speak like Rav Ashi, but to speak so that the people listening will best be able to hear and process.