Annoying NPR Trait; No. 14 of 38: Listening to Sunday's Weekend Edition and there was a report by the ubiquitous and, per NPR's mission statement, oddly-accented, Sylvia Poggioli [Note: despite her not quite-Italian-but-what-the-hell-is-it accent, as her own bio admits, she was born in the good old-U-S-of-A -- Providence, RI to be exact (and to be clear, while put-upon accents are bad enough, at least she doesn't suffer from one of the various speech impediments that seem to afflict about 1/5 of the staff at NPR)]. I don't even remember the story at the moment, but she was quoting from various European newspapers about the subject. First up, what Sylvi-dahling called (if memory serves me) the "Viennese Daily" which I believe she meant the "Wiener Zeitung" which translates into "Viennese Newspaper". I could be wrong -- the exact paper is not important to my point, what follows is:

Then she prattles on for a while in her up-and-down accent, coming to her next paper, which I cannot recall here because...yes, she said it in Italian -- her "native" tongue (to my ear, it sounded like approximately 27 syllables thrown together into one, maybe two words).

See, I got two beefs: 1) She didn't dare try the awkward germanic title of the Viennese newspaper, but [it's my suspicion that] 2) she picked an Italian newspaper as her second source, just so she could show how good her Italian is.

Too good for the Adolphs of the world Sylvia? And you're telling me you couldn't find a perfectly decent article in the Des Moines Register [pronounced "dess moynes"] regarding the fall of the Euro or how strikes by railway workers in Kosovo save lives? Bahhhh.