How do you pronounce “Prusik?”
In the Army, they taught me to say it prew-sick. It was pronounced this way in several schools including Air Assault and Rappel Master where you get tested heavily on knots.
Post ETS, a classmate in my WFR class looked at me cross eyed when I said prew-sick and said that she thought it was supposed to be pronounced pruh-sick.
Whatever. Time marches on. In the civilian world, I now mostly hear pruh-sick.
So I’m bored and I finally decide to Google it. Hung jury. I see some dictionary references that pronounce it pruh-sick and I’ve clicked on other websites that have an audio track that pronounce it prew-sick.
So I make a decision to pronounce it however Karl Prusik would pronounce it. Well that doesn’t help much either. Turns out that Prusik is a Polish name but that Karl Prusik was an Austrian of Czech decent.
Dammit! We can’t even get brits and yankees to agree on how to pronounce aluminum, now I have to figure out if Karl Prusik pronounced his last name as it would be pronounced in Poland or if he put a German spin on it? I’ve heard a couple variations of my first name. Most I’ve met pronounce it Ee-en but I do meet the occasional Eye-an. My world is beginning to crumble.
Fine. I’ll go with the Polish version then. Anyone here speak Polish?


