"Richard Feynman, [Murray] Gell-Mann's chief competitor for the title of the World's Smartest Man but a stranger to pretension, once encountered Gell-Mann in the hall outside their offices at Caltech and asked him where he had been on a recent trip; 'Moon-TRAY-ALGH!' Gell-Mann responded in a French accent so thick that he sounded as if he were strangling. Feynman - who, like Gell-Mann, was born in New York City - had no idea what he was talking about. 'Don't you think,' he asked Gell-Mann, when at length he had ascertained that Gell-Mann was saying 'Montreal,' 'that the purpose of language is communication?'"
A fine anecdote - Gell-Mann was of course communicating not only that he had been to Montreal, but also that it was a French name, that he new the [approximate] pronunciation and that he anticipated Feynman to be equal learne\d.
