There’s much to come in 2023 in entertainment and Chicago, in people and politics — and also here’s the correct way to pronounce ‘mayoral’

I have never made a New Year’s resolution, but I have spent many fruitful hours during the first days of a new year revisiting the past year. In doing so, I have been able to discover things I had missed, or others that I had simply forgotten.

That’s life, but revisiting a previous year by way of reading what my colleagues in the newspaper business have to say is not at all a bad way to greet the new one. Their chosen favorites from 2022 give me plenty of items to begin to fill my reading, listening and watching lists in 2023. Naturally, I also reread some of what I wrote during 2022, mostly as a way to remind myself of past delights and disasters.

I reread what I had written about Joe Winston’s years-in-the-making documentary “Punch 9 for Harold Washington.”

As I wrote when it premiered on local movie screens in the fall, “There have been, in the city’s long and politically colorful history, 56 mayors, drawn to the job for various reasons, venal and admirable. Few of them, I would argue, were as fascinating or important as Harold Washington.”

The film is not yet available for streaming but should be later this year. In the meantime, entertainment of a similar sort comes your way almost immediately, as an election looms.

Many people are running to take a seat in the City Council, which is composed of 50 men and women who, with varying degrees of intelligence, power and effectiveness, form the legislative body of Chicago. They meet at least once every month to debate and vote on all manner of things important to the way the city operates. On a more intimate level, they also oversee the needs, concerns and complaints of the 55,000 people, on average, who live in their respective wards.

In 2022 I did write about one of the people running, Sam Royko, the son of columnist Mike Royko. He’s running for Alderman of the 1st Ward and I noted how his late father held aldermen in low esteem, once writing, “I wouldn’t call any alderman a loudmouth because it wouldn’t be accurate. Most of them have prudently learned to talk in a whisper. A whisper is harder for a listening device to pick up.”

Election Day is Feb. 28 though, if no mayoral (or aldermanic) candidate receives a majority of votes, which seems likely at this time according to various polls and pundits, a runoff election will be held on April 4.

What can we expect?

I am not in the prediction business but will tell you that I expect to be bombarded with commercials and examples of television’s power not only to affect our lives but to change the way we talk.

Listen closely to the television and radio anchors and reporters in the coming days and weeks. I can guarantee that the word “mayoral” will be uttered thousands of times and consistently mispronounced by the majority of those uttering it, those we are taught to trust.

The correct pronunciation emphasizes the first syllable: “MAY-or-al.” But with a few proud exceptions — the late John Callaway of WTTW Channel 11 and currently Mike Flannery of Fox 32 News — everybody on the tube and the air emphasizes the second syllable: “May-OR-al.”

Many elections ago, I was told by Jessica Williams, then an assistant professor of linguistics at the University of Illinois at Chicago and now professor emerita there: “It is simply wrong. It’s not an uncommon speech pattern to shift emphasis when a word changes from noun to adjective. But I think (this pronunciation) has stuck because it is perceived as sounding more prestigious, and has a classier ring. Of course it bothers me. I don’t like to hear a word pronounced the wrong way.”

But hear it we will and perhaps few more than my colleague Nina Metz, who watches more television than most people. She recently gave us a fine 2022 Top Ten list, in which she wrote, “More than 500 scripted shows came out over the past 12 months. Yes, we critics may watch more TV than the average person. But there’s no way we’re getting a look at the majority of what’s out there. That’s just the reality.”

Of her top shows, I have watched two of them: “The Bear,” about the “sweaty, cacophonous kitchen dynamics of a Mr. Beef-esque Chicago sandwich shop … an unexpectedly rich and affectionate portrayal in this darkly comedic drama”; and “Interview with the Vampire,” about some bloodthirsty characters in what Metz calls a series “vibrantly written, tonally self-assured and unexpectedly funny. Yes, funny.”

The rest of her list will be new to me, as will much that happens in 2023. There will be happiness and there will be sadness. I know this because each of my newspapering years, and there have been plenty of those, has been peppered with death since I am often charged with writing obituaries. There was a recent story that captured some of the people and places that departed last year.

But that list did not include such people as Jim Schwall, the co-founder of the great Siegel-Schwall Band and about whom Corky Siegel said, “He could do pretty much anything he wanted to do. He was a master of the guitar, an artist, an incredible photographer. He was a poet and a great songwriter. He was also a humanist. A great man.” Or Susan Nussbaum, a talented actor, writer and passionate disability activist.

The past year has a lot to digest — best to just move ahead to the uncertainty, joys and sorrows of 2023 — but do know that Susan Nussbaum’s father, the great actor Mike Nussbaum, turned 99 on Dec. 29, 2022.

rkogan@chicagotribune.com