You’re hearing what you want to hear, and believing what you want to believe. This is the Florida Ballot Fiasco all over again. Trying to divine the intent of the person. Those sounds could just as easily be guttural groans from the stress of running, as they could be words, and to put a man’s life on the line because of it, is shameful, and it’s a national disgrace to see this going on.
Maybe someone else further on in the thread has already said this (I haven’t read through to the end, yet): You have to understand that CNN’s “enhancing” of the audio for “clarity” can alter what you think you hear. “punks” is more a sort of “soft-explosive start”, lower frequency word. The alleged slur starts off sharper (more transient / more high frequency energy) and is higher in pitch anyway. “oo” vs. “uh”. So, what does CNN’s audio guy do? He selectively punches up certain portions of the upper midrange. And, you have to keep in mind that over a cell phone (I assume) and the phone system, considerable alteration of the frequency spectrum (and other things) has already happened. The human brain actually does an incredible job of reconstructing lost information when listening to standard telephone or cell phone audio, but how often when the phone audio is a little bad, or the person on the other end is stressed or just talks a little differently than you are familiar with, do you end up guessing what they’ve said or have to ask them to repeat it?
But even at that, BEFORE I got to the part where the CNN audio guy says he punched up the “clarity” range, I listened to the initially altered CNN version (with their repeats) about 30 times with high quality headphones: It sounds more like “punks” to me. The initial sound of a hard “c” just isn’t really there. And if I back down 2 kHz and 4 kHz a bit, or listen to the undoctored audio, it is even less there.
CNN then goes on to do further alteration, and that gets into even trickier psychoacoustics.* It’s very easy when doing such alterations to make changes in the direction of “what you think you hear” (or, I suppose, want to hear). I’ve done this myself, years past, trying to eq. rock recordings to make out the lyrics better. Occaisionally, I fooled myself.
To me, exactly which of the two words was used is not really the issue. Zimmerman WAS clearly stressed and upset: If he had said “that S.O.B.!” (in full words, with emphasis on the last) I would not assume he hated or even disliked most women. But, he might or might not murder one. All the evidence must be considered. Rick Santorum seems to have forgotten that.
*As an aside, in the old days of cassette tapes, “everyone knew” that a $100 cassette recorder could only degrade the audio of a high quality source, when recording that source. Yet, any good salesman knew how to cheat on the settings of such a recorder such that almost any but a very perceptive and well trained ear thought the playback from that cheap cassette deck was better than the original. As I said, psychoacoustics can be very deceiving stuff...
>> You’re hearing what you want to hear,
Objectivity, evidence, and due process is obviously not a priority during campaign season.