Can you hear me now? "Big" and "Small" Economics

I went to college with a guy, M, who was homeschooled and had nearly perfect elocution.  Bizarrely perfect, in fact, since he came from Winchester, Kentucky.  To be precise M didn't have elocution, he had diction--his voice was distinctive and every word was measured.  He also spoke, as Peter Egan would say, as though he was holding a pencil clenched in his back teeth.

One day he was describing the next course in his Business degree.  I swore he said, "Mmmmkro".

Being the insufferable know-it-all that I was/am, I knew it had to be 'macroeconomics' or 'microeconomics'.  I probed on, "Uh...M, did you mean 'Macro' or 'Micro'".  He repeated, this time with more urgency, "MMMM-kro".  He might've shoved a schwa sound in there; I don't know.  In any case, I still couldn't discern his target economics class.

This went on for some minutes, with increasing levels of M's consternation and increasing emphasis from me on my Eastern Kentucky Accent ("Do yuh mean MEYE - Cro, or MAC - ro, M?!") until finally we found a common ground:

"I'm taking the big economics, Harold."

"Oh, MAC-ro, then."

"That's what I said."

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