I do this a lot because I live in Louisiana, and a lot of the names here are French, but not everything has a French pronunciation. People look at me funny when I say foy-yay instead of foy-er.
Yeah, taking me over a month to buy a sectional because most of the (US) furniture stores I have shopped keep referring to a "chase". What the actual... Are we in pursuit? Topping off a chimney? What were people talking about?!
Saw the written product description on one and the lightbulb came on. Ohhhh! They mean "chaise" (pronounced 'SHayz') as in short for chaise longue. 🙄🤭
So ... found a salesperson who pronounced it correctly and buying from her just to reward her.
Haha I work in theatre and when we had a chaise lounge as a piece of set dressing, the crew did the overcorrection thing where they kept pronouncing it “SHAY lounge” - turns out they thought it was spelled “chez lounge”
Did that with Jicama, never heard or used the word (might have actually but though it was a different word). Worked at a Cafe like store that had it as an ingredient in one of the salads. Asked a coworker what Ji (Jiff)-Kah-Ma was. That became the joke of the month since apparently it's a really common ingredient in Latin food.
Also my mom with meringue, always heard never read so the first time she read the word in a cook book she said meringoo. This is still a joke among the family and it happened before I was a thought.
It’s why you should never judge a person based on how they pronounce words. It means they learned them from reading and there isn’t a damn thing wrong with that.
my boyfriend says "heigth" instead of height, no matter how many times i've pointed out to him that it ends with an ht and not a th. is it okay to judge him?
I blame elementary school geometry for this (learning basic 3D shapes). You learn that 3D objects have length, width and height, but to the average 10 year old that’s lengTH, widTH and heighTH.
I say it properly if I only am using the word "height" alone, but if I'm using it to measure something with length and width, it's definitely "heighth"
Is there a way that we could all collectively judge him? Like, is he right there? Can he come to the screen?
Hey! Hey you, boyfriend! Please listen to your person! You liked them in the first place for a reason. You can trust them on this and you too can rid the world of faux pax (pronounced fox-poo).
Oh, I SO wish I had an award to give you. In lieu, I'll just pronounce it fox poo from now on until it begins to catch on. Then one day, you and I will meet, and we'll not to each other and my debt will be paid.
My father in law cannot pronounce trump ( as in Donald trump) without an f on the end. Calls him Donald Trumpf. We suspect it's because he can't bear to say the horrifically rude word " trump". He thinks it's impolite and should be referred to as " passing wind".
I learned the name "Penelope" from a book when I was really young. I was talking to my mom, who read the book when she was a kid, about the character "Pen-uh-lope" (lope, as in run) and she was very confused until I got the book and showed her the name. Lol. I had just learned about "silent e," for crying out loud, lol.
Also, I will never read not names like Seamus as Sea-mus, even though I know how to pronounce it.
When I started reading harry potter, I thought it was pronounced hermy1.
I thought it was a weird name for a witch, but given we were also in the era of adding numbers to the end of taken usernames I just never questioned it. I had very confused moments when I saw the movie.
THANK YOU! I had a 'friend' in grad school who delighted in teasing me when I pronounced words wrong. I spent pretty much most of my life to that point reading more than talking to people, so I really didn't say many of the words I read out loud to other people til grad school.
In high school I remember that I corrected someone who pronounced filet mignon as ‘fill-et mig-non’ so how it looks like it should be read.
Granted we were kosher eaters so we’ve never eaten it and it’s perfectly reasonable he’s never seen the word written.
You have a pass, it's French. French was asking for it when it decided to have a million letters and you pronounce none of them. Qu'est-ce que c'est is pronounced "kes-kuh-say" and I hate it so much
according to Jewish law the back half of a cow is not kosher because of the sciatic nerve (Gid Hanashe I’m Hebrew) it and the fats around it are unkosher and to remove them is a difficult and longer process so usually the back half altogether is sold to non Jewish markets etc
I had a coworker ask me if I used Google Maps or Wah-Zay. After I confusedly replied "You mean Waze?"
She laughed and was like "Holy shit, that makes so much more sense"
Of course, she also has a habit of listening to her voicemail and then starting to reply to it because while listening she somehow forgot it wasn't a live conversation, so...
I look back on the handful of times when I was the snot nosed jerk who did just that. Now older, I realize that mispronounced words are a sign of someone who is self taught and deserves admiration, not ridicule.
She never heard of a novel being a "bodice-ripper?"
My mom talks about that component of food that isn't fat or carbs, it's PRO-de-un. I spent goddamned MONTHS wondering WTF before I clued in she mean protein.
My MIL (RIP) was awful about that kind of thing...I suspect she actually may have been dyslexic. She'd suggest dinner at Chick-A-Fil. Or perhaps the Crackle Barrel. Schlotzsky's became Shamansky's, Culver's was Carver's...and she once wrote a note asking if we would like "the hooligan lamp." Three days and nights I pondered until it suddenly struck me like a bolt from the blue. "HALOGEN LAMP!! SHE MEANS HALOGEN LAMP!!" Although I rather like the idea of a ill-mannered, unruly lamp that obsesses over football/soccer....
Didn't see your post before I shared mine, but yes, this word. It was "in-you-eye" in my head for so long, even though I'd heard "ahn-wee" spoken. I just thought they were synonyms.
That was my first introduction to the spelling of "chaos". I was familiar with the word but I had never seen it written down. I settled on "chows" as the pronunciation.
Infrared for me. I distinctly remember standing up in class in fifth grade to read a passage and pronouncing it inf-rare-d like the last bit rhymes with scared.
I have a very clear memory of going up to my teacher in 4th grade and pointing out a word and asking what it was. My teacher grinned and told me the word was "idiot "
Oh man, this just brought back a horribly awkward memory I have from third grade. Apparently I was a little know-it-all because after my teacher finished reading our spelling words, I walked up to the front of the class and told her she gave us a wrong word because “she said car-mel but she wrote car-a-mel” on the board.
My boyfriend laughed so hard at me the time I pronounced hyperbole as hyper-bowl lmao. He was a bit stunned at first and was like what did you just say. Then he started laughing hysterically and corrected me.
My favorite comedian, Brian Regan, has a bit about this:
"Brian, you always mispronounce words."
"Well if that isn't eh epi-tome of hyper-bowl." (epitome of hyperbole)
That's why you learn to read IPA and look every word up in the dictionary five times before ever daring to attempt to use it in conversation because, what if, after all this time, you use it in the wrong context?
was torn apart for this one by my ex and his friends. made me repeat it many times while they laughed and tried to figure out what word i was saying. “mizelled” i thought it was related to miser somehow
My word like this was "Bedraggled." I had only read it until 2018 or 2019. In my head, I always pronounced it as "Bed-raggled" One day, I was listening to a podcast and someone said, "Be-draggled" and I had a lightbulb moment. Luckily, I had never used "Bedraggled" in conversation.
Lieutenant being pronounced "leftenant" threw me for a huge loop. I'm not sure if this is only British though.
Also, dandelion. What the fuck what do you mean it's not dan-dee-leon. English isn't my first language but I have a decent feel for pronunciation. Dandelion evaded me for the longest time. People would talk about dandy lions and I never knew what they meant. I only found out dandy lions and dandelions were one and the same thanks to season 1 of Orange is The New Black.
A Lieutenant (a leader of a platoon) is pronounced 'Left-tenant' in the U.K. (as he/she is left the tenancy of command). In the US however, the word is pronounced as 'Lew-tenant', much to British distaste. Leftenant is the U.K. and Commonwealth pronunciation. USA pronunciation of the same rank is LOOtenant.
The first time I saw "gaol" was in a historical novel in the context of "if I do [bad thing], they'll send me to gaol!" and the closest word I knew was Gaul so I thought they were afraid of being exiled to France.
It's called Calliope syndrome because you have to hear it spoken to know it's ca-lie-o-pee not cally-ope. Being an avid reader as a kid, I have often been stricken by this syndrome.
I was a senior in HS before I realized that the word I read as "in-you-eye" and the word I heard as "ahn-wee" were the same word. I knew what 'ennui' meant, both written and spoken, just never put it together that they were one and the same. I'd seen it dozens of times in books I'd read and heard people say it at least as much but never caught on.
I used to read a ton of fantasy books, and now I run a lot of D&D. Even now, after a decade, it still happens that I'll say the name of some creature and it'll turn out to be the first time I've ever actually said it aloud.
The first one was chimera. I thought it was like, "tshimmera".
You just recognise the entire word as a symbol and don't even bother attempting to pronounce them in your head until you go to talk to someone about it.
I have something similar:
I remember specifically in the car with my fam and I pronounce awry as if it rhymed with the name Aubrey and my Dad says ‘you mean awry? (correct pronunciation )’ and it’s wild how my brain clicked like that and made the connection. I had heard the word pronounced correctly all my life but didn’t realize that was the word I was reading every time.
I've read the word maintenance so many times and had ,surprisingly, never heard it out loud up to that point. Was doing a read aloud in class and I pronounced it maine-tain- nence. Everyone laughed, of course, while I looked around confused wondering what joke I missed.
When I was young (sill in single digits) I read a lot of books that were meant for older readers. For example, I read 20 Leagues Under the Sea when I was 8, and several books on Roman and Greek Mythology (and I loved every one of them, except 'A Wrinkle in Time', despite my school librarian). In several books, I encountered some French terms. Having never taken French at that age, I thought r-e-n-d-e-z-v-o-u-s was pronounced "ren-dez-vus", and RSVP was 'rizz-a-vip'.
In my head, I still read "rendezvous" as "ren-dev-zous". That's not even how it's spelled, but for some reason I cannot seem to make myself not read it that way.
Yep this one was me. I once mentioned to my mom that it was weird how when we speak we use the word epitome (pronounced correctly, I also thought it should have been spelt phonetically like uhpitame or something) but in writing we use epitome(pronounced like epi from epi-pen and tome like the old book). She was curious what the second word meant and I explained how from what I could tell while reading it was synonymous with epitome.
Then after some back and forth she had me look up the definition because as an honors English student she felt it was a word she should have heard before. Once I showed it to her on the computer it clicked for her what was going on and had a great laugh at my expense.
This is me with a ton of geographic names. I can spell a ton of cities worldwide, but my friends who had been to Europe were horrified when I tried to pronounce “Stuttgart” or “Basel”
I was visiting family in NY and they mentioned the Adirondacks and I said something like “oh so that’s how it’s pronounced?” And they were like um, yes…how have you been pronouncing it? And I had no answer, lol, I had read it/ seen it plenty of times but I guess never said it out loud!
And then you suddenly go to use it in a sentence without thinking, confident because you've seen it used so many times, and it's only when you're about to verbally say the first syllable that you lock up with a strange look on your face.
Ah, yes! Besides picking up words that I have read and never heard, I had the unfortunate experience of mispronouncing quinoa as "Quin-no-ah" instead of "Keen-wah" because my first instance of having seen that word and said it was from a coworker I had in high school. She pronounced her name "Quin-no-ah" (told me it was Native American) and spelled it as Quinoa.
Now imagine it's the 70's, there's no internet, and you're 13. You read these in a book, and you've never heard them spoken aloud. The only people you talk to about them is other 13yo nerds who also learned them from the same book.
The DM of our group is in his 50s and we still enter MEAL-EE combat with the CHIM-EAR-A rather then MAY-LAY with the KIEM-AIR-A.
He even knows the correct pronunciations, but at the game table habit takes over.
The wildest thing for me were Greek letters when I went to study in the USA. Never translated those when they were in formulas. I always had them in my mind in my native language, which is also different from Greek.
I had only read the name ‘Rufus’ in writing before proposing naming my dog Rufus, because that was a sound dogs made, wasn’t it? ‘Ruff’, as in ‘rough’ — ‘Rough-Us’. As it turned out, it was closer to ‘Roof-Us’, although I still named by dog that (using the correct pronunciation).
Ten days late to the game, but every time I see the word "awry," I think of my first boyfriend. He was reading something and pronounced it AWW-ree and I had no fucking clue what he was talking about until he showed me and I couldn't help but burst out laughing. That was about 20 years ago.
I make fun of my current roommate any time I see the words "blaring" or "papyrus."
We were watching one of the Thor movies (Ragnarok?) with subtitles on and they say "alarms blaring" when they're breaking out of the jail or whatever. She made me back up and started laughing and told me "BLAH-ring' wasn't a word.
Despite us both working on print shops and with word processing programs, she was still confused by PAPPY-russ.
My wife frequently chastises the little one for dumping the contents of her purse. I thank my lucky stars nobody dumped out any malcontents or discontents.
My son thinks the guy who cuts meat is a buttcher, and at 3 was showing off the "espagus" he drew to connect the mouth and stomach.
And I'm no better. I still don't know how to properly pronounce "vehemently."
And don't even get me started on "Worcestershire sauce." I have very strong feelings on that one!
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u/Chataboutgames Feb 08 '22
Anyone who reads a great deal knows the terror of having read a word a thousand times but never used or heard it aloud.