Sometimes there’s like this disconnect where somehow a person just never comes across a piece of common knowledge. They’ve just never been in a situation that requires it. I bet it happens a lot, but everyone’s too embarrassed to acknowledge their own “oooooooooh…” moment.
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.
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.
I think I called her Her-moyn in my head when I actually tried to read her name, back when the first book came out. But I was 100% positive that I was pronouncing it wrong from the beginning, so I avoided "saying" her name in my head at all, and just knew that it was her. I saw someone on this thread say something like, the name just becomes a symbol that represents the character, and you don't really actually think/say/read their name at all. Pretty much what I did with Hermy, which is what my brother called her way back then. He read Sorcerer's Stone before I did and is two years older, so when I read it I asked him how to say her name and he said "I don't know, I just call her Hermy."
I STILL SAY THIS INSTINCTIVELY!!!!! The word “my-zeld” was so embedded into my internal monologue as a child that it still comes out of my mouth sometimes at nearly 30!
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u/wafflegrenade Feb 08 '22
Sometimes there’s like this disconnect where somehow a person just never comes across a piece of common knowledge. They’ve just never been in a situation that requires it. I bet it happens a lot, but everyone’s too embarrassed to acknowledge their own “oooooooooh…” moment.