My wife is Jewish. One day when she was very little, she and her mother were walking around the neighborhood and saw a Christmas wreath hanging somewhere. Having previously read the word in a book where it was spelled a lot like the word “breath,” she asked her mother why they didn’t have a “wreth” in their home.
In our household we now and forever pronounce it “wreth” on purpose because of how much I love that story.
I wonder how this works for logographic systems like Chinese, where the letter tells you nothing about the sound (though tbf English spelling is so bad that it’s almost at that level too).
I studied Malayalam (the language of Kerala state in southern India) and the script was fucking awesome. It’s purely syllabic and it’s impossible to pronounce a written word wrong - you just sound out the syllables and you’ve got it. Everything else about the language was impossibly alien to me as a native English speaker (like you can’t just say yes or no, you can only negate or affirm other words), but at least the script was easy.
I respect when people misuse meme formats that they’ve only had a verbal description of.
Suff-ice.
:(
How’s it actually pronounced???
It’s pronounced suff-ice, but I always said suff-is before I learned.
Clicking the audio button on the Merriam-Webster dictionary’s page for “suffice” has it say suff + ice
Or… or you read it in the 3 word title of a meme. Doesn’t matter, learned word.
Words go brrrr.
Also dialects are a thing. The way a lot of words come out of my mouth has been culturally labeled as ignorant. I go out of my way to change my pronunciations at work so I get taken seriously, but I’ve been doing it less now that I’m accepted in that world. Maybe that caps how much farther I can go, but maybe I don’t want to go further if it means continuing to act like people who sound like how I sound are less than
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See holler, tow-up.
I was pronouncing “Byrne” like “buy-er-nie” until I saw someone who had that last name pronounce it like “burn”. The way I was pronouncing it was as if I was excitedly saying “bye Ernie” 😂
Don’t count on last names for that stuff.
You’ll find duboise or dubois pronounced dubose which is horrifically wrong.
Brett fucking Favre (fav ray) who pronounces it farv.
I’d say favruh fast but damn this one kills me.
For me it’s the word: ruffians
I still slip up and say roff-ians
An-tea-queues
And rather ironically:
Kway instead of Queue --8th grade substitute teacher caught me on that one while reading aloud.
Ha - and yet “quay” can be pronounced as “kway”, or “kay” or “key” - and mean the same thing - depending on context. Mostly if it’s part of a name, and who named it.
Also sometimes it’s spelled “key” instead.
I have noticed a lot of (youtube) people are keenly aware of their faults. Admitting you have a thing to try improve up on, is an triple up that I can unfortunately only give as 1/3 of a triple agree. If you know you are butchering grammar/spelling, giving a pre-warning is only going to make it funny.
Anyone remember the Eyjafjallajökull outbreak in Iceland?
OK, so then I’m proud of the fact that I thought Hermione from the Harry Potter books was pronounced HER-me-own.
So how is it pronounced?
Her - my - un - ee
Her my ohnee
I pronounced it the same way, until whichever book has that scene with Viktor Krum pronouncing it wrong and being corrected. I believe the story goes that Rowling included that scene because there were so many of us doing it.
That’s how we pronounce it in Spain! Actually the H has no sound, so she’s just “er-me-on”
This happened to me… The word was hyperbole. I said it as hyper bowl ee.
The kicker is I’ve heard the word hyperbole before, pronounced correctly, and never knew what it meant, nor how it was spelled.
So I spoke to someone who was a bit more linguistically inclined, both verbally and written (hes also older than me by a few years, and more “into” art and culture)… And he said “you mean hyperbole?” And everything finally clicked. At the time I was embarrassed because I knew both the written and pronounced versions of it, but never put them together, so I felt like it was something I should have been able to figure out on my own and didn’t.
Now? If someone made the same correction to something similar, I’d be like. Ohhhhhh. That makes more sense. Thanks! Instead, I basically exited the situation to go die in private from embarrassment.
I should not have been embarrassed.
I love learning new things.
Mine is sidereal… I always said side real. Then, I learned it was (roughly) Sid air heal.
Though I did use to say Copernicus as copper knickers too.
English is a garbage language anyway tbh you say words the way you like ‼️
Mine was Ganymede. I read so much scifi but didn’t really ever see any scifi shows referencing the planet, and it never came up in conversation. I thought it was supposed to be pronounced gani-mee-dee, as if it was a Greek philosopher.
I’m kinda the same here, except worse. I’m stuck saying Hyper-Bowl, and the “proper” pronunciation breakes down as hyperbally in my head. Sounding like an adverb trips me up so much, I just refuse to use the word now.
I had an English teacher correct me on that, except I said hyperbola which is a math concept and is pronounced hyper bowl a.
