Up until recently, I thought that the US national park was pronounced “yo-semite”, as if it was some sort of ghetto-slang used for greeting a Jewish person.
Wait how do you phonetically say this?
Yo - seh - mit - ee
are you Donald Trump by chance
Ahahhahhahahaaha that’s actually amazing
There was an '80s cop show called Hill Street Blues that had a recurring latino character named Jesus. All I heard as a kid was “Hey, Zeus” so I thought his actual name was Zeus and everybody just said “hey” to him when addressing him.
I love this so much!
You’re not alone, brother.
I thought Yosemite Sam had pretty much taught all English speakers the correct pronunciation. I remember my parents saying their Swedish relatives pronounced it “Yohsmeet.”
I have no idea who that is.
EDIT: Oh, that guy. And now I know his name.
Non-native English speaker, young, or both?
The former. Noggie, to be precise. Plus I didn’t watch a whole lot of Bugs Bunny growing up either.
Wassa “Noggie”?
Norwegian
Thank you! Going to call my Brother In-Law that now…
I say it that way sometimes for fun. I live nearish so sometimes, when visitors hear me say if, they ask if that’s how it’s actually pronounced
That’s amazing
Yo sa mite for Yosemite is my worst one.
My sister and I did this intentionally to be funny as kids. We took my son there last year and he did the same thing without hearing the story. Pretty funny for me.
Suff-ice.
:(
How’s it actually pronounced???
Clicking the audio button on the Merriam-Webster dictionary’s page for “suffice” has it say suff + ice
It’s pronounced suff-ice, but I always said suff-is before I learned.
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.
See holler, tow-up.
Hysteresis got me.
For me it’s the word: ruffians
I still slip up and say roff-ians
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
That’s how we pronounce it in Spain! Actually the H has no sound, so she’s just “er-me-on”
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.
…or from my word-a-day calendar.
My parents had a dictionary of foreign words and I didn’t always use them correctly
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.
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.
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.
English is a garbage language anyway tbh you say words the way you like ‼️
I had an English teacher correct me on that, except I said hyperbola which is a math concept and is pronounced hyper bowl a.
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.
As a homeschooled kid with a big vocabulary I was largely not able to pronounce (more reading than talking), this is a sentiment I wish I’d heard earlier in life.
I’m sorry. I hate that the stereotype that stuck for homeschool kids wasn’t that they’re often very well read and advanced, because that has been my experience encountering them over the years.
In fairness, that stereotype is largely due to capital H Homeschooled kids like me. as in, the subculture as opposed to simply the method of schooling at home.
If you meet someone who was in the subculture, you need to navigate through a few levels of weird damage before our vocabulary is even close to the most notable thing about us.
Opposite for me. Homeschooled kids are weird and dumb generally. I’m sorry I’m weird too. May be my geography because I’m in a super conservative area. The people here who decide to do homeschooling are typically conspiracy theory rednecks.
As a kid I used to pronounce amoeba as “a-MO-ba” instead of “a-MEE-ba”.
I only pronounced that right the first time because I saw it spelt with a œ, which I misread as æ, like encyclopædia. So three cheers for “right for the wrong reason”.
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.
This was me as a 7 year-old, reading The Hobbit and LotR. 33 years, and many rereads later, I still pronounce Gollum as golem and Smaug as smog.
“[…] I still pronounce […] Smaug as smog.”
Wait, what? I can’t remember when it was pronounced in the movies and I also (mentally) pronounce it as ‘Smog.’ It has never come up in IRL conversation so I don’t know how it’s actually pronounced.
Does anyone have a clip/timestamp on a video to show how it’s actually pronounced? It’s been a long time since I’ve seen the movies.
It’s /smawg/, it should sort of feel like the name doesn’t fit me your mouth properly, English phonotactics doesn’t allow for gliding from W to G without a vowel in between.
I keep pronouncing “sweat” like “sweet”, even though people keeps correcting me about it because my stupid brain is stuck with the wrong pronunciation
It doesn’t help that it’s a meme to swap them out. Lol
