My wife mentioned that her friend, who has worked in an ice cream parlor, pronounces the cold treat as “sher-bet”, just as it is spelled… My wife was dumbfounded, as she’d only ever heard it pronounced as “sher-bert” - and that’s the only way I’ve ever heard it said, too. My wife grew up in Western Kentucky, I grew up in Da Bronx, and her friend is from Cincinnati.
The dictionary shows “sher-bet” as the normal pronounciation, and “sher-bert” as an acceptable variation.
The extent of my idiocy: I never really paid attention to the fact that there’s only one “R” in Sherbet. Sure-Bert is obviously wrong, and I’m going to make an attempt to remove it from my vocabulary.
Somebody explained to me that “shur-bert” and “shur-bet” and “sore-bay” were all three different but somewhat similar frozen deserts, which made me think the whole thing (I mean all those deserts, not the pronunciation question) was just stupid. Why can’t there just be “ice cream” and “some other kind of trick ice cream that has fruit but no cream (or whatever their deal is)”? That way, we could at least understand what we were eating, and the one with the completely unworkable name would goddam disappear.