I used to pronounce segue as if it rhymed with league.
That was another one of mine. I didn’t connect the written word with the pronunciation. But I knew what it meant.
Sometimes I’ll remember when whatshername in Showgirls mispronounced “Versace” (ver saysss) or Kathy Bates in Misery mispronounced “Dom Perignon,” sounding it out as you’d say it in English.
For many many years I saw the term “chimera” and never heard it pronounced, so I said “shimmera” in my head.
This one didn’t originate in my mind but after seeing the Simpsons episode about the mayor’s nephew, every time I see the word:
Chowder
I hear in my head “show-dair… show-dair? It’s Chow-da! Say it right!”
My mom used to jokingly pronounce “vegetables” as veg-ET-ibbles".
When I see the word ‘posthumous’ I have to stop for a couple of beats or I will pronounce it as ‘post humorous.’
I can’t pronounce the name of an iconic spring flower without doing an impression of Oberst von Scherbach, Commandant of Stalag 17 as played by Otto Preminger:
(von Scherbach, surveying the mud-soaked assembly ground as he addresses the prisoners): “I hope that next spring we will have some grass planted here, and perhaps some daff-o-deelsz.”
I knew people who pronounced Target as Tar-ZHAY, to mock its less than fashionable reputation.
I knew people who pronounced it Tar-zhay because it was more upscale than Walmart.
Ascertain. I’ve read it as “a-certain” forever, and I don’t know how I thought the spoken version was spelled, but I didn’t put the two together until very recently.
I truly don’t understand either of these examples.
(1) What is “beeves” said in place of?
(2) I say O-shen. Am I wrong?
mmm
Long I’d ever heard the name Penelope Cruz, there was just Homer’s Penn-a-lope.
Too many to mention. I even got my nephew to come up with different pronunciations.
Examples:
Pronounce silent letters: Is-land. La-sag-na.
Virgin rather than version.
Stolen from Jeff Dunham - Change egg to a three letter word, Eh-ga-ga. His is Jeff fa fa.
Use the wrong vowel sound. For bacon it’s back-con.
There was a Bugs Bunny cartoon I saw back in the day…he’s flying an airplane and it sputters. As he’s headed toward the ground, he says something like, “Am I a victim of sabo tah jee?” So now whenever I see sabotage…
I can’t remember if that’s the one where the plane stops a foot from the ground and he climbs out safely and says, “Good thing I had air brakes!” or if he says, “Good thing I ran out of gas!”
I think, “…ran out of gas.” was the one with the gremlin.
It IS two syllables. How can you say it as one. Ushn?
Given that, I have to take exception to “dad did this to all of his kids”. Pronounciating the word as OH shen isn’t “doing something”; it is the perfectly proper WisKHANsen pronunciation.
Me after moving to LA: “I like going to the OHshen”
Hot chick at party, with dripping distain: “You’re from Wisconsin, aren’t you”.
Nope.
And that not-too-common girl’s name is pronounced See-ho-ban.
Analysis…
In my mind anal-lysis always flickers initially; as in a lysing of the anus. I always picture someone strapped face down to a table, no-pants, with a big laser slowly burning a line towards the target.
Wait… the U is silent? How are you even supposed to pronounce that? “Obv-scate”? I’ve always read it as “ob-fuss-skate.”
I used to mispronounce “sentient” in my head and worked to correct it, then I found out so many people had mispronounced it the same way in their heads that my mispronunciation was now an accepted pronunciation.
And while watching an Olympics related piece on Uighur muslims, I was like ……oh, that’s how you pronounce it, like it starts with a “W”.
I always pronounced it like you, “ob-fuss-skate”. The u isn’t silent. But if you look it up, the u is supposed to be the unstressed vowel (ə) like in ‘the’. I’m not going to change the way I read it in my head, or even how I say it.
Gym should be pronounced “guime” (with a hard G and rhyming with “time”), thanks to the Simpsons episode where Homer attempted to climb Springfield’s tallest mountain. “Guime? What’s a guime? Oh! A guime!”