Just a few years ago, I learned that “palatable” was NOT pronounced “pa-LAT-able”. I even knew it was related to “palate”, which I do pronounce correctly!
I used to think that too. I am a big Three Stooges fan, and one of the films where they go to a high-society party, with predictably chaotic results, is titled “Hoi Polloi”. At the end, Moe says, “This is our punishment for associating with the hoi polloi!”. I thought the term referred to the smart Society types attending the party.
Me three, until just a few years ago. I also vaguely thought that the term had Polynesian roots.
For years I refused to eat chocolate truffles because I don’t care for mushrooms. :o
Oh hy, I don’t believe that I am the first one who is going to publicly admit to this, but…
I never had a desire to eat Ayce shrimp. I don’t care for shrimp, so I never thought much about it. However, when I started noticing signs for Ayce catfish, I thought maybe I should give that a try. I was only slightly thrown off by the Auce catfish… maybe it was just an “English” spelling… you know, color/colour; honor/honour… The only think I can say in my defense is that I never actually ordered the “Aussie” catfish. I think I lit up the whole restaurant when it finally dawned on me that it was All You Can Eat.
What an idiot.
Did I mention I’m an English teacher?
Oy vey.
I’m another one who was late on “awry”. My excuse was that despite the fact that the word appeared somewhat frequently in the books I read as a kid, it wasn’t a word that cropped up all that often in everyday grade school conversation.
Also, Penelope. I grew up knowing many girls named Penny, but not one of them went by Penelope and so I only ever saw “Penelope” in writing. It’s a shame that it took so long to actually hear the name Penelope spoken, because it’s a pretty name.
Can somebody explain Chick-Fil-A to me? 'Cuz I still don’t get it. But I live in the Pacific Northwest, and I’ve only heard about this restaurant chain.
It wasn’t until I attended college that I discovered “virile” and “nubile” aren’t terms that describe a person’s appearance. I’d only ever heard the words used in reference to attractive people: “virile” in the sense of “macho-looking” and “nubile” in the sense of “curvaceous (teen) girls”. It was a college course taken in my 30s that finally explained the connection between virile/virulent/virus, and that “virile” simply means “capable of reproduction” (while “nubile” means the same thing, but is applied to females). In other words, both mean “sexually mature”.
I get jokes!
Think, like, a fillet of chicken…
Hey, all I know is what the video said. Anyway I thought it was a fishy answer myself. But the real reason I’m posting is to ask you about abbreviating roast beef RB. Because I don’t think I’ve come across it before and I’m curious if it’s a regional or generational thing or something.
Ah, okay. I think the problem there is that the letter “A” all by itself or at the end of a word is rarely pronounced “ay”. It’s more often pronounced “uh” or “ah”. So I was seeing it as “fil-uh”.
I’d been working with Windows for over a decade when I realized that if you have some text in your paste buffer, and an area of text selected in a document that you have open, you can just paste the buffer into the selected area of the document and it will replace it. You don’t have to cut the selected text from the document first.
My Latin teacher at school specifically said that this was not the case; educare and ducere are from different conjugations which he took to mean that they were not cognate.
My own D’oh moment is in this thread - I had never bothered to look up what “nubile” meant - I had always thought it meant something vaguely racist, possibly because I was connecting it with “Nubian”.
Another tidbit of Arby’s trivia - there was a company called Sybra that owned a large portion of the Arby’s restaurants. “Sybra” is “Arby’s” spelled backwards.
There was also what NinjaChick posted way back in post 41 back on the first page of the thread where she quoted from the Arby’s website FAQ.
Okay, I probably won’t admit this to anybody but you guys. It was about three days ago. I was watching NCIS and somebody mentioned Hooterville, got blank looks from the co-workers, and said, You know, Petticoat Junction?
Light dawned – Hooterville! How did they get away with that? And how did I miss it? I saw those girls pull those dresses off that water tower every week. Of course, I wouldn’t have caught it until years after the show was on because I just had never heard that expression. But you’d think sometime in the last fifteen years or so…
I use to think I read about a singer named “Be-younce” and heard about a singer named “Fiance.”
Whenever I read ‘segue’, I made it sound like ‘fugue’ and had no clue what it meant except it was probably musical too.
Not until about 3 years after the cool transportation device came out did I realize segue sounds like ‘segway’.
If it makes you feel any better, you’re far from the only one on this, if the stuff that comes to me to be proofread is any indication.
To be fair, I used to think the word segue was pronounced ‘seg’ and the whole thing as people spoke it was segueway. I’m just glad I got that cleared up before I began proofreading. :smack:
Yeah, I had a very intelligent history professor who pronounced it seg.
I pronounced it “seeg” or “sayg”. Despite taking music classes from the time I 10 years old, I don’t think I ever heard the word spoken until sometime in my 30s (though before the Segway was unveiled). It looks like a word that should follow the same pronunciation rules as ‘tongue’, ‘rogue’, and as you mentioned, ‘fugue’.