It took me quite a few years to realize that MP could mean Member of Parliment as well as Military Police. I remember a book I read where someone was considering marriage and one of the big points was that her suitor was an MP. I didn’t understand why being in the military police was such a big deal.
Somewhat embarrassingly, to this day I have to force my mind to read MP as Member of Parliment when reading about the goings on of our neighbors across the pond.
And here I always thought it had to do with owls, as in they were so far out in the sticks you heard the owls hoot in the daytime (to crib from Manly Wade Wellman).
I’m reminded that for years I’d catch the title of a show called “Cooking Secrets of the CIA”. Now, I interned one summer at HQ in Langley and let me tell you, the food there was nothing special, so who was getting all this fancy food they were preparing at the CIA?
Someone finally mentioned “Culinary Institute of America” in my hearing. :o
Not 100% related, but: I could never remember what “pensive” meant until I heard it used in a MASH episode right after studying Spanish.
“Oh! Like pensar!” :smack:
I had never made this connection until about a year ago; that Chubby Checker formulated his name after Fats Domino.
Chubby = Fats
Checker = Domino
I’ve shared this revelation with some Sixties types and they’ve admitted that they didn’t get the connection either. Must have been the drugs…
Man, you people are dumb. I must be brilliant.
Edit: Just kidding, I’ll think of lots of stuff soon.
Along the same lines, I had only seen the word queue in books and didn’t think it had any relation to the word I had always heard as cue until one day I had to read the word out loud and realized (after I had spoken) that “quey-yoo” sounded really wrong… :smack:
And count me in as another who had no idea what Chick-Fil-A meant. I have only seen the name of that place in print and can’t help but read it as “Chick-fill-uh.”
Oh yes you do. It will make your life oh so much easier, I swear. Just try this little experiment with me (you don’t need to know why you’re doing each step as you’re doing it, just follow the instructions and I’ll explain at the end):
See the difference? Tabbed browsing is cleaner, doesn’t slow your computer down as much (which I guess is negligible unless you have a good 15-45 pages open at a time like I do), and it’s easy to flip from one tab to another by holding down Control and pressing the Tab key. Or just clicking on the tab. It means you can have anywhere from two to probably 25,000+ websites open at the same time without having an assload of windows open. It keeps the taskbar at the bottom of your screen less cluttered. If you have different “types” of websites open at the same time, you can keep them separated by category in different windows, each with a bunch of those websites loaded at the same time. For example, right now I have one window with my Straight Dope tabs and other assorted miscellany, one window with my email open and several zines I plan to submit my writing to, and another window with a bunch of porn open. I can switch from Doper Mode to Writer Mode to Porn Mode and back with a quick keypress or click of the mouse.
Surprisingly, I know exactly what you’re talking about. My high school was built on the abandoned Naval Training Center by the bay. Those signs were everywhere.
So that happens on both sides of the pond, eh? Good to know!
:smack:
Never even occurred to me.
Looks like you’ve been educated on the pronunciation, so all that’s left is for you to realize that inside that place lives the food of the gods. I’ve been jonesing for it ever since I left Arizona and came back home–and one just opened up by my old high school, where I just started working at this week! Maybe there is a God! BTW, they also sell the best lemonade you’ll ever have without having to kill the lemon yourself, which is a godsend when you live in Arizona.
Hah! And there’s another one of those words ending with an extraneous, silent “ue” to go along with plague, rogue, tongue, fugue, morgue, etc.
What makes “segue” so damned special that it gets to be a two-syllable word?
Is this something we can blame the French for?
In keeping with words I pronounced incorrectly in my head for an extended period of time:
Chaos: cha-os (as in ghOSt). I knew the spoken “kayoss”, and what it meant, and I had an idea of what cha-os meant from context, but the little lightbulb for cha-os = kayoss didn’t go on for a while.
Belatedly: I thought this was Bleat-edly until I was corrected by a teacher. The fact that it contains the word “late” which is a good part of it’s meaning didn’t hit me until after I got the correct pronunciation.
No, it’s the Italians who are to blame. If it was a French word the u and e would be silent. Until very recently I thought people who said “segway” were stupid - then one day I decided to look it up in the dictionary :smack:
I once thought that scarey things were “ma-cob” and that disgusting things were “mac-a-bre,” like the people in the Bible.
Just last week I realized that when giving the cats canned food --aka “Fresh Wet” ™–that after using a spoon to dig it out of the can and dump it in the bowl, I can use the edge of the can to scrape the last bit stuck on the spoon into the bowl.
I’ve been living with cats and feeding them for 12 years now. And that doesn’t include my family having cats as I was growing up.
Heh. I’ve always thought of macabre as being pronounced like ma-cob. Your post made me look it up at dictionary.com and fought my ignorance. Thanks Annie!
According to Merriam-Webster, there are two pronunciations, ma-cob being one of them.
So Annie and I weren’t wrong? We were just being alternative? I like that. 
My wife and I were watching TV a couple of months ago, when a commercial for a certain insurance company came on. Finally, the question that had been bubbling in the back of my mind came to the surface. I turned and asked my wife, “Who the hell is Stan?”
She didn’t stop laughing for five minutes.
What? 
Not at all.
The pronunciation you gave was the primary pronunciation.
You’re about as white bread and mayonaise as it gets. Sorry, man.
I am not. I grew up with Miracle Whip. So there!
The guy from The Unit in the Allstate commercials says, “That’s Allstate stand.” For a couple of years, I was hearing, “That’s Allstate, Stan.”