I disagree with all the suggestions thus far. I say it rhymes with “gropes.”
At least twice I’ve heard national newscasters refer to Jupiter’s moon, Ten.
That would be Io. You can say EYE-oh, or you can say EE-oh, but even if it’s written in all caps on the TelePrompTer, you can’t say Ten.
Perhaps the newscaster was trying to panache (a new verb!) the pronunciation, like everyone does with Target (Tar-zhay).
I believe it is “Rio” by Duran Duran…
PS: Oscillo-snopes…
I have a friend who thought that Roget’s thesaurus was pronounced Rog-it (where the ROG rhymes with HOG). I was very entertained.
Which leads me to wonder if all of those jokes about “Malcom the Tenth” (for Malcom X) were really jokes. . . .
Oh. And I prefer one syllable, long o, for Snopes.
Just had a thought: could we really blame someone who pronounced it “Snoops”??
Yes. We could.
[total hijack]
We have a small town nearby with the name of Dykesville, pronounced, dikes-ville, like hikes-ville, long “I” for the first one.
The legend goes that onceuponatime a salesman notfromaroundhere was coming to town to propose the installation of something and wanted to have a town meeting to explain his plan to the citizens. One of the local town supervisors took him aside just before the meeting and warned him that the correct pronunciation of the town was dick-ees-ville. Since he didn’t want to appear to to be an outsider, the salesman was quite grateful for the advice.
It was a long time later when he found out why he didn’t get the contract and why the audience snickered whenever he said the town’s name.
[/total hijack]
I really tried not to howl in derisive laughter when the clerk at Blockbuster rang up my DVD of Henry the Fifth – “Henry Vee? What’s that about, dude?”
Really I did.
Snort!
Back in the days before Google, my dad’s American colleague was talking this new search engine, “Ask Jay-ayves”.
Ah, the old "Newscaster doesn’t know how to pronounce ‘Snopes’ " story. That’s been around a few times.
Remember folks, as with “popes”, “ropes” and “gropes”, the silent “q” in “Snopes” is usually ommited (similar to “fox”).
Linky no work. Is that the point?
Malacandra was making a very clever joke. The important part was that you saw the URL in your status bar, not that the page actually worked.