Featherstonehaugh is also pronounced Festonhay or Feerstonhaw, depending on the branch of the family.
And I had a student in the States whose last name was just Featherstone – and that’s how she pronounced it. I assumed that it was American Indian in origin after translation!
The teachers who have believed in you would say that you have skipped your diploma requirements and are attending an Ivy League University. More power to you!
I always thought cation would naturally rhyme with nation. I’m just now learning that I was wrong.
At least I knew about victuals–I grew up in a hillbilly town.
I ran into this while studying Linguistics. For example, I was surprised to learn that judge begins and ends with the same sound. While I could hear a difference in the way the professor pronounced Mary, marry and merry it sounded stilted.
Definitely
That one seems to surprise a lot of people in these parts. 
Orangutan
The most common pronunciation is as if there were a ‘g’ at the end.
That ones a little different from most of the words in this thread because it comes from French and the C is softened due to the cedilla placed under it when written in French. English, which lacks such a mark, has adopted the French pronunciation but without the accent mark that would justify softening the C. In fact, leave the accent off, and the French would pronounce it exactly how your SIL did. So the pronounciation of that English word doesn’t even make sense as written from either language.
There are probably other words we’ve done the same thing do, but I can’t recall any offhand.
To be fair, that spelling also exists.
One other example that I thought of: handkerchief
I hate the word chaos. I always read it as chows.
I got special tutoring in phonetics as a child due to my dyslexia. The result of that plus my love of reading has produced some pretty hilarious times for my family and friends as they try to figure out what I am saying. For example, the word “cathedral”. I knew what a cathedral was when I heard the word, and I also knew what a cath-eh-drill was, which is how I pronounced the spelled word in my head. It took me until I was a junior in college to put the two pronounciations together even though I knew that both words meant the same type of church. Weird. The trigger was taking French classes, which caused me to reexamine English.
Fiery and hyperbole are two words that trip my tongue to this day when I try to pronounce the spelled word.
The word “detritus” comes to mind. I thought it was deh-trih-tus, but it’s actually deh-try-tus.
i’m going to have to +1 on synecdoche. i can’t even say it. it’s the only word that i legitimately cannot pronounce. even when i say it right, it sounds wrong in my ear. uber-frustrating.
I led a sheltered early life. As an adult, my 17 year old neice had to correct my pronunciation of fellatio (fel-lay-she-o). Who knew it wasn’t pronounced feh-lat-tee-o? Very embarrassing! Is embarrassing another one?
- It’s “niece” (wouldn’t have mentioned it but it’ s a spelling thread ;))
- I’ve got to know why as an adult you were talking to your 17-year-old niece about blow jobs :eek:
Yeah, there’s a law about that, and the spell checker missed it too. The niece had been out of control and moved in with us while she was cleaning up her act. She was very advanced for her age, and just about anything could come out of her mouth.
Naive, resume, cafe, finance(e), etc. English tends to dislike diacritics, and often drops them from loanwords as they become naturalized from frequent use. In fact, I’ve often heard it said that proper English doesn’t have any accent markers, however, many style guides disagree. I’ve even been told that façade is proper.
Here’s a list of words that are acceptable to be spelled with diacritics intact.
Brooch
Worchestershire******
Facsimile
Liason - at a former place of employment, it was pronounced as if it rhymed with niacin, hard “s” and all. This was at a huge aircraft/aerospace corporation.
Growing up, reading about astronomy, the word sidereal looked to me like a compound of “side” and “real”, and it always gave me an eerie feeling… like a different sort of reality that was alongside the real (on the model of “surreal”). I was grown up before I discovered that the pronunciation is si-DEER-ee-al, and it derives from the Latin word for star, sider.
They must have been thinking of NPR’s correspondent Mara Liasson.