"Jewlery" vs. "Jewelry" and other commonly mispronounced words.

Along those lines, I used to talk to people all the time who wanted to get their female dog or cat spaded.
Well, sir, this is a veterinary hospital, and as such, we do not have any spare gardening tools or playing cards on hand…
Grumble grumble spayed grumble

I’m surprised this one hasn’t been mentioned yet: ‘weary’ instead of ‘wary.’ It’s like folks just can’t believe that ‘wary’ is an actual word, so it must really be pronounced ‘weary.’ :wink: It bothers me more than most mispronunciations, because it can change the meaning of the sentence it’s used in: most of the time you can tell if someone really meant to say ‘wary,’ but not always!

Another pet peeve is a local one: there’s a law firm in the DC area advertising on television for people to join a class-action suit related to the medical condition mesothelioma. The voice-over guy pronounces it ‘mee-sothelioma’ instead of ‘meh-sothelioma.’ Merriam-Webster online lists the VO pronunciation as an alternate, but the main entry and the audio pronunciation are both ‘meh-sothelioma.’ I don’t know if I could trust a law firm that can’t even pronounce my condition correctly. {grin}

All the ones that bug you, bug me as well. Here’s one I haven’t seen mentioned. I’m in The South[sup]TM[/sup], where I’ve noticed people tend to leave the ‘ch’ out of “technical.” They pronounce it as though the ‘ch’ was a ‘t’, but they don’t enunciate the whole T sound - there’s kind of a glottal stop there. It comes out like “te’nichal.” I first heard my wife say it that way. She swears up and down that she doesn’t, but every other person down here whom I’ve heard say it does pronounce it that way.

While I’m on that word, it saddens me to know that commercial misspellings have worked their way into the national consciousness far enough that now people work on their ‘technics’ instead of ‘techniques.’ What, is your turntable broken?

My mother told me that growing up, she always thought the farm machine was a columbine, instead of a combine. And that a thresher was a thrasher.

The words mispronounced by my old friend Brian could fill a book. I can’t tell whether he is severely undereducated, or dyslexic. Here are some examples: it took me about ten years to discern that a word he occasionally used, “yuh-RO-phee-ah”, was his mangling of “euphoria.” He wondered who Yosemite Sam was, when he saw the name in print. He had been spelling it “yuhsemmity.” There’s a song by the Canadian group April Wine, called “Oowatanite” (Ooh, What A Night). He knew the song very well, but when it came to seeing the title on the album, he pronounced it like it was a cheap Italian wine. How I managed not to strangle him is a mystery…

Speaking of The South™…

“Uhnt” instead of “want”.