I’ve had more than one occasion in which a tour guide mentioned that ‘gratatuities’ are greatly accepted.
I hate English phonics. Unless people speak your same dialect or can figure out what other words were you thinking of, all “reh-FYOO-zhee-oh” tells us is that there is a stress on the neighborhood of the F.
Usual rant about white and Hispanic being compatible.
Shrug. It’s a town whose name was originally in Spanish, but which is pronounced differently in Spanish and in English. You say /ma.'ɪæ.mɪ/, I say /'mɪa.mɪ/. You say /to.'lɪ.do/, I say /to.'le.do/. You say /ˈflɔ.ɹɪ.də/ (or not, depending on your dialect), I say /flo.'ɾi.da/. Each pair is correct, but each involves two different languages.
It took a while to convince my brother that cognac is in fact pronounced *KON-yak *rather than how it is written.
Okay, for the rest of us ignorami who, Dopers though we may be, need our ignorambience fought, how do you pronounce some of those words?
Oligosaccharides f’rinstance?
Refugio is pronounced “reh-FYOO-zhee-oh”? I never knew the letter “g” in any dialect of Spanish had that “zh” sound.
The locals around San Luis Obispo tend to pronounce Luis like the English “Louis”. A few will pronounce it Loo-EES (or Loo-WEES) as in proper Spanish. A lot of “outsiders” tend to put a French spin on it, saying “LOOee” or “LooWEE”.
Oligosaccharide is pronounced ŏl′ĭ-gō-săk′ə-rīd′.
Astaxanthin’s x is pronounced as a z, since asta- is a prefix attached to xanthin, so ăs′tə-zăn′thĭn.
Plantain nearly rhymes with mountain.
A lot of these, especially place names, are forgivable. I could say the same about US tourists in Canada trying to find Yon-gee street (Yonge, pronounced like Neil’s last name) or Gan-on-a-kyoo (Gananoque pronounced Ganan-AW-kway).
About 25 years ago the Far Side calendar at work used the word “epitome.” No one in the department knew what an epi-tome was. Imagine their surprise when I explained the joke.
I do have a mea culpa though. A very long time ago, circa 1983 I was out for dinner with a couple of friends and we had to ask the waiter what these ja-lap-in-oes were. Mexican food was unheard of in Canada at the time. We’ve come a long way.
A couple here.
One of my pet hates is Remuneration.
It’s not pronounced Re Noo Mer ation, you’re not re-numbering anything, the M comes before the N like in Money. It’s Re Mew Ner Ation.
One of my staff, preparing for a presentation started talking about how so and so is great with having amusing antidotes. I did a double take, then explained that the word I think she meant was “Anecdote”.
Speaking of names of towns, I always love when Melbourne makes the US news for some reason as I get a kick out of listening to it being pronounced (slowly) Mel - Born when locals pronounce it (say it quick) Melbin.
Pretty much everybody says plan-tayne. Also koi-tus (2 syllables). Technically wrong, but not many people will stop you.
I should say: my mention of the word above was greatly due to Calvin and Hobbes. “Tigers are perfect/ the E-Pit-O-Me of good looks and grace and quiet dignity” which is how you show your male credentials to get into G.R.O.S.s.
Speaking of cooking shows, the word is restaurateur, not restauranteur.
I recently got a “Bris bain” in an audio book.
Yoze-might Sam
You’d have a similar experience in Rio Grande, Ohio.*
*that’s RYE-oh Grand. 
My big pet peeve, especially from cooking shows and chefs who ought to know better, is the word ‘vinaigrette’.
Vin-eh (or ah)-gret. NOT vin-eh-gah-ret, dammit!
My headscratcher is why Charlotte, NC is pronounced SHAR-let, but Charlotte, MI is shar-LOT.
As a kid that read more than he heard, lets just say I pronounced rendezvous in a decidedly non French manner with a southern accent.
And am I the only one here that pictured MACK-uh-bree ! as being some gruff beat cop/detective on a tv series being yelled at by some paper pushing boss who couldn’t pronounce his name right?
My favorite along these lines is Norfolk VA. Locals pronounce it Nor-fk (with the “fk” sounding exactly like a fastly spoken F-word.) Or, you could pronounce it “Nor-folk” slowly. But I’ve heard announcers carefully pronounce it “Nor-F-ck”.
If you lived near Refugio, you ought to know by now that Texan butchering of Spanish words is a long and proud tradition.
You’ve got Llano, which isn’t “Ya-no”, but rather “Lanno”, Bexar, which instead of being “Bey-har”(more or less) in Spanish, is now “Bear”. There’s Manchaca (and the road in Austin) which isn’t “Man-sha-ka”, but rather “Man-Shack”. There’s also Pedernales Falls, which for some reason moves the “r” forward in pronunciation to “Per-de-nal-is”, and Palacios, which isn’t “Pal-ah-seeos”, but “Pulash-us”. And San Jacinto isn’t “Saan Ha-ceen-to”, but rather “San Ju-sin-to”
I was in the same boat (apart from the southern accent). I knew so many words from books, and had figured out the meaning from context, but not how they were pronounced. Like epitome and facade, which I always pronounced ep-i-TOME and fa-KADE. A lot of people have stories like that.
One that I’ve never heard anyone mention in this context is poltergeist. As a kid, I was tremendously into what would now be called “woo.” Ghosts, hauntings, ESP, Bigfoot, UFOs. I read everything I could get my hands on about them. So I ran across the word poltergeist years before the Spielberg movie.
Trouble was, I assumed that it followed the standard rules of English orthography, and that the “g,” being followed by an “e,” was a “soft g.” What’s even worse is that I was kind of a loudmouthed, know-it-all type of kid, and would regale my friends with all sorts of bizarre trivia that I had learned, whether they were interested or not.
The end result being that I made several learned pronouncements about “polter-jeests” for all and sundry to hear. Boy, was I dismayed when the film came out, and suddenly everybody knew how wrong I was.
There’s an avenue that runs through midtown Atlanta that is named after the Spanish explorer who sought the Fountain of Youth. But don’t call it Pon-say del Le-ON or we’ll snicker at you. It’s Ponce d’LEE-on.
Vunderwife insists on pronouncing it chi-PO-tull, even when corrected.
Don’t get me started on the great she-wa-wa vs. cha-who-a-who-a controversy.
When I was about 10 years old I asked my brother about a word I had found in the book I was reading. I didn’t know what “DEET-er-mined” meant. He told me the word was “de-TER-minned”.
My daughter had an English teacher in high school who insisted on saying “HIGH-per-bole” in place of “high-PER-bo-lee” even after the correct pronunciation was pointed out to her.
Not a mispronunciation but I was talking to a woman recently that told me she had decided to go back to school to become a teacher. A guy filling in a form at her bank had listed a woman as his contact. Her relationship to him? His feyonce.