Better than the hyper boil one of my college class mates mentioned. I shudder imagining it. And the day she pronounced the plural of fetus like it was a Mexican dish put me off Taco Bell for years.
Had a boss who wanted people to rave about us.
No, wait; that’s not strong enough; they must rant and rave about us.
He’d obviously heard the phrase, known what “rave” meant, and figured doubleplusgood!
No time to read the whole thread, but…
In the mid-'80s I worked with a young woman from Iowa who discovered and liked ‘tor-TILL-e-yuhs’.
I think an old ‘friend’ is dyslexic. He was telling me the story behind his script, and mentioned someone’s ‘nim-nis’. I finally figured out he meant ‘nemesis’. Once he had the script finished, he was trying to get sponsors to back a film. One of these was ‘Hen-dez’, the salsa company. He may have had more luck if he pronounced their name as it’s spelled – ‘Herdez’. He talked a good game, but couldn’t get enough interest in his project. He was ‘fluss-trated’.
Oh, yeah… A couple of years ago I was listening to a local college radio station, and the kid on the air mentioned the U.S. Army Corpse of Engineers.
:smack: Everyone knows it is spelled “finance”.
[QUOTE=Leaffan;18340881
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.[/QUOTE]
A year or so ago I went to order a takeaway pizza, featuring jalapeño, and the girl behind the counter just did not get what I was asking for; I eventually had to point at the menu, at which point she goes “Ohh, jallapy-nos!”
My favourite personal one admittedly did not speak English as a first language; a fuy who used to come into the shop I worked in at least once a week to buy a bottle of “Famous Grouse” whisky ordered from behind the counter, (yes, he had a drink problem), or, as he pronounced it, determinedly, despite multiple attempts by all the staff “famoose groose”.
Can you say more about this? Everyone I’ve ever know has said it plan-tayne.
Maybe they’re saying it’s pronounced “PLAN-tun”?
I could see that, I guess. But yeah, I’ve only ever heard “plan-TAYNE.”
A friend of the family once described a view as “picture-squee.”
“Fra-jee-lay”
“Whores-de-ovaries”
When I was a young lad playing street hockey (or soccer), there was always that one kid who would insist on saying “gold-ee” instead of goalie. Man, that got under my skin :mad: :D.
That sounds like a word to describe kitty photos in MPSIMS.
Try to find plan-tayne in a dictionary. Plan-tun is correct.
Here is a dictionary search site:
http://www.onelook.com/
Well, everyone I’ve EVER KNOWN has not said “plantain” in my hearing. Everyone who I have ever heard say it, has said “plan-tayne”. /pedant
OTOH, it’s more obvious why Arkansas City, Kansas is pronounced Ar-KANSAS, like the state it’s in, and not Ar-KANSAW, like that other state.
Arkansas City is on the Arkansas River, and the name of the river is also pronounced Ar-KANSAS within the boundaries of the Sunflower State.
I have a dear friend who is a German native. She is now a language professor at a MN college, and speaks several languages fluently, French among them.
When she first came to America, she took a trip through the midwest states and recalls people staring at her blankly when she’d ask about (in perfect French pronounciation) Terre Haute instead of Terra Hote, Des Moines instead of Dee Moynes, and Louisville instead of Lulvull.
Perhaps they’re nearer right there, than they know. The name of the French region of Provence comes from the times of the Roman Empire, under which it was that empire’s first province beyond the Alps – thus, Provincia Romana.
The county of Norfolk in England is in fact, over here, universally pronounced as the “Nor-fk” above. (Likewise its neighbour to the south, Suffolk.)
England has a rude song (adapting the county name to three syllables, to fit the metre) – first verse,
There were three men of Nor-o-folk,
Nor-o-folk, Nor-o-folk,
There were three men of Nor-o-folk:
No-o-o-or-o-Fck, FCK, F*CK !
The following verses tell of successive misfortunes which befall the three men; each involving a word whose last syllable can be twisted into a word of four-letter profanity.
With place-names at any rate, it seems to me understandable and to be expected that trans-lingual pronunciational butchery will happen. Without meaning to sound elitist: the majority of inhabitants of any community will most likely have always been not very well-educated – quite possibly illiterate – and even if having some awareness of the correct original-language pronunciation, will not hesitate to adapt the name to something with which their tongues are comfortable. As in the village in southern England called Beaulieu. From the French – doubtless a Norman-conquest thing – meaning beautiful place / location. For many centuries up to today, this community’s name has been invariably pronounced “BEW-ly”. (One envisages French visitors to the area, falling about laughing.)
One of my favourites in this kind of thing (mentioned in the recent – commenced 03-20-2015 – MPSIMS thread “Unpronounceable [by non locals] town names") is the Picketwire River in Colorado. A corruption of the French “Purgatoire” (= Purgatory) – name originally given, by French trappers in the area. I see religious differences perhaps taking an additional hand here – with staunchly Protestant English-speaking settlers emphasising their having no truck with papist crap of any kind, by making a particular point of distorting the pronunciation big-time.
The ones that grate on me the most are the Americanized versions of words with French origins:
FOY-er, Bo-Jealous, Lou-vul, <sigh>
In all fairness, most English speaking countries have done the same, especially Britain.
“Wallah” (as in Walla Walla, Wa) instead of “voila” gives me homicidal thoughts.
I know that it became a rather poor joke to call Alzheimer’s disease ‘old timers’, but I really did know a woman back in the 80s who called it exactly that.
My stepfather always said he had a case of 'hee-coffs".
The first (and one of the few) times I’ve seen it spelled “hiccough” was in an old version of the Guinness Book of World Records, and for years I wondered if it was a variant spelling of “hiccup” or if there really was a world record for someone starting to hiccup but then coughing instead (so “hiccough” would be a portmanteau like “shart”.)
When I worked at Boston Market ages ago, people constantly failed to wrap their tongues around “rotisserie” properly. “Rotissary” (as if it rhymed with “commissary”) was the most common mispronunciation, but once in awhile people would manage to mangle it into “rosemary” or “rosary”.