I have at least twice now heard interviews with soldiers saying they were looking for arms “Ka-shays”.
Coincidence, or is this the way some DI says it, with no recruits daring to correct him?
I heard a reporter say it today, too, and wondered if it was an alternative pronunciation I had not encountered before. But according to dictionary.com the only pronunciation is cash.
They’re just trying to add a little cachet to their speech.
Considering that they’re more-or-less in the ball park on sabot, I’m suprised that they’d mispronounce cache. So I checked my Oxford Dictionary of Foreign Words & Phrases and it matches dictionary.com: cache is pronounced cash.
Well, the military also pronounces Five as “fife”, and Nine as “Niner”.
Sometimes pronunciations are changed to avoid confusion with other words, especially in terse radio communication. I suspect “Cache” is pronounced “Cash-AY” for that reason.
A weird dichotomy as I pronounce weapons hoards, etc., as cash-ay, yet I’m a computer geek, and when speaking in computerese, pronounce it as cash?!?!
Almost everyone I know pronounces “forte” as fot-tay, so what are you gonna do?
Almost everyone I know pronounces “forte” as for-tay, so what are you gonna do?
Hey, I pronounce forte “for-tay” and I’m a French speaker. Maybe it’s all those Italian classes…
Depends, are they talking about music being played loudly?
Well, for-tay is the correct pronounciation if you’re talking about loud music.
Maybe the military were watching that old W.C. Fields film. “I have a kash-ay of the elusive spondulix!”
Maybe there’s some sort of connection to “nucular”…
I have to point out that all the computer guys I knew back in high school and college had a tendency to pronounce the kind of “cache” a motherboard or CPU has as “ka-shey”.
I’d go with [btomndeb** - mixing up cache with cachet. I’ve heard an alternative to “cash” as “caysh” but never “cashsay”.
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I haven’t had a chance to observe this myself, but I read somewhere that sometimes people who pronounce nuclear nuc-u-lar when speaking of nuclear weapons or power, will still pronounce it correctly when speaking of nuclear families - go figure.v 
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The military has been consistently mispronouncing “cache” since Viet Nam and probably before. I don’t know why the journalists have picked it up, ignorance ? The military has little quirks like that which become institutionalized.
For instance, in the Army, when you are leading physical training exercises, “the small of the back” is the nape of the neck, but for the rest of the English speaking world, it the back of the waist.
I think the pronunciation of cache as “cashay” is what was called a “reading pronunciation” or “reading mispronunciation” in a speech class I took once. It is a mispronunciation caused by learning the word from reading it rather than hearing someone else say it.
It is like pronouncing the “p” in “pseudo”, when it should be silent, like the “p” in "swimming.
T.S. Not ignorance, but rather analogy, in the Linguistic sense.
Yeah, but if they get “sabot” more-or-less right, why would they have that problem with “cache”?