My paternal grandmother said “piller” for “pillow” and “foller” for “follow”. She was born in Tennessee, came to Texas in the 1900’s in a horse-drawn wagon.
How about spelling errors? I hate it when people get “your” and “you’re” confused and “there” and “their” mixed up. And it isn’t always a typo; people hand-write these mistakes!
Those who do not learn from the past are condemned to relive it. Georges Santayana
Oh, gee, thanks a lot, pluto. Now you have me reading it “Can the arya”, too.
Modest? You bet I’m modest! I am the queen of modesty!
Hooray! I made Canthearya laugh, messed with Neuro Trash Grrl’s mind and pissed off CanadianSue! (Well, that last one was yesterday.)
I must be getting better at this!
I’ve given up trying to correct people who say “warsh”, when talking about doing laundry, and I won’t even go into “axed” instead of asked…
TT
“Believe those who seek the truth.
Doubt those who find it.” --Andre Gide
Documentaries that pronounce “Adolf” with a long ‘a’.
It’s Ahdolf. Not that there are very many people anymore with that name…
I always have and always will say “CUE-pon.” And there ain’t a damn thing you can do about it. “COO-pon” drives me nuts. Oh, and the prefered pronunciation of often, according to www.m-w.com , is “OFF-en,” which is how I say it.
Words that my “reading voice” stumbles over (even though I know how they’re pronounced:
epitome (brain thinks “EP-ih-tome”)
facetious (brain thinks “FACE-shus”)
Penelope (brain thinks “PEN-eh-lope”)
Have you ever been to New Orleans? As a native, I pronounce the following street names accordingly:
Burgundy: Bur GUN dee
Melpommene: Mel POM en ee
Tchoupatoulis: CHOP a too lis
Duplessis: DU pless us
You should hear what the tourists say.
And by the way, Canthearya, you have competition for Pluto’s affections. I’m after him too and not married. Although I hear he is. Oh well.
I’m a first generation American, and much of my vocab came from books, as well. But my favorite of my mispronunciations is Penelope. You know, Ulysses’ wife. I read an excerpt in second grade or so, and was convinced, up until we read the Odessey out loud in ninth grade, that it was Pen-elope. Like, a couple of writing utensils that ran away and got married. Rhymes with cantaloupe…
When I first heard pen-EL-oh-PEE, I didn’t know what they were talking about…
One of the best came from a game we once played…Taboo. We got all sorts of clues about fusion and fission and explosions and bombs, and guessed nuclear a zillion times. No dice. So, when the buzzer finally went off, the exasperated guy said, “You were SO close! Geez, you guys! U-CU-LAR! Nobody guessed that!!” and on and on.
We looked at one another, completely puzzled. His sister jumped up, grabbed the card, and said, “Geez, D! It’s ukelele!!”
There’s the difference b/w “English” and “American”, differences b/w regionalisms that give the language flavor and nuance, and then just plain verbal sloppiness…
Coldfire, hate to drop it on you, but you’ve probably learned more “English” than “American”–even though your fluency and grasp of idiom astounds me.
We say things differently. It always suprises me when I hear a Brit say “ME-grain” for “MY-graine” as in headache. Just for example.
As far as regionalisms…I love 'em. Howdaya say “Milan”? Me-LAWN, like in Italy? Nah, it’s MY-linn. “Versailles”? Vair-SIGH? Nope. It’s Ver-SALES.
My linguistic pet peeve? Pearly tooth airhead w/ razor cuts on TV who say, “govermint”. They’re in the damned communications business; it’s goverNment.
Even the talking heads on pundit TV do this.
Veb
I never mispronounce any English words anymore. I won’t say them unless I know what the correct pronounciation is.
This probably is a result of a howler of mine when I was very young, about 10. Wanting to be a writer, I proudly anounced to my family that I intended to go down in the ANALS of literature.
They laugh about it to this day.
This is a non-smoking area. If we see you smoking, we will assume you are on fire and act accordingly.
i never realized i mispronounced the word ‘with’ until moving to PA.(wit) I do realize it now, but when I do, it’s too late, I already said it. I have always known I have a hard time with (read wit, doh) sword, for some reason I can’t keep that w silent.
My co-workers find great pleasure in pointing out that I say words such as water, dog, coffee,etc. quite differently than they do. But that’s not really mispronunciation,so much as a (slight?) accent.
so you found a girl who thinks really deep thoughts. what’s so amazing about really deep thoughts? Tori Amos
When I was about four years old, it was either Mother’s Day or my mom’s birthday. Everyone else was doing stuff for her, and I wanted to contribute, so I went outside, picked some flowers, and announced, “I picked you a bouquet.” (pronounced “boo-quit”)
Remember, I’m pulling for you; we’re all in this together.
—Red Green
I still have problems with ‘desert’ and ‘dessert’. I often forget which is which.
I can harldy tell the difference between ‘man’ and ‘men’, much less pronounce it correctly.
Other howlers are deers, sheeps, fishes, etc. It’s so ungramatical for me to leave out the ‘s’ that I almost always forget.
The worst is, these are words that I would need to use fairly often.
Oh, an incredibly embarassing one that I just remembered:
As a child, one of my talents was memorizing capitals of countries. To keep in practice, I sometimes had my mother quiz me. One night, for a change of pace, she would give me a capital, and I would name the country, instead of the other way around. Everything went well, right up until she said “Niamey”, at which point I proudly said “Niamey is the capital of NIGGER!” Well, I was just a kid, there weren’t many black people where I lived, I had never heard that particular derogatory term before, and when I read “Niger”, I thought you pronounced it that way. The expression on my mother’s face when I said this was not one I ever want to see again, but when she realized that it was just a silly mispronunciation, she gently explained that it was “Nye-ger”, and that I should probably avoid pronouncing it the other way. It was years before I found out why. It’s a good thing she caught that, I could have gotten into some serious trouble at a school geography bee.
Modest? You bet I’m modest! I am the queen of modesty!
This isn’t a pronunciation thing as much as a word confusion thing … neuro-trash grrrl got me thinking. I used to think that a pickaninny was the same as a ninny. My sister used to call me a ninnny and I’d call her a pickaninny and we thought it was the funniest thing. Thank goodness I saw that one in the dictionary with a big asterisk next to it, before I used it in public.
I mispronounce the word probably as prolly now that I have spent a year online. Not because I can’t say it but because I like the way prolly sounds and it is much easier to type. So I guess you could say I do it on “porpoise”
“Only when he no longer knows what he is doing, does the painter do good
things.” --Edgar Degas
The one that burns me up: pronouncing “harass” like the surname “Harris”. It’s “hair ASS”.
This was probably started by people uncomfortable saying Uranus.
Canthearya sez:
Everybody thinks they can diagnose themselves. Let me render the medical decisions here, please. If you are correct, your didease is incurable. I think, however, I could provide a sample pack of something to help ease the symptoms.