I remember my father once mentioned a paper he was writing about the history of Colorado mining and what sounded like the “Molly B. Denham” mine, which I assumed was a specific mine named after the lady. Then I saw the paper with the word written down: Molybdenum.
Maybe not a brand sold round your area: Famous Grouse
To be fair it is sometimes called “Moly” for short, pronounced “Molly”.
My ex-boyfriend was another one who insisted meme is pronounced “mee-mee”. He also pronounced the word genre as “jen-eer”.
I have a couple of co-workers who insist the word variable is pronounced with a D in there. “Va-ri-ad-able” is about the best way to describe it.
Well, it’s the rolled r, which we don’t much have in English, followed by an unstressed schwa - which you can hear, so it’s more loov-rrr-uh. When singing French, there can be more weight given to a final schwa like that, for scansion, but they’re often more or less dropped in speech.
And don’t get me started on sherbert.
mmm
I did not know this.
The reporter, though, absolutely said 'Loover" (rhymes with Hoover). I’m quite certain she was not attempting any rolled Rs, schwas, or phonemes.
mmm
Three I’ll never forget.
-
Mid 1970’s, big city NPR station, local “talent” was attempting to read the news. Very young woman who clearly had great difficulty reading aloud. At one point she reached a word she’d never seen before, hesitated, then slowly enunciated “bonanza” as “bone ZANN uh.” 40 years later I still have the bruise from slapping my forehead.
-
Don’t remember where I read about this, but in a letter to parents from summer camp a child mentioned their friend who “has the dire rear.” (diarrhea)
-
Just a few months ago- TV news story about the guy who made himself a ridiculous goat costume to help him understand the goats’ point of view; he’d been awarded the Ig Nobel Prize for frivolous research. The news anchor repeatedly referred to it as “the Eye Gee Noble prize.”
One from Mrs. FtG’s past. Taking a medical-ish class. The instructor kept referring to “hee-mog-la-bin”. It took the students a bit to figure out it was “hemoglobin”.
(In fairness that was probably the way it was pronounced in the instructor’s home country.)
So of course that pronunciation became a family meme.
(I’m old and I’ve known how to pronounce “meme” from the first time I saw it many years ago. But it was stated as an analog to “gene”, so that helped.)
When I worked at Blockbuster, we didn’t have the movie Beaches, so I called around to our other locations looking for it. The customer was mildly amused or perhaps mildly annoyed when I put on a bad Hispanic accent and made it sound like I was looking for bitches.
Medical terms seem to be prone to amusing mispronunciations. I’ve heard “very close veins” (varicose veins) and “all sorts of colitis” (ulcerative colitis).
My great aunt used to work with a group of French-Canadian women who would often ask her help with English. One asked her about the pronunciation of a certain word (I don’t remember which), “Did I put the accent on the right syl-LAB-le?”
More annoying than amusing is TBBT’s pronunciation of coitus with two syllables. It properly has three (ˈkoʊ.ɪ.təs) but it’s probably a losing battle at this point.
My mother takes Digoxin for her heart. She calls it Dioxin. She takes Methimazole for her thyroid and pronounces it meth-a-ma-ZOLE-a.
My college philosophy professor liked to tell students about the test one girl handed in that mentioned being “lack toast in tolerance”.
I remember several fellow science teachers butchering a few terms: Men-duh-leave for Mendeleev, pume-iss for pumice, Pune-it for Punnett, and the all too common mee-oh-sis for meiosis.
Alton Brown said his show did research, but he didn’t consult a dictionary for plantain, oligosaccharide, arthropods, and astaxanthin.
One of my yoga instructors likes to reference how people change from day to day, so they end up with a different set of things they have to work with in any given class. One day he asked us “So what’s on your palette today?”
Except he pronounced it “palate,” and I thought “Um, coffee… why? Oh…”
Say what? Aren’t they homonyms?
I don’t know if they still do or not, but the English used to talk about Leghorn, Italy instead of Livorno.
I heard a radio news reporter in Montgomery, Alabama talking about Yeveez Saint Lorent (Yves St. Laurent)
I remember a radio announcer warning of a traffic accident on “Martin Luther King Boulevard, Junior.”
Anybody want to try their hand at Eugene Onegin? You probably don’t travel much in circles that discuss Pushkin’s poetry or Tchaikovsky’s operas, but how would you say it?