I had forgot about that one. Almost as annoying as the vase thing, IMO. Almost.
Yep. The “Chicago S” is added to a lot of shops that don’t have an s. Not all of them, though. “Target” is “Target.” “K-Mart” is “K-Mart.” But “Jewel” becomes “(da) Jewel’s,” “Venture” and “Zayre” (both defunct) became “Venture’s” and “Zayre’s”. I’m pretty sure I’ve heard “Aldi’s” as well. I’m sure there’s other ones, but I can’t say for certain now.
Same sort of thing in Nashville. “Kroger” is “Kroger’s” or “Krogers.” It seems to work most often with grocery and department stores, although some of them do have the 's tacked on as part of the official name.
Oddly enough Walgreens saw all that coming and went ahead and added the s.
Really? You certain about that?
Which part?
The “two vowels in a row” part…
Classical composers are not immune from this. Like “Bee-tho-ven” and “Mo-zart.”
And then there’s Charlie Rose, who leaves off the final letter of some words. Like Egyp(t) and Worl(d). I think it’s a regional thing, but very annoying.
A customer did this (“ax”) mere meters from me, just a few seconds ago. I know that this word was different in Chaucer’s day, but there’s a standardized spelling now, the “s” is in the middle, and “axe/ax” is its own word, with a very different meaning!
My Mom, bless her, tended to add Rs to names that began with C. They’d be tacked onto the end of the first syllable. And for some reason, the game system my kids were using was always the Intendo.
Vienna, Pennsylvania = VYE-anna
My mom always pronounced sophomore “sow-phmore.”
The only other time I can recall her mispronouncing a word was when she mortified me in front of her bridge club, telling them I had just purchased a Vulva. :o
Yeah, It seems like gendered nouns in English are waning, e.g. hero vs. heroine and comedian vs. comedienne. YMMV .
Of course fiance and fiancee would have the same pronunciation in French. Do they not in English?
They are supposed to.
I worked with a guy who pronounced “subsequent” as sub-SEE-kwent (to match up with the root word “sequence” SEE-kwense).
He was a religious fellow, I felt like asking him if considered himself a pro-TEST-ent?
People sometimes pronounce the word “peripheral” as “perifial.” Makes me wonder how they would pronounce “periphery.”
Everyone in the US seems to pronounce “bruschetta” as “brushetta,” although the original Italian food is pronounced “brusketta.” Similarly, Geddy Lee blew it with Rush’s famous song “Red Barchetta,” in which he sounds like a Boston native singing about a bar of cheddar cheese.
C’mon, try some allmond crusted sallmon.
A customer yelled at me for “mispronouncing” some word that 99% of people everywhere pronounce the “wrong” way. It might have been “often.”
It bothers me that the English word for Genova is Genoa. The former is way easier to pronounce! It’s not like Cologne vs. Köln.
Note the original quote was that “it isn’t typical for English to have two vowels in a row,” not that it never happens. I can’t comment if its true, but also can’t think of many counterexamples.
Hell, in Internet English, many people are concerned about our society’s serious heroine addiction problem. :smack:
That’s what I meant :smack:. You can check with my mother the linguist, if you want, but words with two vowels in a row get screwed all the time. “Realtor” gets pronounced “relitor” (even by people who can say “real”), “ruin” becomes “roon” (and “ruined” becomes "roond-- something that really grates on me), while a lot of people pronounce “deal” and “dill” identically. The same people usually say “rill” for “real,” and almost every American says “rilly” instead of “really.”
Not everyone does it, and it happens more with three- and four-syllable words than it does with two-syllable words-- most people can say “deal,” but “dill” is a fixture of a lot of American dialects.
And it’s because there aren’t that many English words with two vowels in a row. People don’t expect them, and “correct” them.
It’s actually an interesting phenomenon that people correct imperfect models. This has been studied extensively. Children whose parents have foreign accents don’t copy their parents’ accents when they learn new words from them-- they know how to fit the word into the paradigm of the dominant accent around them. If you learn a new word from a person with a speech impediment, you will usually hear the word correctly-- you automatically erase the speech impediment. Sometimes you can end up pronouncing a word incorrectly if you erase a speech impediment from a word that is supposed to sound the way the person with the impediment said it.
I once watched video of people learning nonsense words, some of which fit the English paradigm (all the subjects were native speakers of an American English dialect, and none had speech impediments), and some of which didn’t. The subjects didn’t have trouble learning the new words that sounded like English words, but the ones that had sound combinations that didn’t occur in English, most subjects had difficulty with, and usually remembered incorrectly as sounding more like English words. For example, if a word had a “pf+vowel” syllable, people would either stick a vowel in between the P and F, or change the F to a consonant that does follow F in English, like R.
I have a dedicated effort to change height to heighth, and pronounce it that way, and I don’t apologize at all.
Length, Width, Heighth, it makes the world a better place.
Weighth? 
I can live with changing the pronunciation of one hundred to one hunerd at least in Chicago. But please don’t make it a hunert. Please?
Pasghetti. I understand small children may have difficulty correctly pronouncing ‘spaghetti’ but most adults can master it. Most. I know one man (30-ish) who says ‘pasghetti’ and and ‘arks’.
I was discussing this irritating quirk with a friend who said that people who say the words this way simply don’t hear that they’re saying them the wrong way. I reckon they’re either being smartarses or lazy.