Aren’t the djuntas the ones who usually do the koop day tot?
My wife says that she is going acsrossed the street. Usually to see if the hot water heater is working.
My friend says that and, a few years ago, he bought a Ford Escape, driving everyone around him nuts! Idiocracy makes good use of this when a jailbreak is announced with “Excape! Excape!”
That same friend has had discussions with me about *Smokey and the Bandint. * Ugh!
I formerly had a beef with “supposably”, but then decided to give people the benefit of the doubt. Now I just ask myself "could this person possibly mean ‘is capable of being supposed, is conceivable’? Usually the answer is yes, so I’m happy.
I can’t stop myself from saying “deemolition”. Bugs the crap outta one of my friends, but I just can’t stop.
I worked with a guy years ago that not only insisted on calling faxes “facsimiles” but pronounced it “fash-im-il-ee” - as in a fascist fax. Doubly irritating.
But much worse, I hear this regularly spoken by someone I work with, rather than et cetera:
Eck-setra. Eck-fucking-setra. Eck-motherfucking, corn-holing, teabagging-setra! Hearing this is like an icepick straight to the ear for me. And I hear it. All. The. Fucking. Time.
And if another motherfucker says “irregardless” I’ll take 'em out at the kneecaps with a Swingline, regardless of how they feel about it.
Holy hopscotching Buddha, I’m the least educated person (36, with 1 yr of college) in an office full of MBAs. Am I the only one who gets bugged by this shit? And after 7 years, shouldn’t I be able to tune it out?
Similarly, I’ve heard “droll” used as a negative adjective to describe something that’s either not funny or distasteful.
“Per say.”
“Wa la!”
Maniacal as mane eee akul. Kill.
I must be having a high density day, but surely nachos is the plural of nacho ?
Isn’t this the standard usage of droll ? A kind of dry ‘damning with faint praise’ way of responding to weak jokes ?
The usage that I find most vexatious is when people employ verbose and pompous locutions in an attempt to garner incremental kudos, and then screw it up.
Tom-ay-to
it upsets me to the point that I’m considering calling the whole thing off.
Eh? Not that I’m aware of. Merriam Webster says:
Dictionary.com says:
And:
It’s also listed as a synonym for “funny” on thesaurus.com.
I have heard it used sarcastically on more than one occasion. That could be what you were thinking of, but the people I’m talking about have used it in a seriously derisive manner.
You’re completely incorrect. The word was borrowed into English in the 17th century and Anglicised then. If you’re pronouncing it in a Spanish manner, then you’re using a foreign word where an English word would do i.e. being pretentious.
So, the BBC have the pronunciation correct, whereas the Spanish pronunciation is a 20th century affectation.
I guess it depends on regional accents, I pronounce them thusly:
“do” = doo
“due” = jyoo
For me, “due” and “dew” are homophones, but “do” is pronounced differently.
Two whooshes in one post – Indygrrl and Charger.
Not bad if I may say so myself.
FTR, it is true that I really couldn’t care less about this whole RO.
Hey, if it weren’t for the RO, someone would be pronouncing you RedFurree, instead of RedFeeuree. One’s roadkill, the other’s an angry commie.
That ocean up north is the Arc-tic.
There’s a fucking c in the word.
It’s not Ar-tic.
Drives me up a tree.
While I do have my own pet peeves, correctness is more a matter of hitting the proper rhetorical register than actually conforming to some rules as handed down by some omniscient authority. Language is actually quite flexible in terms of actual communication, but one ought to be aware of how certain ideolects are judged by others.
’Axe’ for ‘ask’ - Apparently, some people have more trouble than most pronouncing sounds in certain orders. I don’t have my textbooks with me, but this particular case is a well known phenomenon which in severe cases makes people transform ‘desk’ into ‘deks.’ Well, it sounds severe to me. I had a professor once named Garstka, which has a syllable cluster that apparently slavic speakers can handle with no trouble, but most english speakers unconsciously transformed into the a cluster easier on the english tongue: Gartska. There are probably other unconscious re-ordering phenomena, possibly explaining why so many people who have no trouble saying ‘Vietnam’ will also say ‘Vietmanese.’
Foreign words and phrases - How much foreign-ness does one bring over? None tends to sound ignorant, but you can quickly also sound pretentious, and everyone has their own axes to grind. Personally, I like ‘hunta,’ and if I’m feeling whimsical (and I often am) I’ll exagerate the roughness of the ‘h.’
Nukular - Sounds very ugly to me, and does come across as ignorant, sometimes willfully so. I read an article once that claimed that George W. Bush used to pronounce the word correctly, but adapted the incorrect pronunciation as he started running for public office in order to sound more folksy.
emPHAsis on the wrong syllAble - Actually, I find it remarkable and useful that standards vary as little as they do. Generally, I can use my modern english ear to pick out the meter in Chaucer’s english. But differences in stress can lead to differences in pronunciation in modern english, as unaccented vowels tend to be reduced toward the schwa. This is why my students get affect and effect confused – the second syllable has the stress, so the first syllable gets reduced to ‘uh’ in both cases.
Spelling - Although I’m not the world champion of spelling, I do think more orthodoxy is needed in the written language than in the spoken language. I advise my students that certain spelling errors are particularly telling: ‘lier’ for ‘liar’ or ‘biass’ for ‘biased’ as examples. These tell the reader that they’re dealing with someone who doesn’t actually do a lot of reading, otherwise they would know how these words should look in writing despite how they are pronounced. Fair or not, we make decisions about who is likely to have something intelligent to say based on such observations.
Word Play - I suspect that some odd pronunciations have their origin in word play and somehow got concretized. I found it amusing for a while to say ‘accrumulate’ until I noticed one day that I was saying it unironically. Now suppose I’d had a child around who didn’t know the difference? They’d catch the meme without any ironic sense at all. I’m all for whimsy in language, but I have to remind myself to stop using a whimsical pronunciation before its whimsey has entirely died. Besides, recently I texted the word “idears” to my wife and now I’m worried that the phone learned the word, since I’ve noticed that if I enter the word ‘that’ followed by an appostrophe, the predictive texting now fills in “That’d be swell.” I suspect it learned that from me.
Who cares? About two in ten Anglos get even close to pronouncing my given name properly – I hardly ever bother to correct them unless asked.
But don’t you dare call me late for dinner!
Stress is as much a marker of accent as individual phonetic pronunciations. It’s (partly) how you can tell an American from a Brit with the word aluminum (plus the extra syllable the British seem to insist on adding as well ).
I don’t want to spark that debate, either, but your comment here reminded me of one that really already is a lost battle…the French word “forte,” which pretty much universally is pronounced “for-tay” by Americans, but is actually properly pronounced “fort” in French, as it does not have an accent over the E. (I didn’t know that until recently, when I read about it, looked it up, and found it was true. You’d think I would have figured it out sooner, having taken 5 years of French and having some rudimentary idea of how to pronounce it, but it never occured to me.) Anyway, if you tried to say it that way, you would certainly be considered to be pronouncing it incorrectly.
The pronunciation I hear most often is “Ree-see cups,” without the s at the end.