Pronunciacions that make you seethe with anger!

Not here there ain’t.

Both are legit. Dudes just have to get used to that fact that a number of words have two legit pronuciations, especially British vs American English. It’s not like you Aussies don’t have a different regional pronuciation for a number of words, too.

How do you pronounce ‘margarine’?

Absolutely. Our choice of classy, correct behaviour. :smiley:

Ahem
Sir Humphrey Davy (an Englishman) invented the name “aluminum” (note, “aluminum” not “aluminium”) for the metal. However, in common usage the name evolved into “aluminium” to match the naming convention of other elements. In 1925 the United States decided to switch back to the original spelling and pronunciation of the word. Also note that in 1925 we were kings of the aluminum industry. So THERE. :stuck_out_tongue:

I’ll cop to the soft “g”. That’s the way I learned it, at my mammy’s knee.

This tends to suggest that your choice is one of those “Do as I say, not as I do” things.

Well played, sir. Go Brits, and all that.

:wink:

First I thought “I have none”. Then I thought “Oh god, ‘Saracuse’.” It’s Syracuse, people. Seeeeracuse. And it’s not in Upstate New York just because it’s upstate from here. It’s in the dag-nabbed center of the state.

How else do you build an empire?

In all seriousness, you need to bear in mind that our encounters with Spanish are not dominated by Latin American pronunciations. We tend to have a greater Castillian influence in ways we might have absorbed any particular word. This is on top of any more general aspects of how much we may or may not alter words which become absorbed into everyday English.

…because one person used the spelling in advertisments. Still so proud?

So this mispronunciation is not limited to the South nor is it restricted to one racial group. Kind of makes me wonder why you brought up the issues of region and race.

I’ve lived in the South for almost sixty-five years and I’ve never noticed any mispronunciations of “Reese’s.” But if there were to be a dialectical difference, that would not reflect ignorance. They would just be imitating what they hear and passing that on to those who hear them.

Dialects aren’t about ignorance. I’m certain President Kennedy knew that the island country ninety miles off the coast of Florida was not spelled C-u-b-e-r.

Well, maybe you’ll be lucky and your relator will be an athelete.

I can’t think of any off the top of my head, to be honest with you. Most of it follows British English, AFAICT.

Espresso is a delicious coffee concentrate. Wonderful on its own or as added to a blended drink.

Expresso is an abomination unto the Lord.

Another one:

I had a good friend in college named “Juno”

Pronounced “Hoo-no”

No matter how many times I corrected him, my father would still address her as “Joo-no”

I’ve never forgiven him for this.

Hah! The way the British pronounce “Cádiz” and “jaguar” has nothing whatsoever to do with Castillian Spanish, and everything to do with ignoring entirely the Spanish pronunciation. :stuck_out_tongue:

Sounds like my mother. Does she pronounce “poor” as “poo-er” and “humble” like " umble" (for some reason omitting the H and emphasizing the omission by forcing a glottal stop to make sure you know she’s omitting the H) ?

Oh, I could go on about my folks and their pronounciations. Shrafnel. Helment. It’s like they read books in order to come up with new words to mispronounce.

Are you sure he didn’t mean he asked her without the urge to punch her in the face? As I only learned a couple of years ago, pacific means “peaceful.” I suppose I should have gathered that sooner as it shares a root with pacifist, but I’d never heard it without being connected to the ocean until then.

It bugs me when news folks decide to change the pronunciations of place names. Yesterday one on NEC was going on about “I-rock.” For a second or two I wondered if Apple had released a product to compete with Rockstar and it was causing violence.

If you have to repair one, teh correct pronunciation is often Quagmire.

Only when you are talking about the metal in a Quagmire.
:smiley:

To my horror, I saw this on the cover of a women’s magazine while I was buying food a couple of weeks ago. I was previously ignorant of it. I worked out what it was, of course, but I was dismayed. Celyn’s description of it as ‘very icky and twee’ is perfect.

What about men on cross horses? :slight_smile:

For many years, I had no idea that ‘vittles’ and ‘victuals’ were the same word. I read ‘vittles’ (spelt that way) in books about pioneer times in the West; ‘victuals’ was a lot less common and tended to be in nineteenth-century fiction like that written by Jules Verne.

My dialect of English has tended to lose the Y-sound in words like ‘tune’ and ‘due’; I pronounce those identically to ‘toon’ and ‘doo’. Oddly, some words had already smushed the y into the preceding consonant before we lost the Y-sound, and we’ve kept those: mature’ is ‘ma-CHURR’ for me. So we have fossils of Y-sounds that live no more.

Not where I live. We actually pronounce it closer to ‘JEIG-wahr’.

And for everyone’s amusement, here’s the infamous vocal samples thread, in which we get to actually hear each other! Most of the samples are stored on my web server, so they’re still there.

No, the singular is nachos, pronounced na-choss (not na-choes). I guess the plural would be nachoses.