Sorry but I never hear anyone pronounce it the former; always the latter. I don’t think I’ve ever heard it pronounced that way once in my life.
I’ve heard it both ways plenty of times. I consider both correct, but I use the latter.
That reminds me of a former supervisor. She says sonnometer all the time. Apparently that’s a unit of measure. There are 2.4 sonnometers in an unch.
Ah! That makes sense. Kind of how, when I lived in Mexico, I couldn’t bring myself to pronounce “Popeye” as “poe-PAY-yay,” even though that’s how my Mexican friends pronounced it.
Damn you people all the way to the fiery pits of hell.
Earl Snake-Hips Tucker, Ambivalid, I suppose I was either wrongly taught, lo these many decades ago, or modern usage has screwed yet another innocent word.
How about micrometer?
I suppose kilometer is just so much more difficult to pronounce than millimeter, centimeter, nanometer; all words in vast everyday worldwide use.
grumble
Has hurt-attack from eating too much pasghetti and needs ambliance ride to research at the libary.
In Febuary.
A colleague of mine pronounces Travelocity as Travel O’City.
Just in from the front lines:
Orientated.
One that continually pisses me off is the common medical pronunciation of “centimeter” as SOHN-ti-meter.
Someone (possibly here on the SDMB) was telling me about someone pronouncing queue as check.
As a kid, I saw the word “queue” written somewhere and thought it was “kwa-yoo-ee-oo-ee”.
Other than that…once a student in a high school computer class pronounced the CTRL key on a keyboard as “Sitrull”.
What a goon.
How hard is it to say ‘hap-a-LEYN-yo’? Shees.
I had a Mexican coworker who always said ‘jes’ for yes. I wrote “lles” and asked him to read it. From then on he said it pretty much the right way.
I had written about how the Spanish “y/ll” sound is made by placing your tongue midway between the English “y” and the English “j” – but your data point indicates that, for some native Spanish speakers at least, whether it’s written “y” or “ll” can influence where exactly the tongue is placed (or at least is preceived by the speaker to be placed.)
(The “ll/y” distinction is certainly big in Argentina, where “ll” sounds like an English “sh”. Say “Como te SHAmas?” with an Italian lilt, and you’ll sound like an Argentinian.)
Just remembered my grandmother would say “warsh” instead of “wash.” That seemed to be common in her corner of rural Arkansas. I loved my grandmother and would give a lot to hear her say it again.
Has “fustrated” instead of “frustrated” been mentioned yet? If not; “fustrated”. Fuckin’ a.
I had a supervisor who wrote things down with a ‘pilcil’. I always wondered if the writing instrument with ink in it might be a ‘pil’.
If “an hotel” is good enough for the unhappy John Hector McFarlane, it’s good enough for me.
If cañon for canyon is good enough for Arthur [del]Coñan[/del] Conan Doyle, it’s good enough for me.
Sorry, no link. Every search for that one turned up the Sherlock Holmes “canon,” and I suspect online editing and/or the North American market has changed everywhere it should appear to canyon.
I agree. Even my long-ago, Spanish-as-a-first-language girlfriend (from Spain) pronounced “llama” in English as “lama.” That’s what she called them when we visited the zoo. With me speaking only English, she never failed to call the animals, “lamas” when we were looking at them and speaking English.
I’ve found that most Canadians just say K (pronounced “kay”). I don’t know why; but I can offer that many Canadians will say that it is “eighty K” to the next town (meaning, it is 80 kilometers to the next town), or their car does “10 l per hundred K” (meaning their car burns ten liters of fuel per hundred kilometers). Certainly, it is not uncommon to hear that “it’s 720 K to Sault Ste. Marie,” or similar, when discussing distances.
I remember “cañon,” too, from an old print edition of the Holmes stories. Well, they were written when cowboys still roamed the West, and the Spanish word hadn’t yet been fully incorporated into English.
Similarly, “ourang-outang” from some 19th-C story (Poe?), before the Malay word had fully settled into English as “orangutan”.