Mine likes to call Kingshighway “King Shyway”.
I have a female relative by marriage who would drive you all insane with her misuse and mispronunciation of words.
Her current word, that I’ve tried to correct… psychology… ‘I saw the psychology today’. She can say psychiatrist but can seem to manage psychologist.
And a lot of the mispronunciations I can place by region. A few of the dialectal words I am occasionally guilty of myself.
I spent 3 + years in Naples, Italy and never managed to learn to speak the language. I did learn enough to be understood but a proper conversation with the proper verb tenses and articles never came about. However, I did become a freak about the proper pronunciation of italian words.
Gnocchi is one of the words that I annoy folks about… No - key. The g is silent.
Oh, and one from my mother… hydrangenia instead of hydrangea. I thought it was just her till someone else came into the store looking for a hydrangenia.
Sister-in-law was living in Kentucky… Versailles is pronounced Ver-sails.
If you’re going to veer to odd local pronunciations of place names, Indiana has Versailles as in Kentucky, Milan is MY-lun, Russiaville is pronounced Rooshaville, and La Fontaine is La Fountain.
Yeah, my first attempt at pronouncing the word archipelago caused my husband to laugh at me for about five minutes.
Every time I see the signs on I-24 for Wartrace, TN, I always chuckle, wondering just how they race those warts.
After a friend of mine misprounced it as Wart Race, that’s what I call it, too!
Centimeter pronounced as son-ti-me-ter is a snooty nursing school thing. Many early nursing traditions have connections to French. I’ve seen some nurses who use “et” (French for “and”) when writing orders, for example. I regard this sort of nonsense as a ridiculous affectation.
Since my reading vocabulary far outstrips what I have occasion to use in ordinary conversation, I have that moment of doubt when I use a word I’ve never heard before and didn’t bother to look up to find out how it is said. I’ve probably butchered hundreds of words in my lifetime.
Just remembered someone who would pronounce “co-worker” as “cow-orker,” but that’s another one on purpose, as he’d first read Dilbert’s Scott Adams doing it.
I was working at a tasting event and heard a girl say (at least 5 times) “Stella Artois” with the -oiz. She kept saying how it tasted “too fancy” . Ha.
There’s a city near Pittsburgh called North Versailles, and it’s pronounced like that. When the public transit installed systems that announce the destination of the bus, the voice on the North Versailles bus pronounced it like the city in France, causing much confusion.
In grad school, we had to take some sort of science policy course and we studied Copernicus. One of my fellow students kept calling him - Copper-nick-us. Again and again. I barely kept it together.
How about the word “decal”?
Can I have a show of hands… who pronounces it DECK-ul and who pronounces it DEE-kal?
Where I grew up it was DECK-ul. My wife thought I was speaking gibberish until she realized, “Oh, you’re saying DEE-kal?” Where we now live I know I’m in the minority on this but I can’t change now (not that it comes up often except when Mrs. Call wants to make fun of me.)
Erm, no, it’s just the way the word is pronounced. I’ve never heard it pronounced any other way, in Britain or Italy.
Edit: OK, I have now, in the American examples on this page. It sounds ridiculous and wrong. Scroll down to the native Italian speakers’ pronunciations and you’ll hear that the first “o” is much closer to the British pronunciation than the American one.
More food annoyances: John Torode (UK MasterChef presenter but of Antipodean convict stock :p) pronounces pasta as “PUS-tuh”, which makes it sound very unappetising.
It’s the way he pronounces brilliant as breeeee-yunt that gets my goat. That and the fact that he always uses I when he means we. Always.
“Show Gregg and I what you can do”
“This is what you need to do to impress Gregg and I”
Arghghghghghgh
I know that’s got nothing to do with pronunciation, but surely whoever writes the scripts for Masterchef should have battered that out of him by now?
In some hip-hop and certain urban Southern circles, words beginning with “every” are pronounced “erry”; “errybody” for everybody, “errywhere” for everywhere, etc. Whenever I hear it it sounds so forced and silly.
Waxy (or waxing) elephants. I actually prefer it to waxing eloquent, and use it often.
Human cry, instead of ‘hue and cry’.
I honestly saw this one in writing in a memo: “She’s just such a pre Madonna.” I wondered if perhaps she was referring to Cher.
I had an interesting discussion in a different thread (or was it this one?!?) a couple months ago about British vs. American pronunciation of Italian/Spanish vowels. I was sure that Americans spoke closer to the original languages (and I speak Spanish well, without much English interference, so I’m told.) American “PAH-sta” vs. British “PAE-sta” (I’m using “ae” for the sound in “sad”.) American “rih-ZOW-tow” vs. British “rih-ZAH-tah”.
But the other poster (Hibernicus) convinced me that the original Italian/Spanish sounds are neither like the American nor the British approximations. They are, rather, “mid-vowels.” So, the Brits and Americans are BOTH a little “wrong”. (With the “o” in “risotto”, the Americans are clearly “wrong” when they add that “-w”, making the vowel a diphthong). I was perceiving the Brit pronunciation of “pasta” as much more wrong than the American one, for an interesting reason: the most common Brit “ae” sound (as in “sad”) is not as wide-smiley-mouthed as the American pronunciation of the same sound…but I was “hearing” (perceiving) Gordon Ramsey use the American version, even though he really wasn’t. And the Brit “ae” really is a bit closer to the Italian/Spanish “a” than the American “ae” is.
Years ago, when I first started this job (as an editor), I was sitting in an editorial meeting where in the lead editor was chastising us for missing some edits. Mistakes had been published, so we were going to have to work harder to improve. She asked us to be more viligent. She said it three times. I looked around the room to see if anyone else had caught her error. This would be a great room to play poker in because not one person showed a shred of reaction on their face about our instructions to be constantly viligent.
Vigilant. :facepalm:
Runners up:
My mother doesn’t know there’s another syllable after “hamburg.” She’s never called it “hamburger.” “Doll” and “dollar” are “dahl” and “dahler.”
And my dad can’t get “animosity.” He prefers to skip over one of the syllables and call it “amosity.”
Also despised: eck-specially, eck-cetera, eck-spresso.
I once very patiently explained to an Air Force airman that the reason “nuke-you-lar” is the incorrect pronunciation is because there’s only one “u” in the word. "Why do you say it “nuke-clee-ar?” he asked. “Spell it.” “N-U-C-L-E-A-R.” “Good. Now please explain to me why you want to pronounce a “U” sound in between the “C” and the “L”.” He actually thanked me for educating him so he could stop sounding like a rube. I blame George W. Bush for that one.
On the contrary, Americans, in my experience (certainly in many US TV ads) almost always say “an herb”, which always sounded very odd to my British ears. By contrast, I am quite comfortable with “an historic”, although I would probably be more likely to say “a historic” myself. People tend to use “an” when an initial H is silent or very weakly stressed. That is not really a national difference, just the application of the standard English rule for nouns that begin with vowel sounds. What does differ from place to place, and even individual to individual, is how strongly the initial H is pronounced in particular words. Perhaps it varies over time too. I believe “an hotel” used to be common, but I doubt that it is any more.
I had a Latin teacher - Oxford educated, I believe, and a bit of commie - who sometimes talked of cah-PIT-alism, and the Russian leader Sta-LEEN.