I say “nachos” like “NAH-cho’s” - rhyming with “macho”, I guess. The first syllable rhymes with saw or thaw, yes, but with a little less “long” on it. I don’t really know what you mean by “say the w” - I do and don’t.
I’m guessing the confusion comes from regional dialects: some Americans pronounce “cot” and “caught” with the same vowel, and some don’t. To my ear, “thaw” and “thought” have the same sound, but I think Easterners would make a distinction.
My own contribution: I didn’t have any idea what toilet paper was for until I was about 10. I don’t know how I missed that part of toilet training, especially since whenever I was slow to learn something, my dad would yell rhetorically, “Am I still gonna have to wipe your ass for you when you’re 21?” I guess I just thought it was an idiom.
I was also really late to a basic religious literacy. I had the idea that Mary was God’s wife, and therefore some sort of goddess herself, until I heard Jesus Christ Superstar when I was in high school. More complex things like the Trinity I didn’t learn until I was 30, after graduate school. Note: I also had two years of Catholic high school, but by Grade 11 they assume you know the fundamentals. I can remember the revelation when I was 16 and realized I wasn’t Christian, not because of a well-reasoned atheism but because I had never internalized basic concepts like salvation and monotheism.
I’m the same, right down to the crappy Tracfone. (Though I did finally break down & get one a couple years ago after pressure from my GF, so you have me beat there). Don’t know how to text or store people’s numbers in the thing. Still have like a million little slips of paper w/ phone numbers on them I have to burrow through & find if I want to call somebody & don’t know the number by heart.
Don’t have/know how to use a digital camera either, still using those throw aways.
Pretty pathetic! :smack:
This is where regional pronunciation differences make it difficult for someone to say, “said like X, not Y” because someone else will pronounce those the same, etc.
For me, what he was saying is similar to the difference in my pronunciation of Don versus Dawn. Dawn has a more pronounced ‘awww’ sound, where Don is more ‘ahhh’*. Another example of this is cot versus caught.
So the other guy saying he’d pronounce nachos as “naw-chos” sounds like if I pronounced ‘Don’ or ‘cot’ with a ‘w’. It’d sound really weird to me.
- When I worked in corporate IT, it threw me when I called a California location where Don and Dawn are homonyms!
Oh yeah, same here with the camera thing. Literally the very first time I’d ever held one in my hand was when I was working for a newspaper (five or six years ago) and I had to go out and photograph a customer for an ad I was putting together. I had to kind of bluff my way into getting a co-worker to show me how to use it and I was as nervous as a cat when I got to the client’s office. In truth, they’re not that complex and I was able to get a decent shot but to this day I will not volunteer to take someone’s picture, be they a stranger / tourist or the person I’m with at the time. And I too still use the throw aways. I are scared of technology:(
There have been threads about this term before. I seem to remember that it’s actually a variation of “homey” or “homeboy”. Therefore, technically it’s “homes”, not “holmes”.
When I was in eight grade the saying was, “Yo! Holmes”. We were cracking on the kid, not calling them Homey.
Just like. “No shit Sherlock.”
See posts 121 and 122.
Erm, yes. All three of those words rhyme perfectly, to me.
“natchoze” and “nachoze” are also identical to me.
So you just… went around dirty?
I guess. I don’t remember it being a problem, but kids can turn a blind eye to all sorts of disgusting, can’t they? I did wear underwear, bathe frequently, and live in an otherwise sanitary environment.
I was in my 40’s before I ever heard of a carpenter bee. I was building a garage and found 3 perfectly drilled holes in the wood. Who goes around drilling vertical holes in stuff? Then I saw what looked like a bumble bee fly out of one of the holes. It was like seeing a UFO. I just stood there and looked at it in confusion.
OK, kind of silly, but a few weeks ago, maybe about a month ago, I was watching The Soup and Joel McHale talked about a singer I never heard of before. He said her name as “K. E. Dollar Sign H. A.” I’m thinking to myself, “I wonder how that’s pronounced.” :smack:
A week or so later I hear an ad for some music and they mention an artist I’ve never heard of named Kesha. I look at the TV and see she spells it Ke$ha. :smack:
Well, I won’t tell you that’s wrong, because it fits in perfectly with my impression of how Commonwealth English-speakers pronounce Spanish, but American English speakers (my guess is Canadians, too) would pronounce that a as one would the a in farm.
My guess is that if you started doing that in Australia, though, it would get you some weird looks.