There, there, of course they do.
Little tiny spiky trees without trunks.
I always thought a pry-mer was a simple book you taught children out of or white paint you put underneath real paint and a prim-mer was an embroidered or cross-stitched ABC or witty saying you hung on your wall.
That makes sense to me… a first book, or a *first * coat of paint. Therefore, the prime-r, from the same root as primary. Needless to say, I’ve always pronounced it pry-mer.
Seems to me it’s faster to just go to the grocery store. 
Agreed. I’ve always pronounced it “Pry-mer”. I long ago learned that the proper pronunciation was “primmer”, but I’ve never used it, because
1.) Everyone ELSE pronounces it “Pry-mer”. I’ve almost never heard “primmer”
2.)It’s stupid, given the word’s origin and meaning.
I’ve made a conscious decision to always pronounce it “pry-mer”, to promote what seems a more reasonable pronunciation. “Primmer” is, at best, a bizarre vestige. (I’ve never thought it was “British”, and never heard that asserted.)
I feel the same way about “impious”, which, according to the dictionaries, ought to be “IMP-ee-us”. I pronounce it “im-PIE-us”, which makes much more sense. Or I would, if I ever did pronounce it aloud. I never seem to get the opportunity.
I also aspirate the “H” and use the indefinite"a" in constructions like “a historic occasion”. “an historic occasion” sounds stilted and affected and simply wrong. I certainly do pronounce that “h”.
I remember in sixth or seventh grade reading a biography of John F. Kennedy and wondering why it spent so much time talking about this other Kennedy brother named Jack. Bobby and Teddy didn’t get this much attention in John’s bio, and I’d never heard of Jack Kennedy.
I didn’t realize Jack was a nickname for John until forty or fifty pages into the book.
Excuse me? Jack is used as a nickname for John? The people I know who use those manes use them separately.
Yes, Jack is a nickname for John. No rule against using it as a given name, though, unless you’re in one of those countries with naming restrictions.
It’s an old usage that was going out of style even when JFK was around. The real question is why someone named John would need a nickname. 
I was embarrassingly old before I found out that Norwegian wood was not a line of furniture or a particularly good species of tree to burn in fireplaces. I’m still finding phrases in songs I’ve heard for 20+ years mean something different than I thought they did.
Err… what?
[sub]This is not making me look good…[/sub]
What does “Norwegian wood” mean then? The song’s not about how he slept with a girl who’s place had a lot of wooden fittings?
Well, when the father is John, and at least one grandfather is John, and an uncle on the mother’s side is John, and there are at least two other cousins named John, nicknames are useful.
And really, Jack/John is a much less weird nickname connection than Daisy/Margaret.
I was embarassingly old (20-something) before I realized that the “La Jolla” (that I’d read about) was the same place as “Lahoya” (that I’d heard of) despite the fact I speak and read Spanish. (not well, but enough that it should have been obvious).
Well, not that different. “Norwegian wood” was literal, at least partially; it was common for tackier homes to be made of wood from Norway or Norwegian companies at the time (in Liverpool, I guess?), and the girl literally lived in a home made of Norwegian wood. He wasn’t burning Norwegian logs in the fireplace, he burned her house down. That’s how the Beatles explain it, anyway.
I used to live a couple of miles from La Jolla (I just got back from a doctor appt. there, actually) and it was always amusing to talk to tourists who wanted to know how to get to “luh jawluh”, with a “j” as in “Jordan”.
Another San Diego place name: La Jolla never threw me, but I was quite old before I realized that Jamacha (written) and Hamishaw (spoken) were the same place. In my defense, even a knowledge of Spanish wouldn’t help with that one, since it’s originally a Kumeyaay word with Spanish orthography in an English-speaking context.
Try being on the east coast (Long Island, temporarily) and running into gee-CAM-ah.
No, really, it’s pronounced HICK-e-mah. Really! I promise!
(Yes, I know it looks like a turnip. Tastes more like water chestnuts. Really! I promise!)
Back on topic: I wholly mis-pronounced “yacht” the first time I tried reading it aloud. “More of an ahhhh sound”, my 5th-grade teacher said. “Yaaaahkt” was my best attempt.
Until about a year ago, I thought “brassiere” and “brazier” were pronounced the same way: “bra-zeer.”
La Jolla. Huh.
I was in my 40s before my husband pointed out to me that exits with two options, the first one goes to the right, the second to the left (in the US drive on right system).
That’s helped me a lot, since I usually knew which direction I wanted, but a or b, or even worse, south or north, meant nothing.
My bookworm mispronunciations were discipline and the English term gaol.
I finished reading the other two pages of the thread to see if anyone corrected you on this. Saw that no one did, so I went back and found your original post. I was just about to hit the reply key when I saw this:
:smack:
I don’t know if anyone has responded to this, but its’s air-ee-ODD-nee.
My friend Vashti (rhymes with Bash-tie) named her daughter that.
I won’t go into specifics, but I had some really really really off ideas about how men and women had sex that were based on figurative and flowery language in romance novels that I took literally or on my observations of animal husbandry. Since my parents didn’t talk about the specifics of sex (it wasn’t taboo so much as they were uncomfortable with it) and there was no such thing as sex education in middle school when I was there, let’s just say that if I had scored with a girl before I was 15 or 16 its theme-song would have been One Night Only cause she wouldn’t have gone on another date.
I believed the “Charles Drew was the African-American who invented plasma storage and died because no white hospital would treat him” Urban Legend until my first year on the Dope. (Hell, it was in books and on an episode of MAS*H, so it had to be right.)
I believed that hypnosis could produce memories of past lives to an embarassing age (early 20s or so). I totally misunderstood the nature of the practice.
Did you notice Jack Kennedy, and John Gilbert Layton?