At least she learned it. The geography teacher of a friend of mine refused to believe him when he said Spain is not “right beside Colombia.” He claims he didn’t bother listen to her for the whole rest of the year.
I can clearly recall the day (in a ninth grade English class) when I gave an example of a “false friends” pair of words: “The two words MISLED (“MY-zled”) and MISLED (“Miss-led”) are pronounced differently, yet are spelled the same and even mean the same thing!”
(Insert sound of mental defrag operation kicking in)
“Ah… Never mind.”
Somehow I had read the word “misled” before hearing it, pronounced it “MY-zled” in my whatever-year-old head, and subsequently acknowledged the existence of the word “mis-led” without ever realizing they were the same until then.
That’s fascinating, Nava. You’re right: it’s one of those things people never think about. I still think that my reaction is related to the direction in which English text is read, though.
I had a similar “why didn’t I ever notice this” reaction when I first encountered Japanese comics and discovered that the artwork went right-to-left, because that’s how the columns of text went…
That’s exactly how I thought the word was pronounced as well.
For the longest time, I believed that Flushing Meadows, NY, got its name from a local toilet manufacturer! 
I was like 8 years old before I realized my teachers didn’t sleep at the school, and the people who worked at the Safeway didn’t live there. :o
I thought until I was in my 40s that “vapid” was related to "vapor’, and so I pronounced it “vay-pid” in my head. I think I’ve only said the word out loud to my wife, who corrected me. And for a long time, never having heard it spoken, I thought “flaccid” was pronounced as though the two Cs were S - “flassid” rather than the first C as an X - “flaxid.” That’s what it looks like, doesn’t it?
What? Vapid isn’t pronounced “vay-pid”?
I just found out the pineapple thing this thread.
I knew how to say ‘awry.’ I knew what it meant. But when I saw it in print, for the longest time, I pronounced it in my head ‘AHH-ree.’ It just clicked one day that ‘ah-RYE’ and ‘awry’ were the same words.
It doesn’t? How do you restart the heart then?
Re: “vapid” - Nope. The first syllable rhymes with “crap.”
Both are correct. You can hear both pronunciations here:
Yeah, it’s amazing how much female anatomy we gay guys don’t get. I didn’t understand this till I was in my ***forties!!! ***And a few years later, I was shocked to learn that a lot of women still think they pee out of their vaginas. I know it’s hard to see down there, but don’t they wonder how they can still pee when wearing a tampon?
Up until about 30 seconds ago, I thought the same thing for exactly the same reason.
There we go, my first one. I thought Awry was AHH rie. I hope I haven’t said it like that yet.
One day, well into my adult years, my dad asked me if I could paint the back fence at his townhouse. The condo association provided the paint store name as well as the brand and color of the paint.
I remember driving to the store thinking to myself “I hope they’re not out of this color…”
Of course, for those who have never bought paint, it’s almost all white and they color it to order when you buy it :smack:.
Another –
When I was young, my brother had a fancy switchblade knife that his friend had smuggled home from Germany. The blade was stamped “Rostfrei” in the same fashion that Swiss Army Knives bear the Victorinox name. My brother went on to tell me about the high quality of knives made by Rostfrei and that they were a prestigious German knifemaking firm.
I believed this for decades, until I saw the fine Rostfrei name showing up in one too many low-quality places. In case you don’t speak German: “rostfrei” = “stainless”
I was going to correct this, until I saw that you actually did say that it was the angle that matters, not the distance from the sun; even if the northern hemisphere were closer during the summer, the distance involved is so minuscule compared to the distance to the sun that it would (and does) make no difference.
I told my wife about this thread, and she said I should tell you that when she was a kid, she thought “melancholy” was pronounced as it’s spelled, with the soft “ch” sound - she thought it was “me-LAN-cho-ly” until she saw the Smashing Pumpkins album called “Melon Collie & The Infinite Sadness” and put the two together.
Okay, I’ll bite. Which episode of TNG was this, and why did it give you this impression?
(Because I can’t remember a Trek episode where a woman crapped out a kid! :eek: )
I was going to answer earlier but got interrupted. In my case at least it’s because I didn’t use a tampon until I was sexually active. My mother would have flipped if I was using tampons before that. Anything inserted into you takes your virginity away, after all. :rolleyes: We won’t think about the stuff that twelve years of professional dance does to you!
IOne of my solar power books says that the variation in the Earth’s distance from the sun only results in about a 5% variation in received power on a surface at right-angles to the sun’s rays at the distance of the Earth.
Given the way that the incoming solar power is spread out at different angles across the surface of the Earth at different seasons and times of day, a 5% variation in the incoming intensity would be swallowed up by the variations at ground level.