I’ll send it to you.
I was going to say Don, Dawn, Aaron, and Erin, too, just for amusement, but somehow it made the file much bigger. I stopped to breathe too long, I think.
Thanks again.
Just be lucky I couldn’t find my microphone, or you all would have been treated to 15 full sentences.
Oh, I could have hauled out the horrors of my accent and diction big time, but it didn’t seem fair to unwary listeners.
Well, I was thinking of saying, “Mary was merry as she married Terry, but then Scary Larry got carried away and chased Barry’s hairy dairy cattle through the ceremony.” Oh wait. I did.
I do distinguish the last syllables of “Aaron” and “Erin” slightly…
I just know that’s going to crack me up.
You totally gave away your Canadian accent with that one.
Me? An accent? Nonsense! I speak normal! It’s all you other guys who have the accents, eh?
And I always thought it meant a “woodie”, that is, an erection. But then I was not much exposed to these things during the critical teen vocabulary-forming years.
Exposed, tee hee!
Ahem.
I now want someone to draw the wonderful image that you have given me of dairy cows stampeding through a wedding.
Since this thread has moved in a totally different direction from the OP, I feel comfortable sharing this little antidote about dialects:
My aunt grew up in the midwest and spent her young adulthood in Colorado. She then had to move to a more humid climate for my uncle’s health, and they chose a smallish town in Arkansas. She was (and is) an elementary school teacher, and probably the most prim lady you would ever hope to meet. Really, no other word can discribe her. Take the most prim person you can imagine and multiply that by seven, and you’ve got my aunt. Not uptight; just prim. (And don’t you dare tell me that one is the definition of the other. You would be correct, but you’d also be totally missing the point. Jerk.)
Anyway, aunt got a job teaching first or second graders in this small Arkansan town. On one of the first days of class, she was teaching them about vowels. She was sitting on a chair, and they were sitting on the carpet around her feet.
Aunt: (primly) Now children, we’re going to practice our vowels! I will say two words and you will repeat them after me. Ready? “pin” and “pan”
Children: (obediently) “pin” and “pan”
Aunt: (encouraging, but still prim) Very good, children! Now: “pan” and “pine”
Children: (obligingly) “pan” and “pan”
Aunt: (double take, but quickly recovers) No no, chidren. Let’s try again. “pan” and “pine.”
Children: (confused, but trying their best) “Pan!” and “Pan!”
Aunt: (at a complete loss, now stretching out the vowel sounds) “Paaan!” and “Piiine!”
Children: (some of them getting upset) “Paaaaaaan!” and “Paaaaaaan!”
Aunt: (quite flustered) “PIIINE!”
Children: (many on the verge of tears) “PAAAAAN!!”
She’s also got a fun story about an incident years later, when she had an older class (maybe sixth graders), and one of the kids had a speech impediment. Sort of. (Or so my aunt thought.) She spoke very softly, and would drop the final consonants off her words. (“mistay” for “mistake”; “preven” for “prevent”) My prim aunt would have none of this, and would gently but firmly drill her on pronounciation. But to little avail. My aunt finally called a conference with the girl’s mother.
“Your daughter is a brilliant little girl, but I’m concerned about her speech development. She speaks so softly, and drops many of her final consonants.”
“Oh yes,” agreed the mother, “She just don’t have any confiden!”
(PS:And yes, I know that the proper word is “anecdote,” thank you.)
(PPS: Reading back, both of those stories sound like email glurge, but my aunt, who would NEVER lie, swears they’re both true. She’s caught a lot of flak over the years for her Yankee accent, and she has boatloads of stories about it.)
You’d think that, but I have a supervisor who not only *says *‘pacific’, she WRITES it that way. Every time, without fail. Goodness knows what she thinks this peculiar word, ‘specific’, (that the rest of us use in our written correspondence and reports) might possibly mean.
I suppose I could correct her, but since I dislike her intensely it’s kind of satisfying to know she’s making herself look like a total idiot to her peers and manager(s).
I do this with my friends as well.
Our new favorite, when someone points out a language error, is “Well, I’m no entomologist, but…”
I try to be gender-neutral and refer to my footrest thingie as an ottoperson.
And one of my friends did literally blow on a gentleman’s penis the first time she was trying to perform oral sex. She was taking blow job literally.
Eh, if you pronounce the t with the po, you’re doing it wrong. The three sillables are chi-po-tle.
In all seriousness, I think of full-sentence examples as the best way to catch the real pronunciation lurking about in your subconscious, but YMMV.
For example, Sunspace’s one-word examples sound a tiny bit foreign to American ears, but in the full-sentence example he might as well be bellowing “HEY GUYS! I’M CANADIAN! I’M FROM ONTARIO! LOOK, I’M CANADIAN!” at the top of his lungs. 
Sounds believable to me. My last linguistics teacher has similar stories to tell about his elementary-school teaching days. It’s all a lesson in how badly English teachers need to have a background in linguistics, so they know how to handle dialects.
I knew one poor girl in middle school who did that. Unfortunately for her, the gentleman she blew on saw fit to tell the entire school (hence how I knew).
Interesting. I learned about homophones around 1975, but it’s possible they don’t predate that by much. Dictionary.com gives two much earlier, but conflicting, dates for the word origin, so that doesn’t help much.
My understanding was:
[ul]
[li]homophones – words that sound the same, but are spelled differently (That hare has short hair.)[/li][li]homographs – words that are spelled the same, but sound different (Wind your watch while the wind blows.)[/li][li]homonyms – words that sound the same *and * are spelled the same, but have different etymologies (The bear growled so loud I couldn’t bear it.)[/li][/ul]
Wikipedia claims homonyms have either the same spelling or pronunication, but not necessarily both, so homophones and homographs are types of homonyms. However, they show that “row” with oars and “row” an argument, are heteronyms since they are pronounced differently; that is, they are both homonyms and heteronyms of each other. I think that’s ridiculous, but I’ll concede the point. (And conceed it too if necessary!)
If I can prevail upon Sunspace to host one more file for me, I can give some full-sentence examples, once I think of something. But it won’t be pretty.