I’ve always wanted to do ‘O Canada’ to the tune of ‘O Superman’.
Or vice versa.
I’d settle for “Oh Hanukkah.”
English spelling is terrible. It’s common for intelligent, well-read people to misspell and mispronounce words, because English spelling isn’t phonetic. You can sound things out sometimes, but there are enough traps that you can’t rely on it. You really just have to memorize. So there are many mispronunciations and misspellings I wouldn’t call stupid. It would be dumb for an adult to pronounce “cough” as if it were “cog” (unless it was as a joke), but putting the accent on the wrong syllable of “execrable” is just a matter of not knowing.
Back in middle school, I happened to mention that I liked butter PE-c’n ice cream, and was immediately assaulted with a chorus of “pe-KAHN”! Apparently my whole family said it wrong. Positively mortifying for my young self!
Once heard a guy on NPR talking about a puh-RID-ih-gum. Took a few seconds to realize he meant paradigm.
That’s how a lot of people pronounce it in Britain.
As long as its used correctly, I cut some slack. When I was college age and my sister was in middle school, we were talking and she mispronounced an exotic term, but she used it correctly. I corrected her and she looked at me and said “The problem with reading a lot of books is that I know a lot more words than I can pronounce.” I could only agree.
I agree also and it still happens to me~ah, the sweet perils of reading…
This is a weird one because both sound correct to me, and I can’t really remember which way I’d normally say it! I think I actually use both pronunciations, “I’ll have some butter pe-KAHN ice cream and then a handful of PEA-cans.”
When we lived in the US, my Canadian wife attended a social event that started with the Pledge of Allegiance, and she stood mute, then explained “I’m Canadian”. Someone asked “Don’t you say the Pledge of Allegiance in Canada?”
I can’t remember what podcast I was listening to (Radiolab?) but it was a collection of people who lived a long time before learning something very obvious. One of the women was having a conversation with her college friends and someone mentioned a unicorn. So she said, “I forget. Are unicorns extinct or just endangered?”
Everybody laughed, of course, until they realized she was serious.
I was riding the bus back from college in Indianapolis in 2000, and there was a mother there with her four-or-five-year-old son. The son was standing up in his seat and generally making a ruckus, and another rider complained about it. (As I recall, we had to stop the bus and get the police involved).
The inattentive mother screamed at the complainer, “Did you squeeze that boy out of your pussy?”
Even funnier if the complainer was male.
Wait…
<pulls out dictionary>
Oh, EX-ec-ra-ble…now I’m not sure I’ve ever heard that word spoken or used it myself out loud. I know I used it recently, but I think I only typed it as one does these days.
Agreed on those two. But FCM was talking about PEE-c’ns with a schwa in the second syllable. That’s just wrong.
“Almond” is a fun one too.
“AH-mund” bordering on “AH-m’nd” seems to be the default US pronunciation. Though often the trailing D gets mostly or entirely swallowed. So “AH-mund” and “AH-m’nd”.
But most almonds are grown in central California and folks there in the industry pronounce it “AMM’n” which rhymes with jammin’ as in informally playin’ with the band or “famine” as in mass starvation.
And I hear more and more people including anywhere from a hint to a lot of the “L” sound in there along with a bigger longer initial broad A sound. They’re becoming "AAHl-mund on the way to "AAHL-mund .
I’m reading all of these “ough” words, and am reminded of the Dr. Seuss essay The Tough Coughs as he Ploughs the Dough. It’s about an immigrant who has a hard time with those words, at first thinking they should all be pronounced the same, and later with just mixing them up. The last part of the story has him in a boxing ring, wanting to quit, and instead of saying “Enough, enough! I’m through!” , he said it as “Enoo, enoo, I’m thruff!”. The other boxer thought he was swearing at him in a foreign language and beat him to a pulp.
A few years ago, I had 2nd period conference, 2nd being the time they had a student read the Daily Bulletin over the intercom system. At the end of the announcements they would add a vocabulary word that the English teachers would try to work into their lessons. I was outside the principal’s office (where said announcing was going on) when I heard the student say that today’s word was “En-you-eye.” Apparently the whole school heard me yell “That’s “ennui,” you nimrod!” in the background.
I have since learned to be more supportive. Sometimes.
It happens in Spanish too and Spanish is phonetic, we even have tildes to specify where the word should be stressed.
But even with that, those of us who learned words by reading tend to mispronounce them, In my particular case I never paid attention to tildes when reading (or writing, to my school teachers despair), so I mispronounced a lot of of words. (I still mispronounce “Hostil”(Hostile), in my head at least. (It should be pronounded HOStil but I think of it as hosTIL))
He missed a couple of sounds, so I’ve added two words: The tough coughs as he ploughs thoroughly through the dough.
At least the tough isn’t ploughing up turnips near Slough.