Yeah, but Brits (and Canadians) say ‘tack-oh’ and ‘Mazz-da’, so… 
I’m reminded of a story involving a customer of a pathology department (O.K., a patient) who supposedly filed a lawsuit over a pathology report describing him as having a “senile keratosis” (a pre-malignant skin lesion related to sun exposure, now almost universally called “actinic keratosis”).
“How dare you call me senile?”
Some people do not have the knack of pronouncing foreign words. There are plenty of intelligent people who just don’t think very “verbally” – they just don’t remember how things are spelled, or pronounced, all that well, especially words they don’t use routinely.
And then some people are indeed insulated, not from working at it, but simply by leading lives that you and I would think narrow and provincial.
I just don’t find this all that amusing, as I once probably did.
Prepping for a roadside breathalyzer test, by hiding them underneath their clothes?
Tripler
You sure they weren’t adding anything to their mochas? 
Oh, we’d get an assortment of characters at that cafe. We were located near a halfway house for the chronically mentally ill, though these two, while a bit “off” were not from that facility. So we were practiced with just going with the flow and not being too surprised at odd behavior. And Ray rode the el, so it wasn’t for breathalyzer purposes.
[quote=“silenus, post:119, topic:932375”]
I usually do it to either 1) be “funny,” or B) annoy the waitron. . .[/quote]
That seems like a dangerous way to start a meal.
This reminds me of an incident at dinner in DC with some friends, one of whom lives in France part of the year. We were eating at a now closed French bistro* and my dining companion corrected the French pronunciation of the waitress. The waitress, to her credit, responded with “thank you for the correction,” but I was mortified and have never eaten out with that person again (nor will I).
*The lovely Chez Billy, it’s other location, Chez Billy Sud is still open, the Obamas dine there on occasion. http://chezbillysud.com/
It’s a good thing they didn’t look in his eyes.
Similarly, after saying and hearing it wrong for so long, I have a hard time remembering to say porchetta with the correct hard k sound.
You’d think, but unfortunately here in flyover country it happens more often than I’d like.
I feel like, at this point, it’s fair to just consider ‘bru-shetta’ the American pronunciation of the word (or even the American name of the food). I too know it’s not correct, but I get this weird feeling like I’m both being condescending AND wrong at the same time when I say bru-sketta, so I don’t. And don’t get me wrong, I’m all for pronouncing things correctly, but that one just sounds wrong in my head. It feels like someone took the right word and tried to make it sound Italian.
Like saying (or writing) habañero. That’s spelled wrong and saying ‘habanyero’ is an incorrect pronunciation. But people are clearly extrapolating from jalapeño.
In fact, trying to prove to someone that the correct spelling and pronunciation was habanero is how I came to learn that it’s a common thing called hyperforeignism. Basically adding foreign sounds to foreign words in places they don’t belong.
I agree completely. What brought it to mind was discussing a porchetta recipe with someone and he used the hard K and I was using ch. They can’t both be correct and he had it right but it sure feels weird to use the one I’d only recently learned. And I doubt I’ve ever used the proper ñ in spelling jalapeno. I say it properly (I think) but I think a little bit of that nya does creep into my pronunciation of habanero.
Free advice (that I’ve had to learn the hard way, over and over):
Don’t dick around with underpaid, harried wait people (and that’s 99% of them). If it’s “funny”, it’s probably not (and even if it’s a genuinely great joke, they don’t have time to appreciate it). And if you’re doing it to annoy them, your friends will think you’re a jerk.
Ehh, in matters of pronunciation, I’m reminded of a co-worker who pointed out that the correct plural of octopus would be octopod, since it was Greek. I replied that I didn’t speak Greek or Latin, I spoke English, which was a whorish language that let me do whatever I wanted with it. So, octopusses, it was.
I’ve been working some form of support for a couple of decades. I’ve heard doozies.
Not me, but a co-worker, and it is etched in my brain:
Customer: I know you guys don’t support Windows 98 yet, but we both know Windows 98 is the same thing as Windows 95, so let’s pretend.
Co-worker: Ok, we can do that. I want you to click on the apple in the upper left corner of your screen and select “About this Mac”
Customer: But, this isn’t a Macintosh, this is Windows 98.
Co-worker: Oh, yes. I understand that, but let’s pretend.
Customer: Oh, I understand. Thank you for your time.<click>
Later in my life, I worked as admin/CTO/front line support for a web hosting company (yes, at the same time, hey at least I wasn’t also the NOC tech…most of the time). Sometimes that made the escalation process difficult. Yes, the hosting company was the definition of fly-by-night, but the employees did what they could.
In this repeated scenario, the customer has basically asked me to do something we don’t do outside of charging them extra. Something like compiling custom modules for their web server, manage their fishing forums for him, or they may have asked me to do something computers simply don’t do. Plus, they’ve used the classic tactic of calling after normal business hours to try to bully someone on the night shift into doing something extra in the name of “customer service”. The joke’s on them, I set the schedule and I prefer to work late. I’ll come in an hour before the C-Level meeting starts, and work with the afternoon/evening folks after it’s over.
Me: No. We can’t do that for you, at least not without charging you.
Customer: Can we escalate this issue?
Me (and yes, I paused to think about whether someone else more well versed in the particular tech besides myself could fix it quickly): I’m sorry, but no, we can’t.
Customer: REALLY? WHY NOT?
Me: Because I’m the CTO of the company. The only person to escalate this to would be the CEO, and he’s non-technical. So, he’s just going to ask me what I think.
Customer: Oh. OK.
Then we might discuss why it wasn’t possible or how much they’d be charged, or sometimes they’d just hang up.
My favorites were the folks who honestly thought that threats would get them what they wanted.
Customer: Scabpicker, I’m a pretty big guy, and I think that your answer would be different if you were speaking to me face to face.
Me: Our address is published on the website, and despite my size, you would be surprised.
I didn’t say this, but that’s because: even if you do beat my ass, beating my ass wouldn’t make you right and change the answer.
My least favorites are from when I was an assistant manager of a video store.
My manager was trying to help a customer pick a movie, and they suggested The Shawshank Redemption. His honest reply was “I’d never rent that, it has a black man on the cover!” She glossed over it, and moved to suggesting something else. To be honest, I don’t know how she did it, that lady had grace.
The same customer a few weeks later gets finished being checked out, and on his way out the door pauses and turns to me and starts off a conversation with (and seriously, this is the closest quote I can form) “You ever notice how most black people aren’t worth a shit?”
I just shook my head in disbelief and said, “Man, you’d probably better go before the cops get called on one of us.” He seemed to take my advice to heart and promptly left.
He didn’t really trigger any “woah, watch out for racist grandpa” vibes before that, and he apparently toned it down enough that I didn’t hear/see more incidents of that type after that, but he was still shopping there when I left.
Oh hell, I had forgotten about this, but for longer than I care to admit, I was employed by Glamour Shots as a photographer. The things people would say to their kids blew my mind. “Slut it up!” being said by a mom to a 10 year old girl makes me drink to erase it temporarily, as well as the lady who said “Mommy won’t love you anymore if you don’t come over here” to a shy child who didn’t want to be in the picture.
Ugh. Wish I’d never worked for that place, even if it was sometimes comical from end to end.
One of the most head-slapping questions I got during my bookstore tenure was about photocopying. Now, it wasn’t that uncommon for people to ask if we had a copy machine — happened maybe every other month. I took it to be part of the conceptual blurriness some people have between bookstores and libraries. (I see some such people in this thread. 
) But invariably people took no for an answer.
Not this one guy. He wanted to argue about how we should have one, how we could make money on it. I have to admit that I engaged with him on the faults in that line of reasoning. I also tried to explain the copyright issues involved. Then, after a few minutes, he eureka’d that actually we surely must have a copier — in the office. Which, yes, I admitted, we did. And he started insisting on using it. Because he didn’t need the electrical code book, just a few pages from it. And we were going to make him buy it. He thought this was unfair and stupid. Which my inner anarchist can kind of relate to, but my inner anarchist figured out at a young age that that’s not how things work.
I swear, he was so dogged I almost gave in and copied the pages for him — or pointed out the simple solution all the smart tightwads took when they wanted something out of an expensive book. (Buy it, copy what you want, and return it.) But I did not, and he didn’t figure it out on his own.
I suppose today one can just whip out one’s phone with its high-quality camera and snap away. Sigh.
Only if he can find an actual non-virtual bookstore - good luck with that these days.
Honestly, I think the argument could be made that American “bru-shetta” and Italian “bru-sketta” are referring to completely different things. In Italy, the term refers specifically to the bread; in America, it refers to the tomato-and-olive-oil garnish that gets served on top of or alongside the bread.
Of course, that’s neither here nor there when it comes to the “bruce-chetta” that my customers believed they were ordering.
Huh. I would say in both cases it refers to toasted bread that has been prepared in some way (in the simplest form, olive oil and garlic, but the tomato-olive oil-garlic version and different ones are common in Italy, too.) I never thought of just the topping just as “bruschetta.” It has to be both that and the toasted bread.
That was a one-liner in an episode of Designing Women.
Their driver is getting married to Etienne, a young and unsophisticated woman and she is planning the wedding with Julia, Dixie Carter’s character, who was sort of snobby.
Etienne: “I’ve decided on the GE soft white light bulb music, which I’ve found has the strangest name. It’s the Taco Bell Canon in D.
Julia: You know, Etienne, I believe that’s Pachelbel.
Etienne: No, I’ve eaten there several times, it’s definitely Taco Bell.