My boss clearly enunciates every syllable in com-fort-a-ble. He does the same with veg-e-ta-ble.
I generally go with comftable and vegtable…
I suppose “banal” should be pronounced bah-NAL, but I hate that. Also, gal-LAHNT (“gallant”). Ugh. Make me happy and just say BAY-nal and GAL-lant.
“You don’t have the money for that.”
Ugh!
Segue.
Makes me cringe ever time I hear it, but I would never argway the point.
Luckily I have not ever heard this word in reference to me: “debridement”
Pronounce it the way it’s spelled, not “da-BREED-ment.” It’s not French anymore!.
(Last night on ER, for example.)
February.
Of course, it also annoys me to hear it mispronounced.
All in all, I’m glad it’s a short month.
That’s exactly how I feel about the planet Uranus.
Exorbitant
It’s one of those words I read in print reasonably often, but almost never hear. When I do hear it, most folks kind of swallow the first T so it sounds more like an N: Exorbinant. In fact I remember reading the word a few times and wondering how it related to that other word that meant the same thing but didn’t have the T in it!
When I hear someone pronounce it correctly, it seems too elitist.
Speaking of elitist, I also have to go with:
Forte
Correctly pronounced “fort” - for-tay is the Italian word for “loud” whereas “fort” is the French word for “strong” or “strength” which is how the word is used in English. I remember as a teen learning about this and going out of my way to pronounce it correctly and to correct others, not comprehending that, whether I like it or not, foreign words are incorporated into English with pronunciations that differ from their source language, not to mention that pronunciations evolve. So hearing it pronounced “correctly” reminds of my own wrong-headed snobbishness…
WordMan–you beat me to it!! Virtually everyone mispronounces ‘forte’ (meaning strength) and that bothers me, because the editor in my head smugly says, “wrong!”. And then I’m also bothered when it’s pronounced correctly, because it sounds so pedantic and overly learned to know how it’s supposed to be pronounced, since virtually everyone gets it wrong. Some things I wish I could un-learn so I wouldn’t have to walk around with the correct-o-matic meter ringing in my head all the time.
Well, there’s no reason to get into name-calling. I was just saying…Oh, I see. Good one. (And aren’t you glad we don’t have to live there?)
I have to admit I dislike it when forte is pronounced correctly because my brain wants to know why someone’s telling me that cooking isn’t exactly their army post.
moister and moistest
Anything french that’s been co-opted by the english language.
and is pronounced with the french accent, like when people insist on using the french accent to say the words.
liaison
les miserables
croissant
freedom fries
I guess it works the same way with spanish, people who insist on the spanish pronunciation of:
Tortilla
taco
burrito (de pollo y arroz con frijoles of course)
their hispanic surname even though they don’t speak spanish-especially those who correct others for gringofying the pronunciation
Libary…
I’m not a libarian and I don’t work in a libary!
I’m sure there’s some sort of regional accent thing that contributes to this mispronunciation, but I still cringe every time I hear it.
Oh, and my boss says excedra for et cetera. I always see a bottle of the headache pills whenever she says that word. At least that mental image is kind of amusing.
“bosom”…
I hate the way it sounds. “boozum”. I always pronounced it “bossom”, because I always thought that sounded more… feminine. Them my mom told me you pronounce it with a z-ish sound. I was crushed.
“Species” as spee-sheez
Hurray! One of my favorite subjects!
It just so happens that I have, sitting next to my computer, a copy of “The Big Book Of Beastly Mispronunciations” by Charles Harrington Ellster.
One word I don not want to hear correctly is “Celtic”. I think of it as keltic, but it’s not.
I feel like a complete ass-head when I say forte. Nobody seems to know what I mean, and I have to explain. It just makes me look like a self-absorbed jerk and a know-it-all.
I HATE the word harass. I have always preferred huh-RAS (rhymes with alas), but from what I understand, HAR-is (like the name Harris) is generally preferred. That just sounds weird to me.
Prelude? Deluge? Does anybody pronounce these words correctly? Correct pronunciation on these words is not only silly sounding, once again, you must spend time explaining yourself. When you do this often, one might be led to believe that the speaker is a pretentious smarty-pants.
Lastly, there is the err of err. Err (like ur, not air) just sounds dumb.
There is a street named “Goethe” on the bus ride home… and all bus drivers pronounce it differently… it looks like “GO-THEE” or “GOAT_HEE” but the correct pronunciation (which drives me MAD when I hear it) is “GER-TAH”…
ARGGGHHHH!
Be happy. The correct pronunciation of gallant varies according to the sense in which it is used. Banal has more than one accepted pronunciation.
I know the word aunt can be pronounced either like “ant” or “awnt,” but the “awnt” pronunciation still sounds weird to me, as though you’re lapsing into a British accent for the duration of one word. Same sorta thing when people pronounce vase as “vahz.”