Another vote for “awry.” Why can’t we put a hyphen in there?
Segue. Anyone who uses this word or knows how to pronounce it properly is a pretentious boofhead.
Wow. I’ve always thought, up until two seconds ago, that Linux was pronounced with a long i.
Bugger me. How are you supposed to pronounce Linux other than Lye-nux? I guess Linus Torvalds might pronounce his name Lee-noos (but I have no idea if he does). But I must confess I’ve only ever seen Linux written.
My contribution - oui. I remember reading a book when I was a kid, and the author included some French characters. In order to underline their Frenchness, he had them say “oui” regularly, but otherwise they spoke in English. But I was too young to get this. For the life of me I couldn’t understand why all these people were pointlessly saying “Oy” all the time. Quite the revelation when I connected the word pronounced “wee” with the word spelled “oui”. But I still occasionally think “Oy” in my head as a fond gesture of recall to my old self.
(Roughly) Lihn ihks.
For me it’s vacuum. I always pronounce it vahkoom (with the oo part abnormally long) and have to correct myself.
Ignorance fought. Thank you.
My husband was reading a book several years ago about the French Foreign Legion. According to him, it was an OK book but he wanted to know the meaning of a word which kept cropping up. “What’s oo-ee mean?”
Necessary. I always had trouble remembering how to spell it until I started mentally pronouncing it as “neck-a-sary.”
The name of the star Sirius (or the satellite radio, or the Alan Parson’s Project song). I want to call it SirEYEus.
We can’t call it SEERius, we already have a word pronounced like that!
Third for ‘awry’ over here.
Another one (not that this comes up often, mind you) is ‘beribboned’. I always look at it and think ‘berry-boned’.
Whenever I see the title of that hour-long commercial come up on my TV screen I always mispronounce it in my mind as “Is Collin Detox Hype?”.
For those of us who can’t figure it out, what is the actual spelling of the infomercial product?
I maintain that you are not wrong.
But perhaps you should pronounce it “sausage dog”.
The word is colon. Since there was a thread a while ago discussing this “infomercial” I thought nobody wouldn’t know what I was writing about - and I was right- Nobody didn’t know what I was writing about!
I thought Linux was Line-ux, too, but I guess that doesn’t count by my own paramenters until I keep at it.
The name Isaac. When I read it, I always hear “Iss-sack” in my head instead of “Eye-zick”.
Another one for me is “seatbelt”, but that’s because of the book Good Omens. It’s one of my favorite books and I’ve read it many many times. In it, there’s a character that has a weird japanese car that they only made a few of. The various alerts (like door ajar, etc) are spoken in very very bad english. If he doesn’t have his seatbelt on, the alert tells him to “frasten sleetbert”. Now, whenever I see the word “seatbelt”, I always pronounce it in my head as “sleetbert”.
Penelope. To me it’s penuh-lope.
StG
Barney Google and Snuffy Smith was a comic strip in the paper when I was a kid. It often used the word “bodacious” which, to this day, I still see as “bo-dack-ee-us.”
I can’t for the life of me remember to say Nicolas Sarkozy’s name as “sar-ko-ZEE”. I always blurt out “sar-KO-zee,” all the while knowing I said it wrong, but by then it’s too late and I’m being corrected left and right.
My (po-SIB-lie wrong) understanding is that it has been pronounced Rafe for hundreds of years, and that that has always been the correct pronunciation. It’s only when it became Americanized that we made it sound more like a euphemism for puke.
When I was in first grade the teacher told us what various punctuation marks meant. When she explained exclamation points, she said “Surprised like gasp.” She actually make the gasping sound. I took her at her word, and actually made that sound whenever I read an exclamation out loud. If I read “Run, Dick, run!!!” I would gasp three times. My parents thought that that was adorable. I suspect they were right.
As with other posters, much of my vocabulary came from reading, and I had a few mispronounced words.
Chaos… I pronounced it “CHAY - OHHS”
Rendevous… “Rendayvoos”
There are others…
Regards
FML