I *just *realized it really is mischievous, as in, “mis-chiv-ous”, not “mis-chee-vee-ous”. I thought the prior was a snooty affectation, but, uh, no. There’s no “ee” vowel after the v, is there? :smack:
A few months ago, I was reading something aloud to my husband and said something like, “The detrious of his life lay around his room…”
“The what?” he asked.
“Detrious,” I repeated. “DEH-tree-ous.” This was not a word that was new to me. Detrious. Junk. Stuff. Flotsam and jetsam, you know, detrius.
“Gimme that! Detritus! De-TRY-tus!” he nearly fell over laughing. Okay, he didn’t, he just quickly smiled that irritating English teacher smile, but I felt like he was poking me with a dumb stick. Stupid t.
Finally, vacuum, which I discovered about a year ago here on the dope, really does have two pronounced u sounds, just like continuum. Who’d’ve guessed it?
I’m gonna go ahead and contest that. I’ve never heard anyone in my life pronounce it with two distinct u sounds, and if you listen to Merriam-Webster’s pronunciation (click the first red speaker icon) it is pronounced the normal way, with only one “u” sound.
Until my wife corrected me, sometimes I would talk about mispronounciation. After all, you mispronounce words, you don’t minpronunce them. But, whatever…
The pronunciation shows two two syllable pronunciations, and one three syllable one, under “also,” implying it to be a less usual pronuncation. I also have never heard anyone say “vacuum” with three syllables. Dictionary.com also lists “VAK-yume” as the first pronunciation, although it lists the three-syllable one next, and finally “VAK-yuhm” as the last.
I was in the middle of a pedantic explanation of the word “pedant” (pronounced “peed-ant”) to more than a dozen people when one of them piped up and asked, "Isn’t it pronounced “ped-nt?”
Well, I was in my mid-teens before I realized that the word people said, “Grose” (meaning disgusting) was the same word as “Gross” (which I believed had a similar meaning but was pronounced to rhyme with ‘floss’)
And…as an adult - well well into my thirties - my husband had to convince my whole immediate family that there’s no ‘l’ in amphitheater. We always pronounced it as “Amplitheater” - you know, a theater that’s shaped to amplify sounds. Ampli-theater. I don’t think any of us had ever noticed that there was an ‘h’ where an ‘l’ would go if we’d been right.
I gave a presentation maybe my freshman year of university where I used the word “caveat,” and I pronounced it “kuh-veet,” twice. As soon as I was done, the first thing out of the professor’s mouth was “Ka-vee-aht, Theo! Ka-vee-aht! It has three syllables and I would think you of all people in this room would know that!” (considering I was the only student in the class that was studying linguistics) :smack:
I never heard anyone say “double entendre” until, oh, two or three years ago. I’ve know what one is since I was a teenager, but never in my life suspected it was pronounced the way it is.
Apparently the person who sells your house is a real-tor, and that word has only two syllables. Everyone I know says “rel-a-tor” but based on a pit thread a while back, that makes us simple-minded.
I was a teenager, but surely this is late to be figuring out that:
Misled. Miss-led. Not missle-d. Misled and Mislead are not two distinctly different words that mean you’re lying to someone. No, they’re forms of the same word.
When people not from around here say “crick” in reference to a body of water, they mean “creek” despite how they say the word.
In my experience, this is actually a rather common late realization. I’ve known at least three people who’ve gone through the same thing (including myself).
The best place to discover that gaol is pronounced the same as jail is not whilst reading your essay on The Ballad of Reading Gaol to an English professor at university.
For ages, into my third decade, I thought compliment and complement were the same word.
I know I am not a great speller, so when I write, especially at the office, I always ask a colleague to proof my work. Many, many times I had a report returned to me with “compliment” corrected to “complement.” I simply assumed I had made a spelling error, and was appreciative that my proofreader caught it. Finally one day my boss returned something to me with “YOU DO KNOW THESE ARE TWO DIFFERENT WORDS, DON’T YOU?” scrawled across it. I looked them up and was stunned to find they are two different words.
Here’s the thing … in my mind, it seems perfectly reasonable that they are the same word. I feel that they do mean the same thing. But at least now I know to go along with the convention of using them as two different words.
Not sure I get that. ‘Complement’ as in ‘added to’ and ‘compliment’ as in ‘well done’ aren’t at all similar at all in my book.
That said, to avoid looking sanctimonious, I still have to check myself (in my mid-thirties now, so probably for ever) when it comes to ‘catastrophe’. To me, it will always be ‘cat-a-stroff’ - probably because I came across it when reading at an early age and it made sense. Oddly, I don’t do the same with ‘apostrophe’.
‘Complement’ doesn’t mean ‘added to’ but ‘to complete or make perfect’. To say a couple complement each other is to compliment them, if you get my drift.
I’m English and I’ve never heard this. Might be a northern thing, though (I don’t get up there much).
