In college, I was in the play “Antigone,” in which one of the characters is Euridice. At the first rehearsal, one of the actors referred to her as “Uterus.”
And our very own mangetout . . . I wonder how many people think his name is “man get out.”
I had the same experience with the word(s) “misled”, which I read-pronounced “my-zled” even though I was familiar with the spoken word pronounced “miss-led”.
Then one day, at the age of 15 or so, the epiphany mused aloud to a friend of mine: “Hey, how weird is this? Myzled and miss-led are two words pronounced differently yet are spelled the same, like “led/leed” for “lead”, but in this case they also mean exactly the same thing! Oh, wait… Ah… D’OHHHH!” (This was pre-Simpsons, but if D’oh! was in my vocabulary it surely would have fit.)
Apparently it’s “posthumous” and not “post-humorous”. Boy I cringe at how many times I must have sounded like an idiot lol
I think I was in high school when I read “origin” aloud as “uh-RIDGE-in.”
(Hey, I grew up on a farm. The word didn’t come up much in conversation.)
And I was well into my twenties when I found out “victuals” is properly pronounced “vittles”. (Jed Clampett was smarter than we thought!)
And don’t ask how I pronounced “Goethe” in a prepared speech as a lad.
Me too.
Also it took me a whole to figure out that hors d’oeuvres (written) and “or derves” (spoken) were the same thing.
For a long time I thought Southern was said “South-ern” instead of “Suthern”
It certainly can be. Fitting, since French is also associated with the double entendre.
There’s only one stress in any word. It’s on the DESS… not the TOR.
WhyNot, I pronounced “detritus” as “dee-tree-us” for years. Did we both read the same book as impressionable youngsters that misspelled it? I wonder.
And this “desulTORy” thing? News to me. (I’m 50, so we can narrow down the age when one learns to pronounce this down to sometime in the early 50s.)
There’s a primary stress on “DESS” and a secondary stress on “TOR”.
Wait…what? I don’t think I’ve ever spoken that word out loud, but I’ve certainly not been pronouncing it that way in my head when I read it.
An ex of mine had a habit of placing the stress on the second syllable in words starting with “se”. So, he once mentioned a seVEERed head and a different time a seQUEENed gown. (That would have been quite a conversation if they happened in the same sentence, eh?) I know there were at least 2 “se” words that he did that with, causing me to think it was something about that combination of letters that threw him.
I’d like to preface this by saying that I was in 5th grade at the time. We were reading The Secret of Nimh or something like that. One of the rodents had pneumonia. You pronounce that P-new-moan-ya. (The p is not silent.) Yes, of course, humans get that thing called new-moan-ya. But rats get this special, unrelated illness. Fortunately, it was my mom who I was talking about this to and she told me it was the same thing.:smack:
And an unrelated hijack… I was somewhere between 25 and 30 before I realized that “Bridge freezes before roadway” because of the air running beneath it. NOT because the bridge pavement is made of stuff that is more slippery .:smack::smack:
I was belittled in grade school, middle school, by students and teachers, and high school by students for insisting that the word was pronounced vittles and not Vick Tchew als. And then my high school English teacher corrected one of my tormentors in front of the class. And her correction was a beautiful thing, brief, cutting, and public, and not five minutes after the smug bastard had taunted me as we discussed the days assignment before class.
The correct pronunciation of victuals really floored me!!!
I still want to pronounce salmon with an L.
I guess this event wasn’t too late in life, but had consequences. When I was in sixth grade, I proctored a spelling test to the rest of the class and on of the words was “ambulance.” I pronounced it AM-blee-ance. It seems that most of the class were sound it out spellers and there were so many wrong answers that the teacher gave everyone a bonus point because of it.
Fast forward twenty-five years later and I’m at my parents’ house. My niece hears a siren and says “Gramma what’s that?” “It’s an ambleeance, Tori, say ambleeance.”
I don’t know how she spells that, but her nieces and nephews are my “cousints” both in pronunciation and on paper.
One of the first days of middle school for me was 9/11, and in the morning our advisory was having a discussion about it. Of course I had no idea what was going on, and I didn’t even think it was that big a deal (my english was hardly passable and I was overall a very vacuous child) but I remember saying something about the debris and pronouncing it deh-briss. Around the same time I wrote voila as wallah, but neither of these are embarrassingly late I guess. Actually, until five minutes ago, I thought ennui was pronounced en-you-eye.
Wait, how do you pronounce that?
edit: ooh I was just reading eleanorigby’s post and I remembered that I made that same mistake (fuh-kaid) not too long ago. I was with a couple other guys and I actually argued that I was completely right.
At the opposite extreme, a college girlfriend had a high school teacher who talked about the Specific Ocean.
You should have told her about “Godwin’s Law.” That’s the law that says God always wins, right? 
The dictionaries all say it’s pronounced “vittles,” but I’ve never believed it.
Also, I’ve never actually said that word aloud (and don’t think I ever will) so it’s a moot point for me.
-FrL-
I think I will wait for an opportune moment, and use “vittles”. Then check out the reactions.
I learned a few months ago that the name Penelope is pronounced Pen-nel-lo-pee, not Penne-lope. :smack: