Opaque, opague. Somewhere along the line my brain decided the latter was the right spelling and my pronunciation followed. Then one day maybe five years ago my brother with whom I was working at the time gave me a real funny look when I said it that way. I believe he thought I was being folksy but he kindly corrected me.
Oops.
It wasn’t until High School that I discovered “Sean” was pronounced Shawn and not Seen.
As a kid, I was reading a poem out loud to my Mom. The poem rhymed “Niger” with “tiger.” But I had never seen or heard of Niger, so I rhymed it “nigger” and “tigger,” even though I knew “nigger” was a “bad word.” I didn’t get into trouble, just corrected. Thank og it wasn’t at school…
Joe
I was about 12, and recounting to my Mom the Phillies game my dad and I had seen the previous day. I told her very excitedly that Ozzie Virgin had hit a game-winning home run!
Ha ha ha! I worked with a 50-year-old woman who did this! I was too embarrassed to correct her, but she never caught on by example…
Joe
Nah, that’s how they pronounce it in Philly, and Trenton, where I’m from. Foke and yoke. I give them a slight “l,” but not quite hard.
Joe
I’ve spent most of my adult life believing that "Its your round(of drinks) L4L " meant that it was time for me to pay an extended visit to the toilet only to find that someone had bought me a pint while I was out there.
Boy was my face red when I finally discovered that it actually meant that it was my turn to buy everyone a drink.
Can I just say inteGRAL and claim it’s y’all who speak in the wrong language? 
No, it didn’t fly with that teacher in grad school either…
I’m confused. Philly and Trenton says it “foke” and “yoke”? I’m saying the Illinoisans in this thread are saying it “folk” and “yolk.” But then you say you do give it an “l.” So are you saying Philly and Trenton give it a light “l” or say “foke” and “yoke”?
Nope, because I pronounce them the same way **WhyNot **does, and I’ve lived most of my life in Texas.
Maybe I misunderstood. The words should have a pronounced 'l" sound. But people from Philly don’t pronounce the 'l".
Joe
Not a pronunciation thing exactly, but I only figured out a couple of years ago that if you do something painstakingly then you are “taking pains”, not… er, “staking pain”.
I think you misunderstood. Those words should not have the “l” pronounced. Look in any online dictionary. They don’t even list the “l” pronunciation (much to my shock.) I’m glad to hear I’m not the only one pronouncing the “l.” (edit: Actually, “yolk” has the “l” pronunciation in some of the online dictionaries, but “folk” is only “foke” from what I can find.)
it wasn’t until my senior year of college that I learned that the saying is not “for all intensive purposes”. Although I’ve always been a heavy reader, I never realized that my way of saying it and “for all intents and purposes” were the same thing.
Thankfully, I grew up in the south, where all the words are kind of slurred together anyway, so I don’t think anyone ever noticed.
I’m still confused about how to pronounce the “x” in spanish words that are loaned from the south and central american indigenous languages.
I was going to add that I used to think calliope was pronounced KALeeope, insted of caLIEopee but I just read that both are acceptable.
I’ve been watching Simon Schama’s History of Britain series and I was surprised to hear him pronounce Agincourt with a soft “j” instead of the hard “g” I’ve always assumed was correct.
I have been pronouncing coquettish as ‘coy-tish’ until rather recently.
Which is even more peculiar considering I sing along to a song that describes the woman involved as a “…little coquette” and pronounce that ‘koh-ket’. It never occurred to me that despite having the same meaning they would sound the same. :smack:
Oh and a couple of the other posts on here reminded me of this story.
When I was about 11 or so I had been flicking through some of my mother’s cookbooks and announced quite pleased with myself that we should serve Whore’s Duvets for our guests. My parents had no idea what I was talking about until I described it in a bit more detail. They both erupted in laughter and it has now been a running joke that you serve the quilts of prostitutes at parties. I have the pronunciation hors d’oeuvre etched in my mind, but I only serve canapés. 
It wasn’t until late highschool that i realized the word i had read, colonel, and the one i had heard, kernel, were the same thing. I still sometimes pronounce it colonel just because i think it sounds better.