No doubt. Jazz tunes are often passed around like $2 hookers.
I first encountered that word (seque, not hooker) when I was doing a show in high school. I was able to tease out its meaning from context, but I’m glad the music director pronounced it before I did!
When I worked in a mailroom, we had one employee whose last name was Ng. Before I had the opportunity to pronounce it, I asked Mr. Ng how to. He said it was pronounced Eng. I just took it for granted for months after that. That is, until a coworker pronounced it Noodge. I gave him endless crap about it. “Dude! Noodge?”
I love that! Especially since I worked with a guy whose surname was Ang. When his first child was born I asked him if he named it Boomer.
Nguyen is often pronounced “noo-yin” or even “noo-in” as in “New in Town.” I’ve heard Nguyen so many ways I don’t know which to believe. The actress France Nuyen made it simpler.
I have particularly liked “faux pas” since I heard someone pronounce it “fox paws.” I can’t even remember who it was. I pretty much only say it “fox paws” now so I probably get some funny looks.
I like to listen to WKHR, a 750-watt station affiliated with Kinston High School. At night they have adult announcers who know their stuff, but during the day they have students. The station is early jazz/big band, and I just love to hear the teenagers trying to pronounce Django Reinhardt, Bix Beiderbecke, and Thelonious Monk.
The first times I saw suede and quinoa in print they stymied me, though I had heard them pronounced.
The wikipedia page on Homeotic Genes was vandalized so much that the source code used to have a comment " ’ Homoerotic Genes ’ isn’t funny, and can be reverted in seconds. Don’t vandalize this page. "
**Barfly **is one that I always stumble over. I remember when the movie was out – I thought at first the title referred to an adjective about regurgitation. BARF-ly.
Another one that I constantly get wrong is biopic. A movie based on or about the biography of a person. Not difficult. But somehow it always comes out as bi-OP-ic. Not BIO-pic.
…and I’m very visual, but the longer I stare at a word trying to figure out if I’ve spelled it correctly or not, the weirder it begins to look until it’s *totally *wrong.
That’s exactly why I mentioned does. I’d prefer duz (remember that soap?) because does and the female deer look just alike to me.
I’m with you on biopic as well. It’s like you have two eyes, so what?
I suppose the mention of kudzu isn’t off-topic if only to point out how long it took me to find it in a dictionary! I had known of the weed/vine/ground cover all my life but had never seen it in print. After I had looked all the way through the C section I finally had the idea to check the K’s. At last.
And the first time I saw capisce in print, I had no idea that was the “capeesh” I had heard mobsters say in no telling how many movies and shows. Capisce?
And even though there’s a recent thread on Italian-American slang, for a while the HBO home page for the show had an extensive list of things The Sopranos would say, with what appeared to be acceptable spellings and pronunciations. They appear to have taken that glossary down now.
I have a feeling knight would fall into this category if we didn’t have this specific example drilled into our brains when we were first learning to spell. At least in my first grade class “knight” was like, the archetypal “not how it sounds!” word.
I know this is a regional thing, but here in the UK, the distinction would be important - without the ~meat suffix, the word ‘Hamburger’ exclusively means the disc-shaped incarnation of the stuff.
You may be aware that there is actually a place called Mole Station in Australia, and there is a horticultural nursery there that used to have one of the most unfortunate URLs on the web: molestationnursery.com. Sadly, the domain is now parked, but I can vouch for it once having been real (and entirely innocent).
It must be a very small region for DMark. I’m from Pittsburgh, and I know we have some weird sayings, but there’s nothing wrong with “hamburger meat” in my book. It’s opposed to hamburger buns or hamburger condiments. A hamburger is a type of sandwich, not a type of meat, so saying that “hamburger meat” is redundant is like saying that “sandwich meat” is redundant. Buying hamburgers is entirely different than buying hamburger meat.
ETA: I’ve always heard Nguyen pronounced “Gwin”. I’ve known three "gwin"s but never any "noo-in"s.
And every variety (we must hope) has some distinctive quality or mixture of fat and lean, or fresh and rotting, or real beef and other (hopefully) animal components. In any case, it will be priced differently by weight and the range can be in terms of dollars!
Angus apparently makes the best hamburger, if Hardee’s, Wendy’s, Krystal, and McDonald’s are anything to go by. Anything else is just meat.
Re-reading the OP reminded me of when my uncle asked me if I wanted some "pine ice cream’. He had to say it like 5 times before I got he meant ‘pie and ice cream’.
During a flu outbreak that took out a couple of anchors a few years back, the news director on one of the ABCTV news affiliates had to step in do the news. The major story was about some bones found under the grounds of a major shopping development being built. Excavation was halted until archaeologists could “decenter”? the remains, as the construction crew was not legally allowed to do the"decentermint"?. It took me a few seconds to realize she meant to say disinter and disinterment.:smack: