Curious. I’m a UK English speaker, and I’ve never encountered the phrase ‘abject lesson’. However ‘object lesson’ is a fairly widespread construction. Sounds like an eggcorn to me.
A meringue topping is peaked.
A baseball cap is peaked.
My curiosity is piqued.
On the other hand my curiosity has peaked.
I don’t think I’d ever say ‘my curiosity is peaked’. Peaked means something with a point, like a mountain or a hat, or something that has reached a local maximum in the recent past. You can’t say that anything ‘is peaked’ in the present tense, because it might get even higher in the future.
I agree. In what I wrote—“If it’s peaked, it’s reached a high point”—both "it’s"es should be understood as contractions for “it has” (making “peaked” a past participle, not an adjective).
Re “nucular” (as I don’t know how to quote when using my phone): I have often heard that that was Carter’s pronunciation, but I have listened to numerous examples from various decades, and I don’t hear it. Either it’s just “nuclear” or sometimes the “L” is barely sounded so it comes out sounding like “nukier”.
I’ve seen them perform twice, and both times Live were introduced as rhyming with jive.
Think of it as new-clee-ur.
We had a neighborhood dry-cleaning store who used the clever name “New Clear Drive-in Cleaners”.
Maybe this was an attempt at being witty, as in they’ll give you a piece of their mind?
Tract and track, usually in the context of the human body. A doctor may speak of a respiratory tract or a digestive tract (see second definition of tract here), but it’s often misheard (and later incorrectly repeated) as “track”.
Another one that grates on my ear is the confusion of rights and authority. A police officer may claim they have the right to give you a ticket or arrest you, when what they actually have is the authority to do so:
Public servants will have authorities beyond those of the average person, but only for the narrow purposes of performing their official functions. These are authorities, not rights.
Antimony is a chemical element with the symbol Sb (from Latin: stibium) and atomic number 51. A lustrous gray metalloid, it is found in nature mainly as the sulfide mineral stibnite (Sb2S3).
Antinomy (Greek ἀντί, antí, “against, in opposition to”, and νόμος, nómos, “law”) refers to a real or apparent mutual incompatibility of two laws.[1] It is a term used in logic and epistemology, particularly in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant.
I can’t tell you how often that caused confusion in college when we were reading Kant, and someone would argue that something Kant claimed was antimony couldn’t possibly be made into an alloy with tin. Then the professor explained, and we all had a good laugh.
The Enlightenment-era political philosophers would roll in their graves to hear anyone speak of a government having rights.
When properly pronounced, antimony rhymes with matrimony. Got that, Martha Stewart? (She snootily mispronounced it all through one of her TV shows)
How did she pronounce it? An-tim-on-ee?
invidious: causing ill feeling or envy
insidious: subtly producing harm in a cunning, deceitful manner
They are (maybe unknowingly) quoting 80’s-era TV commercials for the National Enquirer.
Sunovabitch. AN-tih-MOH-nee is the right pronunciation? All these years I thought Tom Lehrer was pronouncing it wrong (or took stylistic license) in his “Elements Song” because my chemistry teacher (who also worked at Argon Laboratories, no less) corrected me when I pronounced it that way and said “it’s an-TIM-uh-nee.” Thirty-three years later only do I learn the truth.
ETA: The Forvo pronunciations are interesting. The two UK pronunciations sound closer to me (though the stress is on the first syllable) to the first US pronunciation (which is what my teacher said to pronounce it as.) The second US pronunciation is what Tom Lehrer sings and what I see to be the correct pronunciation to US speakers, though I suspect UK speakers may find it odd.
contumely and contumacy
precedent and precedence
UK speaker here, and ‘an-TIM-uh-nee’ is how I say it.
Some people make it sound more like ‘an-TI-mon-ee’, but it definitely doesn’t rhyme with ‘matrimony’.
Callous: showing/having an insensitive or cruel disregard for others.
Callus: a thickened and hardened part of the skin or soft tissue, especially in an area that has been subjected to friction.
The OED gives only one pronunciation for antimony, /ˈæntɪmənɪ/, which is different than either of the ones proposed in this thread. It has the vowels of an-TIM-uh-nee (with a schwa, not a long O in the third syllable), but with the accent on the first, not the second syllable.