Holy hell! I’ve always thought “victuals” was pronounced /vIk’ shu @lz/; hell, I’ve seen “vittles” spelled that way enough that I just thought they were two separate words. Now I see my dictionary says “victuals” is pronounced like “vittles”.
I hope I’ve never said the word aloud.
how about
naive
suave
I pronounced both to rhyme with
pave
Not pronouced that way in Michigan. Sault is “soo”, as in the Soo Locks.
Naive (ny-EVE)
Suave (SWAH-vuh)
OK, three pages and nobody’s mentioned…
Arkansas?
You people are slip’n…
The French words for “long chair” are “chaise longue.”
But you’ll sound ridiculous if you use the correct French pronunciation, or call it anything but a “chayz launj.”
Not round these parts you won’t. Folks that pronounce (or, even worse, spell) it as “chaise lounge” mark themselves out as the worst sort of rubes 
“Shez long”, approximately, in English.
Evil Captor still has trouble with ‘Armeggedon’ (from studying too many dinosaur books) and ‘Himalyas’. He believes it is ‘ar-MEG-a-don’ (like a dinosaur) and ‘him-MALL-yahs’.
Then again, my mom has trouble with ‘Granada’. Well, it IS spelled like ‘Canada’, right?
Me? I embarrassed myself over ‘Nietzsche’. (I had even read the stupid book!!)
Nope-Martha and Xema each mentioned it three days ago. 
Cognac
Indictment
“Sault Ste. Marie” (note that it’s “Ste.”, not just “St.”) is pronounced (roughly) “Soo Saint Marie”, not “Salt Saint Marie.”
A few people have posted their embarrassment upon discovering “victuals” is properly pronounced as vittles.
This little quirk in our language is explained in a History Channel one-hour documentary entitled, “The Adventure of English from 500AD to 2000.”
Under Henry V, there was a national movement for the everyone in the country to speak English, and one dialect of English, at that . In a break of 350 years of tradition, Henry himself stopped using French in his written and spoken communications and resorted to English, instead. The country would have to follow his lead.
But the problems were considerable. England had a mass of regional dialects, along with a host of words coming from the French, German, Latin, and probably others. So the task of standardization fell to the Chancellery (reduced to Chancery), kind of a civil service office, responsible not only for dissemination of royal documents, but also that these communiqués would be understood throughout the kingdom.
So Chancery made thousands upon thousands of decisions on which words were to be used and how they’d be spelled.
“In a desire to make the roots of the language more evident,” the narrator tells us, “words that had entered from the French, for instance, were given a Latin look. The letter ‘b’ was inserted into “debt” and “doubt”; the letter “c” went into ‘victuals’ [pronounced “vittles” by the narrator].“Words that were thought to be of Greek origin sometimes had their spelling adjusted, so that throne and theatre acquired their “h.”
It goes on and on.
If you like rummaging through the history of our language, you should catch this documentary.
I recorded it on 12/10 of this year, and still have it on disk. I’m sure it’ll play again.
depot (DEE-poh)
catheter (CATH-eter)
cache (cash)
Proust (proost, not prowst)
It may sound weird to those used to American English (him-a-LAY-ahs), but his pronunciation is actually pretty close to how the locals say it (him-MAH-lyas, as best as I can recall and approximate it).
[ul]
[li]debacle – debba cul[/li][li]decoupage – DEE coo page[/li][li]czar – CEE zaruh[/li][li]lieu – lie ooh[/li][li]heirarchical – hair ARCH I cull[/li][/ul]
and for proper names…
[ul]
[li]Rodeo (as in Drive) – rod E O[/li][li]Boise D’ Arc – boys duh ark[/li][/ul]
I also had problems with corp, minutae and queue. Which all came out as, respectively; corp (like corpse minus the se), min U tay and qua ehhhh. Like Fonzie was saying it. Ugh!
I’ve also bungled plenty of names and some others mentioned here. However, I’m too embarrassed to add them to the list. I need to find the thread where you always misspell words no matter how hard you try to remember otherwise.
::: hangs head in disgrace with, at least, stellar company :::
And in keeping with the theme…
Wow. I cross myself off the “reasonably erudite” - I’ve been mispronouncing and misspelling barbiturate my entire life. Had absolutely no clue it wasn’t barbituate.
superlative
senior year of high school asking about the “Super Laytives” in front of the whole class… great times.
I used to have some trouble spelling out the word psychic.