Mandi, I had just gotten used to phenomenon, and now I’ll be thinking about phenomenonally all night! :eek:
Actually because of mispronunciation, my youngest son has an american name that I mispronounced in my head when I was younger. I read flowers in the attic, and loved one of the characters name’s cory, but I had always pronounced it corrie as in (caw rather than co) but hey, he dosent mind.
The state that Boston is in. Massa… Massach… Um, you know. It’s sad, really, that I can’t even spell it.
hey, sue duhnym, good job, but amongst the wormtownites i hung with, the pronunciation was more like this: wista. (insert wistful-looking emoticon here to denote that i would step over my own mother to eat at coney island hot dogs one more time)
i cant say economics, cuz a visiting indian professor said e-CON-o-mics once, and i thought it wuz funny, and now i cant say it any other way. i also cant say misled- i always thought it wuz my-zuld. i actually have a buncha those- i have a reader’s vocabulary, and i cant remember how many times i would hear a word spoken for the first time after only seeing it in print, and say to myself, sheesh, i had that one all wrong.
“Sesqui–sesqui–sesquipedalian!”
Actually, watermelon= “waterlemon” for some reason. When I was a kid, I called 'em waterlemons and my family was too amused to ever correct me. I still have to remind myself that they are NOT waterlemons.
Popocatepetl.
Statistics trips my tongue every time. I know how to spell it and how to pronounce it, I just have to slow down to get it right.
I have no problems with many of the multi-syllabic words listed…but I cannot pronounce the word tour correctly on the first try to save my life.
Wha’s dis here sauce?
While a name rather than a word, I find after a night with drinks involved that I can lose the finer elements of tongue operation when saying “Schlumberger.”
And there are speech behaviors that I think become burned in to the brain. From time to time I have occasion to refer to “steeply dipping beds.” Once, a few years ago, I mispoke and said “deeply stipping beds” and that monster continues to come home to roost.
Gee, I go away for a day and BANG, a brain drivel of mine has 47 hits. Why is it that the easy ones are the most popular, but the ones I really really really work, the ones that I think has the broadest appeal to the Doper Mentality overall just DIE DIE DIE?
No joke. But there are lots more than just us two here who’ve had that problem. You can tell by their comments. 
Good News: As you get older, eventually you learn all the correct pronunciations of all the words you learned from a book, instead of in school. 
Words with an “R” in them, especially ones that don’t start with it.
Word. World. Bird. Horror. Tour. Roar.
I have to be VERY careful when pronouncing these things, and many others like them.
I have less difficulty with words only starting with an “R” sound, such as read and write, but I still dread having to say them. As a child, my friends, after listening to me say something with a bunch of these words in it, would all start grinning at me, and then ask me to say my name.
Thanks, Mom.
“statistics”
I always stumble on the initial “st” for some reason, even though I don’t have any trouble with other “st” words.
“fracas”
I was actually taught this was pronounced “FRAY-kus”, but apparently it’s “frah-KAH”. I like my version better.
“route”
Another side effect of a regional dialect – sometimes I say “root” and sometimes I say “rout”. At least I’ve stopped rhyming it with “foot” (damn Pennsylvania Germans…).
There have been two words I’ve found that no matter how hard I try, no matter how many times I look up the correct pronunciation in a dictionary, I can not ever say correctly: “obstetrics” (not sure if I even spelled that one right… think the ‘ob’ part of OB/GYN), and “budgeted.”
For the former, I can say ‘obs’, and I can say ‘tet’, but it all falls apart after that, degenerating into a mishmash of t’s and r’s and spit.
The latter word invariably gets too many 'ted’s at the end, becoming ‘bugetedtedted.’ This fact pisses me off to no end.
As an aside, lots of people have trouble saying ‘statistics’. It was my major back in school, and it always caused me to luagh uncontrollably when the head of our department would say ‘ta-tistics’.
This is one I have problems with, and it does crop up fairly regularly for me :o.
When drunk , I have problems with most words.
I thought it was just us bunch of hillbillies down here in Dogpatch that had trouble with that word.
I used to have a great time :rolleyes: with that word when I was taking “Stastistical Methods”. I usually just gave up and called it “Stats class”.
Omnipotent
Always pronounced this as omni-potent, not omnip-otent, even now it scares me, as initially the first form still comes in to my head, and I have to adjust just as I’m about to speak.
Plus pretty much every other word in this thread (not literally every one, just those highlighted of course). I hate it when I have to simplify my diction just because I know my mouth (or its cerebral conspirator) is not up to scratch.
“Rural” will not come out of my mouth in any coherent fashion. “Mirror” is a close second.
This is how I pronounce Worcestershire [the way my mammy taught me]. Woo-[or whuh…or both mixed in together]ster [or sta]-shire. Woo-ster-shire. Pretty simple.
Oh heck! It’s popped up twice so far, so let’s just note that anomaly.