“ASS-uh-sin” for “assassin” (this came from friendly games of Magic: The Gathering, in which our nickname for the card Royal Assassin was “Royal Ass”, because it was annoying as hell).
I also pronounce KMart as “kmart” (one syllable), and Wal-Mart as…actually, I’m not sure how to write it phonetically; I pronounce it such that ‘Wal’ rhymes with ‘Hal’ (as in Hal 2000). If KMart’s going to insist upon not being hyphenated, and Wal-Mart refuses to add that second ‘L’*, well, I’ll just say it like they spell it.
*Yes, I know where Wal-Mart got its name. I don’t care. “Walton” rhymes with “Dalton”, but “wall” rhymes with “hall”, whereas “Wal” rhymes with “Hal”. Sammy’s dead anyhow.
I just got off the phone with a friend of mine, who told me, among other things, about the la-zag-nee he had for dinner. The funniest thing is that he’s completely serious when he says it this way.
Hmm, let’s see- par-MEE-san cheese, broccolis, lasagnuts for lasagna (I’m not sure where that one came from), fuffy for puppy (I got that from my sister - she had dental work done, and was so frozen up that when she saw a cute little dog, she said “Look, a fuffy!”).
Jim pronounces lingerie as fancy undergonch and also talks about Spectacles (pronounced SPECK-ta-klees), the Greek god of corrective eyewear. (You can imagine what Testicles is the Greek god of.)
ok, that made me laugh out loud. I will now embarass myself in public forevermore by exclaiming, when appropriate, “'Look, a fuffy!” with suitable fake novocaine accent.
Not really a mispronunciation, but I get corrected on it all the time.
The Finnish pronunciation of the word “sauna” is sow-na, not saw-na, as most people say it. As the word (and the thing itself) is a Finnish concept, I don’t think that this is technically a mispronunciation.
The area I grew up in and currently live in has a large percentage of Finnish people; as a result, the common pronunciation of sauna up here is “sow-na.”
I know that the rest of the US pronounces it saw-na. I know that I sound like a hick when I say sow-na. But I can’t bring myself to change the way I say it, because ogdamn it, it is the way it’s pronounced by Finnish people.
Around here, D’Angelo’s sub shops are pretty common, and I’ve always preferred to pronounce it Dangle-o’s, seeing as there is no vowel after the D to give it the Dee-Angelo’s that everyone else calls it. I only do this among friends and family though, who know that I do, in fact, know better.
Pretty much everyone I know says Tar-zhay for Target, or sometimes even Chez Tar-zhay. Being from Boston, anyone around here who doesn’t say Tar-zhay says Taahgit.
The one that I do inadvertently is that I have a habit of apparently pronouncing colonoscopy as coLONoscopy. I know how it’s supposed to be pronounced, and I’m not even aware of how I’m actually saying it until I get the blank stare from whoever I’m talking to.
A. mispronunces street signs to make me giggle. For example: Chouteau becomes Ch-oh-tee-u-ee-oh with much distortion of the face.
We also do Wor-chester-shire and epi-tome.
Our last names are different only by a few letters. We joke about hyphenating our names when we get married (which would make my initials NMNN) and our pets have the last name “Newmneumlaneumeunum”.
When I’m a little overdressed for the occasion, I feel swayve and deboner.
I am almost incapable of calling the California Pizza Chicken by it’s correct name.
