Coca-cola = Choke of cola
Doughnuts = Dowg nuts
Necessary = Nececelery
Hors d’ourves (sp)? = Horse Dow Vres
When I want a snack and a good cheap cup of coffee, I go to Drunken Donuts.
Testicles = Test-a-cleez.
One of the main streets through El Cajon is Jamacha Road. I was told locals pronounce it “ham-a-shaw”. That’s such a bizarre mixture of getting it right and getting it wrong … worse even than Vallejo.
That reminds me; my brother and his family live in Mission Viejo but I call it Mission Pendejo.
Samsung = Gnusmas
Tustin = It nuts!
Nooksack = Nooksack, Baby!
I say “ja-la-pen-oh.” As in, “I’d like nachos please, no ja-la-pen-ohs.”
Mine’s “hind lick” from Beavis & Butthead.
Same here. I say “sammich.”
We have a low-end grocery store here called “No Frills.” I say “No Thrills.”
At my old work a girl and I had our own secret language. One thing we did was pronounce the hard consonents in some words. I’d ask for the “sKizzors” or she’d ask me for a “kuh-nife.” If something was important we needed it “right kuh-now.”
My dad, who definitely knew how the word was properly pronounced, would almost always use the Lt. Pulver pronunciation of “buttocks”, which rhymes with “you clocks”.
laundrymat
devil’s avocado
banammas, you know, those long yellow fruit.
“fruh-JEEL-ay” any time a package comes.
I pronounce aluminum like the Brits because it sounds so absurd.
My white-bread Midwestern grandmother, whose speech was as close to the General American Accent as one could possibly get; who was well-read and generally eloquent (her father was a school principal and a lay preacher); and who eschewed slang, regionalisms, and other variations in her speech, always pronounced “window” as “windle” (rhymes with “spindle”), for no reason that I could discern.
To this day my wife and I do the same, just for the lulz.
Yeah, I do that.
My spell-checker insists I spell ‘aluminum’ wrong (See? I got the red underline right there!) because I don’t spell it ‘-ium’.
The other thing about ‘aluminum’ is that I like to pronounce it ‘moony moolah!’ (Yes, with the exclamation mark.)
For me it’s mostly place names. I’ve lived in AZ and CA for 30 years - I know how they’re supposed to sound. But that’s not how they should be pronounced
:
The town by Oxnard, Port Who enemy
Down by San Diego lies La Jollah
South of Phoenix is Geela Bend (hard g, not “heela bend”, like it is supposed to be), and Cahsah Grandy.
But, I’ll go the other way with that city 90 miles south of Phoenix, Tucksone, which is closer to how it is spelled (Tucson - FYI the American pronunciation is Too san, the Spanish is Took sone.)
My wife insists on pronouncing the place filled with books as a “liberry”. I have a co-worker (non-native English speaker) who adds an extra bit on the end when he asks me how words are supposed to be “pronounciated”. That is like the epi-tome of bad pronounciation!
Which I must pronounce as ‘Puh-HOE-niks’.
And then there’s the Mo-jave Desert.
Al-boo-kwair-kway.
When I’m out on the town, I might go buy a shirt at Old Gravy. And since it’s in the same shopping center, I just have to go visit boobsandnipples to see if the latest book by my favorite author is out yet. And then my girlfriend will usually drag me to see her puh-syke-ic. It’s all hogwash, of course, but it’s harmless and she usually buys me a double scoop of freetome for being a good sport.
And there’s that military installation in southern Arizona, Fort Hoocha-koocha.
FEB-ee-air-ee ?
I like the Ford light sport ute, the Escape. Pronounced “ES Ca Pay”.