I’ve heard the word synod pronounced a number of times, including on television and on radio, to rhyme with sin nod, just like that, and nothing to do with those words themselves, just a manner of pronouncing synod, unrelated to venial or napping.
I’ve used niggardly a number of times, and have heard it IRL, a few, very few times. Its definition should not in itself be offensive to black people, although the sound of it often is, especially in its implication.
Along similar lines, and to the best of my recollection, I’ve never heard the word cupidity used in my life, even as I have known its meaning since I was a teen (go figure). No, nothing to do with a god of love, nor, more generally, erotica, lascivious, voluptuary, or other such words.
The definition of the word is synonymous with greed and avarice; and while its origins are from a Latin word for yearning, cupiditas, this is too general to be directly associated with sexuality
I associate “parlous” with Mark Twain. I assume it was a 19th-century frontier rural Americanism for “perilous,” just as “varmint” (which I associate with Yosemite Sam) was for “vermin.”
A regional variant on perilous indeed, but apparently much older than European settlement of America
Similar vowel shift in “varsity”, and if memory serves there’d be other examples in Dickens and other Victorian writers.
Cool! I never associated “varsity” with “[uni]versity” until you mentioned it just now.
“Cadre”. My mental pronunciation has always been CAW-dray, but I’ve been listening to a lot of British English narrators lately, and they pronounce it like CAW-der (rhymes with fodder).
I did a Google search and the audio pronunciation for American English was CAW-dree, though I did see some IPA notation that supported my longstanding mental version…
acronym - a word (such as NATO, radar, or laser) formed from the initial letter or letters of each of the successive parts or major parts of a compound term
The definitions overlap. At one time they might have been more limited but use over decades have made them grow looser.
Capex can fit the definition of all three of acronym, stump compound, and portmanteau.
Ain’t English grand?
This may be one of those cot/caught things, but I’ve always heard it as CAH-dray or even CA (as in “cat”) -dray.
I’ve never heard the last syllable as “der.”
Yeah, for me CAH and CAW parse as the same sound.
Add to that, “victuals” . TIL it is literally pronounced “vittles”.
In BrE the second syllable always gets a schwa, and a lot of BrE speakers also do not voice the -r-. So, KAH-duh or KAH-druh. Essentially, they give it a frenchified pronunciation, which make sense, since it’s a relatively recent (late 18th century) borrowing from French .
In USE the second syllable is often given a long vowel, so either ray or ree.
It’s still around in modern British English: clerk = “clark”, Derby = “darby”, Berkshire = “barkshirr”.
Then there are words I’ve heard, but never read. If a wound has a purulent discharge people want to say it is pus-ee. So I’ll ask them how to spell the word they are using and they spell it pussy, which isn’t correct.
My Random House dictionary says the “e” at the end is a schwa, except in the US military, where it’s pronounced as a long E. I’ve always pronounced it with the schwa, because that approximates the French pronunciation while still not being too difficult.
Tell me you’ve never watched ‘Forged in Fire’ without telling me you’ve never watched ‘Forged in Fire’…
How about ‘gibbet’? Can’t say I have ever heard anybody talking about that…
Bunch of historical names. For example, I got it in my head that Franz Shubert’s last name was pronounced “Shoo-Bear” and mispronounced it to appropriately hilarious results. (It’s “Shoo-Bert”, in case y’all are wondering. Which y’all aren’t, being smarter than I.)
Pretty sure his name was Schubert and he was Austrian.
This thread is about pronunciation, not spelling! 