Where you are, perhaps. Here in the States, we pronounce our Rs. For (most of) us 'Murricans, it would rhyme with “mommy.”
Michael Flanders was one of the cleverest lyricists ever. All of his songs, and his introductions to them, are laden with clever wordplay. I gave just one example here:
My father had the “At the Drop of a Hat” records when we were kids, and growing up with them, I took them completely for granted. It was only decades later, when I had become a writer and editor, that I became fully aware just how sophisticated Flanders and Swann’s silly little songs were.
I have both the ‘Drop of a Hat’ records and also their ‘Bestiary’. I think the Whale song is great - it includes rhymes for such words as ‘Equatorial’, ‘Antarctical’, and ‘Porpoises’.
They obviously loved using language as a musical effect.
Inchoate is a good one. I don’t think I’ve ever heard it spoken. The OED gives two pronunciations, either with the accent on the second syllable (in-KOH-uht) or on the first (IN-kuh-wayt). In reading it I had assumed the accent was on the second syllable.
For some reason that word makes me think of one of the Childe cycle books by Gordon Dickson. I guess that must be where I first encountered it.
Idiosyncrasy/idiosyncratic - - although I’ve made a stab at saying it a couple of times in high school and was tittered at. I think I could make a better stab at it today, but I don’t remember ever hearing it.
I encountered “brown study” once, in a Sherlock Holmes story. Watson falls into one, and Holmes, watching his eyes and expressions, infers his train of thought.
Mine is “inchoate”. Seen it in print, often enough, but never encountered it in the wild.
I read a bunch of chess books in my youth and had a subscription to Chess Life magazine, but didn’t really play much outside of the school cafeteria and on my computer. This was all before I could sort of guess how to pronounce German and Russian.
One word I don’t think I’ve heard pronounced: zwischenzug, which IIRC is an in-between move (and probably literally means that in German, which I don’t know): something like “I play bishop takes knight, then queen takes knight, queen takes queen, bishop takes queen – but if I play knight-g6-check before I take their queen, then bishop takes queen will be a check that skewers their rook and I’ll be up an exchange after king takes knight, bishop takes rook.”
Words that stunned me when I heard them pronounced correctly: zugzwang, which doesn’t rhyme with “bug sang” and (Alexander) Alekhine, which isn’t pronounced like Alex Hines with the /s/ and /z/ sounds removed (sorry for the IPA usage!).
For those mentioning “inchoate”: I just recently listened to the audiobook for “The Greater Good” by Sandy Mitchell (a Ciaphas Cain novel); apparently the author just learned the word or something, because I felt like it was used at least one time in every chapter. As one of those words you see but not hear, usually, it really stood out.
It is a good interviewing/interrogation technique. Some suspect says something that doesnt gibe. The interviewer just stays silent, staring at them, maybe with a doubtful expression. The suspect often quickly supplies more info.
Fecund or fecundity. Apparently it’s a hard C, like fekund or fekundity. In my head it was always a soft C, like fesund or fesundity, which of course, now sounds wrong too.
In yesterday’s Spelling Bee puzzle, the pangram was frontman which I had always said as two words front man, with the second pronounced exactly as man. But they didn’t accept motorman, which I always pronounced with the last vowel a schwa.
