Posthumous still gets me.
Forte.
Not mine, but my roommate told me the story of how he thought for the longest time the word “misled” was pronounced like the past tense of the (non-existent) word “misle” instead of “miss led.”
Oh, I thought of one. I still pronounce the “l” in “yolk.” Apparently, it’s homophonous with “yoke.”
I grew up just saying it the obvious way, fully articulated (London native).
Not sure what you mean - it does have a long second a, both in US and UK. I’ve never heard any other variant that the ones on this page:
Ascertain. I was corrected by my english teacher in 9th grade. I take a small amount of pleasure in noting that on the rare occasions I’ve heard someone say the word in the wild, it’s 50/50 which pronunciation they’ll use.
Dystopian. I had it in my head that the ‘correct’ version was pronounced with the o sounding like in stop.
Riemann, he’s saying that he pronounced it /stəketo/ rather than /stəkato/
Instead of Staccato, I pronounced it Stacaytto. Long A.
Ok, I get what you did now - but I wouldn’t call that error short vs long.
So what is the correct pronunciation? “Vittles”?
Yes.
For several years, I thought Superman lived in met-ru-POH-lis.
In front of my entire 2nd grade Social Studies class, I read the label on one of the diagrams as “pah-li-TICK-ul map.”
Not mine, but I knew of someone who thought “biped” was pronounced as one syllable, like “bipped.”
As a kid, when I read “capacity” and “incapacitate”, my brain seemed to replace the second “a” with an “i”.
Growing up near the Mexican border, I knew how “Quixote” is supposed to be pronounced. The anglicized pronunciation of “quixotic” grates on my nerves.
That’s reminiscent of the archaic verb “to misle”, meaning to deceive, retained in modern English only in its past tense, as in “he misled me”.
A friend of mine told a story of visiting Paris, meeting a fellow Yank, and being asked directions to the Champ de Sleazy.
And when I was little, I thought “Kryptonian” was pronounced “KRIP-to-non.”
As a kid, for a long time I harboured that misapprehension – having read the word, but either not heard it said, or failed to make the connection.
Long-ago thread about this one – seeing points in favour of both English-type, and Spanish-type, pronunciation.
I’ve always been firmly with “kwik-SOT-ic”: read of, and heard named, Cervantes’s hero, before I had any notions of Spanish: where I was, he was Don Kwik-soat, “end-of”.
(mbh, missed your #35 – posted while I was typing.)
A woman with whom I once worked, who claimed to be an ex-nun, told of how as a novice, she (not a particularly fast learner, and sometimes “challenged” on the spelling / pronunciation front) had trouble with the word “episcopal” – of-or-pertaining-to bishops. She related how she was the recipient of gentle mockery from her fellow-sisters, for intitially pronouncing it “ep-i-SCOP-ple”. This lady did tell very many tales supposedly about her past life, some of them extremely improbable; one ended up feeling unsure of the truthfulness of any of her recountings.