My brain says “enn-you-eye”. What is it really?
On-we.
That was the “Word of the Day” at my school a few years ago. It was really amusing listening to the student doing the announcements trying to pronounce it.
Sort of like “on-we” except more frenchified
Facade - I though it was pronounced with a hard “c” and and ending like lemonade until high school.
I just couldn’t care less; le sigh.
This. As a child, it took me a long time to realize that the word I heard (on television shows, never in my own home) as “orderbs” meaning fancy party finger foods was that same word I read in books but couldn’t figure out how to pronounce. I had a very large vocabulary and read a lot, but some words (usually foreign ones) stumped me.
Another one. when I was doing a voice over for a medical information DVD, I said Doo-wad-enum instead of Dou-O-Deen-um for duodenum. I had to re-record a several sentences the next day. I hate mispronouncing words like that.
another memory, when I was doing morning radio news, I said Domineecan instead of Dominican in a live broadcast. It wouldn’t have been so bad, but Ed Bradley from 60 minutes was touring the station and heard me. Called me on it when I got to shake his hand. Sigh. The bad part was, I knew how to pronounce Dominican, I just had a brain fart.
I always though it was pronounced the first way too, and I learned it from my mom who suffered from a duodenal ulcer.
In grade school I used to get called on a lot to read aloud from our textbooks because I had pretty advanced reading skills at the time. Except the day I pronounced Caracas as Cara Cass.
Just checked a few online dictionaries and they list both pronunciations. However, I have noticed, as someone pointed out upthread, that these online dictionaries in the last decade or so (does anyone consult print dictionaries anymore?) have begun including more and more pronunciations that were widely considered incorrect until very recently.
In medical school, there are attendings who will correct you. Surgeons are particularly notorious for this, and in particular, being asses about it. E.g., “doo-AH-den-um? What’s that? I’ve never heard of that structure before.”
Medicine has a whole host of pronunciation controversies, in addition to doo-AH-den-um vs. doo-oh-DEEN-um. A few more:
ANN-jin-uh vs. ann-JIE-nuh
um-BILL-ih-kuss vs. um-bill-EYE-kuss
SKELL-et-ull vs. skull-EE-tull
And everyone’s personal favorite, SAHNT-ih-meet-er for centimeter. Surgeons again are notorious for this. Legend has it this got its start when American medicine was still relatively primitive, just starting to become scientific, and European medicine was more advanced; we were importing all these experts from Europe to come over and teach American doctors, who thought it was more “correct” to mimic the French pronunciation because SI units were originally developed in France.
FWIW, the only thing I remember from high school English was our teacher telling us if a word was from the Greek, the accent was on the second syllable from the right. If Latin, third syllable from the right. Duodenum is Latin, ergo Doo-WAD-e-num. Trash this at will, I don’t mind.
(Here she comes, just a-walkin’ down the street, singin’ Doo-wah-de-num-de-num-dum-de-num-doo.)
Isn’t that matter, affected by where in the West Indies you happen to be talking about? If I have things rightly: Haiti’s neighbour is the Do-MIN-ican Republic; but the island nation some hundreds of miles eastward thereof, is pronounced Do-min-EE-ca – so its associated adjective is Do-min-EE-can.