I just about stabbed my eardrums with a pencil while at work today. In a nearby cube, one of my co-workers was giving some training on one of our back-end sales planning tools which maps account coverage hierarchies.
Now, I know this woman very well, and she’s a very sweet person, and normally I get along with her fine. But she is incapable of pronouncing the word “subsidiary” - instead, she pronounces it “subsidirary”. Which I’ve heard her do before - but since I don’t sit near her, it hasn’t bothered me much. No more so than hearing the stray “ex-cetera” or other mis-pronunciation.
But she was giving the training to someone sitting nearby. And since the training dealt with account hierarchies, it was very heavily focused on mapping subsidiaries. It also seemed to take all. fucking. day.
It bugged me so much I tried to clear my schedule enough to allow me the 30 minutes to get home, just so I wouldn’t be subjected to this verbal butchery. But I had calls scattered throughout the day, so I had to sit there clenching my jaw and waiting for it to stop, trying to focus on whatever tasks were on my plate.
So I got to hear “subsidirary” 200 goddamn times.
Seriously, who the fuck looks at that word and sees an extra ‘r’?
And the bigger question - after several years of giving these types of trainings, how come none of her teammates have corrected her? She often gives training to dozens of people at a time - hasn’t one person piped up, like, ever? And even if not, she must have heard how other people pronounce the word - I can even recall saying the word “subsidiary” in front of her on mroe than one occasion (one time, perhaps even enunciating just a bit too clearly). Is she simply incapable of correcting herself?
And before anyone asks, no, she doesn’t have a speech impediment that - this appears to be the only word that she molests with any kind of regularity.