Up until recently, I thought that the US national park was pronounced “yo-semite”, as if it was some sort of ghetto-slang used for greeting a Jewish person.
There was an '80s cop show called Hill Street Blues that had a recurring latino character named Jesus. All I heard as a kid was “Hey, Zeus” so I thought his actual name was Zeus and everybody just said “hey” to him when addressing him.
I love this so much!
That’s amazing
Ahahhahhahahaaha that’s actually amazing
Wait how do you phonetically say this?
Yo - seh - mit - ee
I thought Yosemite Sam had pretty much taught all English speakers the correct pronunciation. I remember my parents saying their Swedish relatives pronounced it “Yohsmeet.”
I have no idea who that is.
EDIT: Oh, that guy. And now I know his name.
Non-native English speaker, young, or both?
The former. Noggie, to be precise. Plus I didn’t watch a whole lot of Bugs Bunny growing up either.
Wassa “Noggie”?
Or… or you read it in the 3 word title of a meme. Doesn’t matter, learned word.
Words go brrrr.
“Facade” caught me in high school.
Interestingly (to me), I have the opposite problem in Spanish. I’ve learned mostly through immersion, so when I see a Spanish word written down sometimes I’m like “Holy heck THAT’S how you spell carrot??” Spanish is a language where the spelling/pronounciation rules are really consistent, but it’s still surprising to see some of these words without having ever thought of how they might be spelled. Toallas (towels) got me too.
Pour one out for all my epi-tome homies
This was me with a number of words over the years, but most memorable “paradigm.”
The one that wakes me up in the middle of the night is albeït. I thought it was fancy foreign speak pronounced “all bait”, but it is just a short form of “all be it”, is pronounced exactly like that, and is a synonym for “all though it be”.
It was embarrassingly recently that I realized segue and “segway” were the same word which I apparently didn’t know how to spell.
Edit: BTW - the weird way that English words are spelled or pronounced - and why - is one of my favorrite nerd subjects. I love this thread so freaking much. And how RIGHT nearly everyone here SHOULD have been.
segue puts me straight into a fugue state
Pronounced “foog-way”.
master ugue
Yeah, that’s very much an English thing. Many other languages use reasonably consistent spelling and pronunciation, so memorizing the handful of exceptions isn’t really a problem.
However, with English it’s the other way around. You need to memorize the handful of words that are actually pronounced the way they are written. Everything else is just pure chaos. If you read a word, you can’t pronounce it. If you hear a word, you can’t find it in a dictionary.
Bro let me tell you how recently I realized…
👆
Doesn’t mean it isn’t cute/funny when it does happen, though. Just this week my SO pronounced chihuahua as “CHA-HOO-A-HOO-A” so I told them “you know this word, it’s the taco bell dog” lol
Thank you for the new method to make my family groan.
As a homeschooled kid with a big vocabulary I was largely not able to pronounce (more reading than talking), this is a sentiment I wish I’d heard earlier in life.
I’m sorry. I hate that the stereotype that stuck for homeschool kids wasn’t that they’re often very well read and advanced, because that has been my experience encountering them over the years.
In fairness, that stereotype is largely due to capital H Homeschooled kids like me. as in, the subculture as opposed to simply the method of schooling at home.
If you meet someone who was in the subculture, you need to navigate through a few levels of weird damage before our vocabulary is even close to the most notable thing about us.
Gif
You should never mock someone who pronounces a word strangely: They might be from Reading.
As a kid I used to pronounce amoeba as “a-MO-ba” instead of “a-MEE-ba”.
I only pronounced that right the first time because I saw it spelt with a œ, which I misread as æ, like encyclopædia. So three cheers for “right for the wrong reason”.
Also dialects are a thing. The way a lot of words come out of my mouth has been culturally labeled as ignorant. I go out of my way to change my pronunciations at work so I get taken seriously, but I’ve been doing it less now that I’m accepted in that world. Maybe that caps how much farther I can go, but maybe I don’t want to go further if it means continuing to act like people who sound like how I sound are less than
I wonder if by the same criteria the opposite also holds true. Are misspelled words dishonorable? And if yes does it matter if they’re nouns or other functional words like there/they’re/their ?
Correct
This happens to me a lot in the medical field. “Parenchymal” has been my most recent, and I have to think about it every time I hear it or try to say it
I read it in my head as PAIR-EN-KIME-AL, but it’s pronounced PA-RINKA-MAL… though how I read it does help me to spell it
Some words I still can’t pronounce, but I know how to “read”, such as “klebsiella aerogenes”
While we’re on the subject: “Tachypneic” is pronounced like “TA-KIP-NIK”, but I never hear anyone try and pronounce “Bradypneic”. One would assume that it’s pronounced like “BRA-DIP-NIK” (or maybe “BRAY-DIP-NIK”), but I can’t confirm. I think saying “bradypneic” intimidates people
“Tachypneic” is pronounced like “TA-KIP-NIK”,
I’m clearly not qualified to lecture you, but deriving from words like pneumonia, and consulting merriam-webster, are you sure the “p” isn’t silent here, and that the “e” is?
I can confirm that the “p” is not silent in tacypneic, unlike in pneumonia. It’s a weird one imo, but that is how it is
Thanks for enlightening me.
I thought I was mispronouncing “duodenum” so I changed it, then I heard doctors on youtube saying it the way I thought was wrong. I had gone from right to wrong back to right. lol
Lol, I think I heard this one verbally for the first time from Peter Griffin in an early season of family guy.
