One of the occupational hazards of being a reader is using a word in speech that one has read silently and stumbling in the pronunciation of said word. There’s nothing like saying a word with confidence but incompetence, watching the listener screw up their face either in confusion or laughter, hearing the illuminating correction and having a hearty laugh at yourself.
One of the joys of listening to books read on Librivox is catching an ‘oops’ from the mouth of their lovely volunteer readers. I laugh out loud when ‘the patience of Job’ is pronounced like a wage earner. One of the joys of listening to professionally produced books on tape is catching one of my own mistakes. “Oh, is that how you say it?”
My last name is commonly mispronounced. Before “No Call”, I was tipped off to telemarketers by the botched pronunciation. The grocery store clerks who look at the receipt and say “Thank you, Miz ________” make me laugh too.
And for those who care: Magistra Mater is Mah-GEE(hard G)-struh MAH-tair Think “TEA with MaGEEstra.”
Proper Nouns
Wodehouse – it’s supposed to rhyme with wood
Cowper – sounds like Cooper
Goethe – my SIL’s mother quoted Goethe and pronounced it GO-eth.
Isak Dinesen – for years, in my mind I said DINE-sen,
Camus – it is not CAY-mus, it’s caMOO
Dumas – another French name to trip you up: dooMAH
Keats and Yeats – wah, wah they don’t rhyme! KEETS and YATES
Edinburgh – it looks like it should end with a burg, right? Not! ED-in-BURR-a
My Oopses
primer – long i when it’s paint. But if it’s a book of elementary information
Orion – there was confusion when I said ORion instead of ohRYAN
vegan – hard and soft g’s trip me up all the time.
bade – the past tense of bid is pronounced BAD – forget the silent e
victual – doesn’t it look like VICK-shoe-ol? Nah, it’s pronounced VITtle
jihad – not that long ago I said JIE-had. Ouch!
Oopses from Others
xylophone – my son thought this was pronounced ex-CELL-a-PHONE
roughage – one former boss gave this a French twist, saying ROO-ahzj
chihuahua – a friend’s husband said chih-WHO-ah-WHO-ah
synecdoche – William Safire wrote about Jerry Brown (remember him?)
I’ve run out of time to ponder and remember my favorites.
Help me out, would you? Correct my corrections, if need be.
What words have you or yours mispronounced?
A Living Pencil 
Hi! Mel’s friend here–
We have 3 dachshunds—that’s DOX-oond (roughly) not DASH hound. Many people say it that way. They do dash around, but they’re still “doxies” not “dashies.” (Sounds kinda like Morse code–)
Hi Julee! (waving)Did your ears buzz this weekend?Ouch…guilty of dashing here. It’s that German ch that sounds like k. Doxies it is, then.
Okay, okay, I will try to pronounce Magistramater the way you want me to…..
And Julie, welcome to my friend, Carol’s blog. You will REALLY enjoy her insights! 🙂
I was just thinkig about this pronunciation thing, while listening to a Libribox recording yesterday. Trollope to be exact 🙂 And I wondered how they *standardized* and realized they *dont* lol
True confession about pronunciations…. 17 y o freshman in college (me) taking Honors Econ raised my hand and corrected the prof’s way of saying *Bastiat*.
Hmmm, let’s see if I can make this clear. He was saying Bass (like the fish) Chat (like small talk). Instead of Bah (soft a) stee aht (swallow *t*)
(Hangs head)
I dont think I will ever live down that humiliation….my older brother was on campus and he *found out* before the end of the day about the upstart frosh who *corrected* a professor!
Fun post!
Blessings fm GA,Dana
Just this weekend Chappy said “macabre,” which in my head was always, well, what it looks like. I said, “What did you say? Spell it!” Should sound like ma-cob (corn on the cob of death is how I remember it), but I was saying (in my head), mah-ca-bre! I made her say it several times over to get it. 🙂
Family faves:
Travis’ jalopy while reading the Hardy Boys as a kid as jaa-lopp-ee
Abbey’s lingerie – lin-gear-ie
And we always love to say filet mignon wrong. Who doesn’t?
Miss your words and humor!
KGB
Okay, I’m confused. Our Prima Latina book says that a G followed by an e, i, oe, or ae is a soft g – and the teacher on the DVD pronounces it Mah – jee – strah. Help!
Whenever I read the word cupola in a book, I pronounced it in my head like cup (as in a mug) – OH – la. Then I heard it read in an audiobook as kewp-u-la. Oops!
Carrie
#3 insists Peter went to visit the centurion in “Jopp-ee-ah”, not “Joppa”.
I still get “antennae” wrong- if it looks Latin, it must end “eye”, right? 😉
A couple of my favorite spine-tinglers (and they do send tingles down my spine) are grievous and heinous, pronounced ‘greev-ee-ous’ and ‘hay-nee-ous’ respectively by one of our favorite lecturers on video and audio disc.And, here’s a tangent for you, I recently read ‘orientating’ which everyone (except the author and editor of the book apparently) knows should be ‘orienting’.nnjmom – Latin has two pronunciations, the classical and the ecclesiastical. Classical uses hard g’s always, ecclesiastical follows similar g conventions to English, depending on how a word is spelled.Fun post!!!
Of course I remember Jerry Brown! I lived in CA while he was gov.
When I was much younger (still in school–maybe early high school), I thought ‘antique’ was pronounced AN-ti-que! My eldest son, while still in high school, thought “epitome” was pronounced like it would be if it were not pronounced like it is–EP-ih-tome. (He also thought ‘drawer’ was spelled ‘droor’!).
Sweetbriarpatch- thanks for clearing that up! Our Prima Latina must use the ecclesiastical pronunciation rules.
Carrie
Well I’ve been mispronouncing Wodehouse for years! I know there have got to be others – but my ooopsies aren’t coming to mind. Funny how that is.I can remember a pastor once giving a whole sermon on “Jesus quiets the storm” and several times referred to a “squall” as a “squale”. It was VERY hard not to laugh. His poor wife (who was an English teacher) was mortified, I’m sure.Deb
I mispronounced “subpoena” in a speech. I said: sub-poh-en-ah. Yeah, I got mocked afterward.
I literally cannot say the word “defibrillator”. No matter how many times I try. Never. I can say ventricular fibrillation without a pause, but just get stuck one “defrib…defurba…defuckaduckalator! dammit!”.
Rendezvous – I pronounced it as spelt, rather than Ran-day-Voo
Everyone tells me that I mispronounce all of them.
Epitome (Calvin and Hobbes thankfully cleared this one up, Hobbes uses it as a rhyme point in a poem). We would say Ep-ih-tome rather than Ee-pit-o-mee.Mischievous– I have never struggled with Miss-cheh-vuss, but my best friend always says Miss-chee-vee-us.You should post a disclaimer about classical Latin pronunciation. I was a classical proponent for years… but I have been won over to ecclesiastical pronunciation. I’d rather support ecclesiastical living than classicism. … and you always use ecclesiastical pronunciation for singing.
I’m smiling at a lot of these. Each one makes me think of more: Loquacist’s rendezvous brought potpourri to mind, and Han the Roo’s mischievous reminded me of realtor. How many people say real-IT-tor?Han, I’m not against ecclesiastical pronunciation, but I first learned “magistra” in Wheelock’s with the classical pronunciation and I’m too inflexible to change now. When I lived in Illinois it bugged me when people pronounced the s. Now that I’m in Oregon, I can’t stand it when folks say Ore-y-GON. Think two syllables, like a pipe organ or an organ transplant.
Nihilism- neeheelism
Hi there! I got here from the featured section. I’m still lol over “chi who ah who ha”. Some of my friends’ more memorable mispronounciations include micro-orgasm for micro-organism and testacles for tentacles. 😛
some words are so hard to pronounce!
ORion-Milk’s favorite constellation?
mischievous- MIS-chih-vus, often mistakenly pronounced mis-CHEE-vee-us
Goethe is a road right outside my house and I never new how to say it until now!
If I had read other comments sooner, I wouldn’t have repeated one of them.
Ecclesiastical pronunciation is the devil… ironically. Sad that a church so attached to an ancient language has nevertheless spent over a thousand years attempting to destroy its pronunciation, turning it into Italian.On topic, for some reason when I was about a decade younger I always pronounced “centrifugal” with an extra long E sounding I inserted into it, thus: “centrifugial.”Honestly, I’m a fan of my spelling and pronunciation of it, but language sorta stops working when it’s no longer a set of rules we all agree on, and is instead something we each determine individually.
Lol Machiavellenistic Is that even a word? it should be… I used it in my speech once, but totally messed it up. Saddly… Its kinda funny, you can say it in your minds ear but when you’re gonna tell everybody about it, and you’re reading it entirely to fast. You see the word and its a race to see how fast you can interpret the pronunciation and then say it… which ends in total failure… “he was a MA-Tch-I-a crap… No he wasn’t asian… my bad :p
haha, yeah people botch Goethe all the time! Best way to get it right is for a German to pronounce it for you!
My last name ends in “huis” and no one ever gets it right. (BTW, its pronounced “house.”) You would not believe the number of people who have argued with me, at length, about the pronunciation. I tend to just tell them that for at least the past couple hundred years it has been pronounced that way, but they are welcome to pronounce it however they like. I have friends with a very unique Polish last name, and in our very small town there are at least four possible pronunciations, depending which of their relatives you ask. I grew up thinking it was pronounced a certain way, so imagine my shock when, on the day my best friend married into the family, I heard the groom pronounce it in a completely different way. I swallowed my embarrassment enough to finally ask the bride if I had been saying the name incorrectly all this time. She shrugged it off and said no, that they just found it easier to pronounce it more closely to the way it was spelled, because that made it easier when making introductions. I still find that weird, and avoid saying their last name at all costs.
interesting featured post, it’s actually really practical information lol. When I was about 9 years old I pronounced ‘silhouette’ as ‘sil-hoot,’ and to this day my brothers have not let that die
I never could get “annihilate” right…
mispronounciacionism is a word. supercalifragilisticexpialidocious is a word. distracimatede is a word.pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis is a word. i would tell you the longest word in the history of languge english, but …..there is a BIG problem……………………1,909 LETTERS I CANT PRONOUNCE THAT WORD!!!!!!!!!!!! hey, q: is miotroplisticifactionosistibalotomobilizationlocateraperotibleoasisiflikerdand
a word???? i think it is i said it was and my teacher agres about it!
With my hubby it was “ah-bore-a-gene “[aborigine] and “swored” [sword]. With my daughter it was “two cups make a pint” [like lint] and she didn’t misbehave because she was raised with “de-skip-line” [discipline]. My favorite ,”misconscrew”
At least you’re running across words that normal people will, generally, run across every so often. I’m audio-taping a textbook on Microbiology, and running across words like “chemolithotrophy” and “Phycodnaviridae.” Biologists are just plain mean when it comes to words. They obviously didn’t want them spoken outloud.
I live in TN, and I work taking pizza orders. >.<I know I screw up grammer, but some people take it to the extreme.A few things that arent absolutely terrible but make me cringe no matter what are “kewpin” (coupon) “EYEtalien sausuge” (italian.. ih-talian. uggh!!) “hall-eh-pee-noes” (jalepenos, yep.)and this one is just dialect, standard, but it stil bugs me “tematers”.Oh well. ^_^
This is so funny. My friend and I were just laughing about a nephew who was worried sick about the family dog. Seems that the Bruno an erection of the worst kind and is going to die.
Oops! I was laughing so hard I made some typos.
The family dog, Bruno, got an erection (infection) of the worst kind and is going to die.
… and of course you get english folk like me who pronounce words differently to you, even when they’re spelt the same. but that’s another post …
I love pronouncing Chipotle as cheap-o-tle (like “cheap hotel”) hehe.And when I was a little kid, I always thought etc. was spelled “ect.”, and so I thought the word was ect-cetera instead of et cetera.
Okay, who hasn’t messed this one up?
hor d’oeuvres
I know (now) that is proncounced OR derves but I used to say in my head all the time whore de vores.
Yes, that’s sad.
I learn French. There’s so many silent letters, liasons and some words are so complicated to pronouce.
Hey! How cool is it that you made it to the featured blog!!!! I loved this entry, too funny!
My and my little brother used to pronounce “chihuahua” as chee-hoo-ua-hoo-uh, but only when we were trying to be funny.
I mispronounce quite a few words because I need someone else to tell me what i sund like!! I’m Deaf.
Happened so many times to me. “Herbs” was always a struggle because my third grade teacher told me it was silent h and others don’t use that rule. Anyhow, really fun entry. Don’t you get a slight feeling of superiority when someone pronounces a word wrong and you have the power to correct them if you wish?
I’ve been a lector in church for many years & my name is an insanely bad ethnic tongue twister so I understand entirely. Ave Maria
i have liked using big words since i was just a little tot, and it has gotten me in trouble a time or two, since i didn’t always know how to pronounce them, such as rendezvous, macabre, and a few others that have already been mentioned by some of you. it bothered me to the point where i am now a stickler for proper pronunciation and spelling, and it grates on me when someone misuses a word.
this is the mixup that annoys me about the most; someone is not feeling well, and they tell me that they are nauseous instead of nauseated.
but that’s not a pronunciation error, just a matter of not knowing your language correctly.
i know several preachers who consistently read from Genesis that “the serpent was more sub-tile than any other creature”. that annoys me too.
I always thought Majistra was pronounced, “Ma-hee-struh”My latin teacher said we had to pronounce it that way!
Elvish Fairy, besides the difference in classical and ecclesiastical pronunciation, there are many variations between teachers of Latin. What I shared is what my teacher taught me. He’s one of the top Latin scholars in the country. I’m not trying to one-up on your teacher though. Keep with Ma-hee-struh. Not a hill to die on.Be well.
Is it car-amel or CAR-amel?
correct – incorrect but funny
busy – bu-z
fatigue – fat-ti-gue
Jews – juice
Magistra Mater sounds very Spanish
Jihad is an Arabic word – I have always pronounced it correctly, thank God!
I love the pronunciation of “Edinburgh”.