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 
There’s a street near my house that’s Cognac Court. For years I pronounced it COG-nak. It wasn’t until I turned 21 and started drinking alcohol that I realized it is CONE-yak.
There’s a street near my house that’s Cognac Court. For years I pronounced it COG-nak. It wasn’t until I turned 21 and started drinking alcohol that I realized it is CONE-yak.
My husband sisn’t believe me or our pastor when we told him victuals was “vittles”
I had a girt in my speech class in college who was giving a speech on Karate, Tae Kwon Do and the like, and she persistenly referred to them as “MARITAL” arts. I couldn’t have done them then becasue I was unmarried… lol
In the KJV shew = show, and divers = diverse… my husband always says them like, what you put on your foot, and the guy on the board getting ready to go in the pool.
Great post!
Oh, this is too much fun. And you all keep priming my pump. The Bald Eagle, “draught” is correctly pronounced draft but I learned that within the last ten years.Stacey, KJV language has a plethora of words which have been mispronounced. One that always tripped me up was whore, which I pronounced war.
As a teacher, I hear so many strange pronunciations. Of course, now that I want to share one, I can’t think of any that stand out. As an avid reader, I can identify with some of your little trouble areas…
holy crap, the english language has confusion pronunciation rules.
haha, and i remember the laughter of my classmates back in 4th or 5th grade when i said outloud the proper name Sean for the first time.
but i’ll say this: upon reading your list, i had so many, “nah, that can’t be right”s that i had to look some of them up on dictionary.com, only to find out that i definitely have been pronouncing primer and victual/s wrong for years. but as for bade, dictionary.com has pronunciations of bad and bade (you have to scroll down for the bade), and my webster’s non-virtual dictionary has it pronounced as both, too. and as for synecdoche, i’ve been pronouncing it wrong because i learned in french class that it’s pronounced see-nek-dohk, with the vowel in that last syllable somewhere between oh and uh, as the french say it. i should have realized it’d be pronounced differently in english, especially since it’s not even originally a french word, but rather a greek one. but, again, dictionary.com has it as sih-NEK-duh-kee, instead of SIH-nek-duh-KEE.
proper names are the worst, though, because that’s where there’s the most variation from the normal rulse of pronunciation. i remember going on a tour of the metropolitan museum of art in new york, and our tour guide pointed out the living room of a frank lloyd wright house that was from a house originally built in wayzata, mn. the tour guide pronounced it roughly like it’s spelt. being from minnesota, we thought we’d quietly mention to him after the tour that it’s why-ZEH-tah. but in trying to emphasize the difference between the why and the way, we put the emphasis on the first syllable instead of the second, so when he made the correction in front of the group, he still pronounced it wrong by emphasizing the wrong syllable. whoops! oh well.
also, to cheeselover3000, i’d guess that it’s not so much that the church has been trying to turn latin into italian, but rather that the ecclesiastical pronunciation gradually evolved from the classical pronunciation. by the time the church had its liturgy in place, the pronunciation of latin had changed somewhat, as happens to languages. and while the church codified that version of latin as its official language, the vernacular continued to change slowly from the vernacular latin that influenced the pronunciation of ecclesiastical latin into italian.
in any event, the church being the conservative force that it is, it seems unlikely that they’d actively try to change the pronunciation of latin, but rather that it happened by accident. if anything, ecclesiastical latin was an incorrect attempt to pronounce the classical language. or so i’d guess. i’m no linguist, so i definitely could be entirely wrong.
Oh Estellalovesmusic you are SO RIGHT and I was SO WRONG with synecdoche. I thought the right thing in my mind but didn’t translate it to the screen correctly. Thank you.And I remember the first time I connected Sean the printed word with [shawn] the spoken word. But the problems continue: we know a Sean who pronounces it [seen]. Yikes!
ugh. confuSING pronunciation rules. jeez.
I teach English as a Second or Other Language, so I could write a book about this! And as a speaker of another language, I’m sure someone could write a book about my mispronunciations. One of the funniest is when a Spanish speaker asked me how much my purse cost. I got the accent in the wrong place and told her it cost me 20 pains instead of 20 dollars. The entire class ROARED with laughter, including me, the teacher.
Hmm, I didn’t read through all of your comments so this may have been mentioned already, but I think it’s funny when I hear PREE-FACE rather than than PREF-IS for the introductory information of a book.
Calliope, Penelope yup, I mess ’em up – who whould jhave thought that they don’t end with an OPE (think hope) instead opee… and worse yet as s freshman in High School; puh-sway-do .. for psuedo … AWK the shame of it all.
Everyone in Cleveland says bra as braw, except for my aunt and mom who say brah. I swear they’re from Brooklyn, NY.
I corrected my German teacher in high school about the pronunciation of “Goethe” and she said “No, it’s Go-eth.” …right. And she had lived in Germany for like seven years or something and had been teaching it forever, so come on.Also this reminds me that a lot of people mispronounce the word “pronunciation” and say “pro-NOUNCE-ee-ation” which always makes me laugh.
I once asked a teacher how to spell “ANX-shus-tee,” and was after a few minutes of confusion told that it was pronounced “anx-aye-eh-TEE” (anxiety). Whoops.The Chihuahua is my favorite.. I think I may start pronouncing it incorrectly just for kicks. =)
My brother has both the privilege and misfortune of being named Orion. Many others, like you, have pronounced it OR-ion, or OR-yon as well as many, many other mispronunciations! I thought the constellation was well known, but have come to realize otherwise.
I too, like you, have read much but spoken little and sometimes have forgotten that I didn’t know the word for sure until I said it, and received a very funny look from someone… and consistently say “lingerie” exactly as it’s spelled, though I know otherwise, but forget because that’s how I’ve said it in my head since I was able to read!
Prolly quite a few i can’t think of…. but I was in a class one day where the teacher repeatedly pronounced the word “cliche” so it counded like “clitch”. I was so embarrassed for him. It was a class full of adults who all prolly knew also!!!!
Ah! Poorr guy.
But, there is grace for such blunders.
SQ
and our beloved President still thinks we can benefit from NUCULAR energy. Can no one correct him?
i had to present a project for school. hadn’t ever seen the word on paper, so i slipped and pronounced facade “fay-kade”
I knew Camus, Dumas, Keats and Yeats, Orion, vegan, jihad.
Are you sure about primer? I’ve never heard it as PRIMmer, and each checking the dictionary for a pronunciation key, it only lists the long i form and another, British pronunciation: prahy-mer.
I had no idea about victual.
I’m not completely sure about “bade.” I’m almost certain it has the long a sound, but checking the dictionary yields little clarification. Perhaps it is a case like “tomato.”
uh, i did not see a single funny word. need something more innapropriate like mr dumass commercial.
i got one, say I sit on chairs ten times rlly fast.
I cannot pronounce façade. I have a problem where I read a word, and I can use it properly in writing, but I can’t say it because I’ve never heard it used. I guess thats what I get for having a high reading level. =P
i worked at a sheet music store, and the first book in any instrumental series was always Primer.i pronounced it just like you did haha, and i never even knew it was wrong until like, a year into the job.
Sweetbriarpatch,Orienting and orientating are two different things, but both are real words!
I always said vinyl as VINN-ill instead of VINE-ill. Oops!When I was little I pronounced chihuahua like that, too.I can’t say the word ‘thyroid’… it comes out as thoi-roid unless I say it slowly.More interesting:When I went to Montreal, I was talking to my parents on the subway and they asked what stop we were going to stop at–I was too embarrassed to try and say the station name (I’ve never taken French!) It was ‘Lionel-Groulx’, pronounced ‘lee-oh-nell groo”. What a beautiful language, though.
When I see “picturesque”, I always say “picture-skew”, just because I want to.
I think I get more upset when highly paid professionals get away with creepy things like “irregardless” (often heard on national news). I once heard a collection of paintings described as “incredulous”. Boy, was I!
my family calls these “reading words.” my favorites: my mother always called a miniseries a mi-NIZ-eries, and so did i until it dawned on me one day. she laughed so hard when i told her. my aunt said “bedraggled” as BED-RAGGLED, which makes sense to me.
I’ve made the same mistakes with wodehouse, Goethe, and victuals. I never connected victuals with vittles until recently. Weird. I have the reverse problem when I pronounce my first name. People can’t spell it when I pronounce it. They want to put in an extra R, L, H, or some other letter where there isn’t one. Oh well.
great for the high school students want to impress teachers or avoid embarrassment 🙂 i think i have more trouble spelling (words with double consonants like tomorrow) rather than pronouncing. thank the genius(GEEN-nus) for spell-check!
a lot of people pronounce “sherbet” with another r…”sherbert”. where does the other letter come from? i don’t get it.
I don’t know about my favorite mispronunciation, but I do know my least favorite:
nuclear pronounced as “noo-kyah-lerr”
It’s “noo-klee-err,” people! Nuclear, not nucular!
I had an argument with an ex once over how you pronounce the word “often”. I would say OFF-ten. He swore it was OFFen. I told him to listen to how everyone else pronounced it and he said, “Well, they’re all wrong!” I told him he was just bitter because I was right.
Years later, after we’d broken up, I just happened to be looking up another word in the dictionary in which the word ‘often’ was on the same page and I realized that he’d been right. Oops.
I’m not as much a pronunciation nazi as I am a spelling nazi. There are some words I know I probably don’t spell correctly either, but one huge one that bugs me is that it seems over half the population can’t spell is the word “definitely”. It drives me crazy and I can’t help it whenever I see definatly, definately, definetly, or even yes, defiantly.
Some fun things to try to say out loud are the screen names of people you’ve been talking to online for years…and sometimes you realize when you sound it out, it’s nothing like you thought it was!
I always mispronounced the word “nonchalant” until my eighth grade English teacher said it in a spelling test. Luckily, I recognized it and spelled it right.
I always say chee-hoo-uh-hoo-uh as a joke. It’s terribly amusing.
I always say “bob wire” instead of “barbed wire” even though I figured out I was wrong when I was about 14…
I just tripped and fell over this blog entry because I was having this thought the other day and remembering, horrified, the first time I said Jung outloud. *cringe*
I still cringe when I think about the first time I referred to Jung out loud.
I also cringe when I think about how I didn’t realize that first comment had posted. 😉
My dad says his aunt said “misled” as “mizzled” and idiosyncrasy as “id-i-OS-in-crazz-y”.
my name is commonly mispronounced and misspelled but i always try to correct the person in my mind as they are speaking or writing to me. funny how the mind works
there was a girlie girl in my high school class years ago who read in front of the class and pronounced “channel” as “chanel.” my teacher said, “we’re not going shopping.” ha ha!
i can NEVER remember if the A in fragrance is long or short.
and for the longest time i thought epitome was
“ep-ih-TOME”
chihuahua – a friend’s husband said chih-WHO-ah-WHO-ahthat one made me laugh i mispronounce tons of words, english is a funny langyage,i once pronounce carcase car-case>__________< but now i know
My most recent mistakes … Flotilla is Float-ill-a NOT Float-tee-ya and Frigates is Frig-its NOT Frig-gates.But I’d rather say flotillas with the Spanish ‘ll’ because it’s so much sillier 😉
Great post! When I was in school I said “ama eeba” for amoeba and “preem able” for the preamble. My mom taught a little boy to read and he just loved “deeter miners” and “pre-potions”.
Thanks for the giggles!
Oh, I totally forgot my biggest pet peeve: people who say “irregardless”!
“rec anize” instead of recognize bugs me too. 🙂
Growing up with non-English speaking parents, my reading skills developed much more quickly than my pronouciation skills. I remember pronoucing things in my head as “deeter -mine” with a long E and a long I (determine) and “ans-wur” (answer).
how about toupee…
apparently its pronounced “two-pay”, but i always think its “to pee”
Melee – I always said it as though there was no accent over the first of the double ‘e’s.
It sounded liek “muh-LEE.”
Granted, I’ve been reading the word since about second grade, and even now I hear disputes over whether it’s “MAY-lay,” “muh-LAY,” or “mee-lee,” (with no clear accent on either syllable.)
Until I get a satisfactory concensus, I’m just gonna keep pronouncing it my way, which I think sounds better anyway, or using “melee” alternatives, like hand-to-hand, fisticuffs, close combat, brawl, etc.
Whenever I see the word “Pilates” (pronounced pull-ah-tease) I pronounce it “pie-lay-ts”.
I also came by way of featured content and must say I have to grin a lot.
When we moved from Kentucky to Arizona and my mother-in-law heard we were moving to Huachuca, she called it wha-chi-wha-chi, it’s pronounced closer to wha-choo-ca.
Of course then we moved to Germany and the new Chancellor’s name is Angela (like Angle-a, not an-jel-a).
Thankfully some of those you (and everyone else) mentioned I more or less knew, although it helps to have heard the correct pronounciation before knowing how the word/s were spelled.
I had another one to mention, but I can’t remember the word right now.