My father had a terrific sense of humour and would deliberately mispronounce certain words to wind up his fancy-pants daughters. “Patio” became “pay-tio”, that kind of thing. But one word in particular has entered the family lexicon: “gnome”, pronounced “ganOmee”. Not meaning a garden ornament, but a young man of dubious moral/intellectual qualities. Our boyfriends were almost always declared gnomes.
I do this all the time. My son used to roll his eyes, but now he joins in, asking his grandmother for a “fork and ka-nife” or saying “I can do that, it’s my pierogi-tive”
Phonetic transcription exists for a reason. The comments here are full of “this is pronounced as this”. Which isn’t very helpful.
Well of course it’s not very helpful, “this” is quite frankly wrong. Use “this” instead of “this”.
Fyoog is just so wrong
*Sad Fyoog noises*
I was 12 and believed chaos was ‘cha-os’ because I’d only ever seen it written.
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Had a classmate that thought the same. 20 years later, still amused by how funny we thought that was.
Similar to me, I used to believe chaos was pronounced ‘caus’
That’s probably closer to the original latin than the current English butchery.
It’s “kaos” in (“classic”) latin bcs it’s copypasta from Greek.
Wait, what is the current English butchery? Non-native speaker here.
Oh, just in general. English is the cronenburg monster of languages and pronunciation. We will steal your words, pronounce them weirdly, use them wrongly, and claim they’ve always been ours.
Behold, the original Kronenbourg monster.
At university a college pronounced ‘machine’ a bit like ‘ma-shayna’ (almost a bit Slavic? but totally on accident whatever it was). I loved it so much it stuck with me all these years, basically became headcanon.
I’m going to pronounce colleague as college now thank you.
Fuck, lol, well now I have to as well, since I was so committed.
Then again, I always pronounce whale-cum, cock-a-ccino, etc, what’s one more
collagecollege.
Just looking at the word I would definetly read ir as fugu.
Looking at the Wikipedia article, it says it’s pronounced fjug. Like what happened to the u and e.
It’s usually an etymological thing.
I know fugue in french is said similarly and I wouldn’t be surprised if fugue is a french loanword.
entomological
Entomology is the scientific study of insects, a branch of zoology. source: Wikipedia
There corrected, good catch. Early morning posts are the worst.
Same as what happened to “league”. Forget it, Jack - it’s Englishtown.
I’ma start saying leegu now, especially if it’s of legends.
On the one hand … “Never make fun of someone if they mispronounce a word. It means they learned it by reading.”
On the other hand… what else are friends there for?
We were playing some game (don’t even remember what) back in 2005 and I read a card that said Lebron James as “Lee-bron James”.
My wife will not let this go. It’s been almost a full 2 decades, but anytime Lebron is mentioned in any context whatsoever, my wife will give me that look like “haha Lee-bron. You moron.”
Stories like this make for lasting relationships.
My wife accidentally bumped someone at a traffic light while sitting immediately in front of a cop like 10 years ago. No damage, no ticket, no problems but she’s SO bad with that sort of thing.
So naturally it occasionally comes up when she’s driving.
I’m ruined on “Lee-“ anything. , because I think of Leeroy Jenkins. Now I’m just imagining Lebron just charging into every play with no strategy, shouting “Leeee-bron James!”
Jokes on them I mispronounce words I learned from reading in ways not supported by the spelling
That’s just English though ;)
I misinterpreted core concepts of the texts I’m reading so that irregardless of my pronunciation, I have a flawed understanding of the theses!
irregardless
You’ve done it, you triggered me.
swim away fugu fish, swim away!
Omg it’s from 2008. Half my lifetime ago.
Look over there Charlie! It’s a magical leoplurodon!
One dnd session, the dm described the room as having flaming braziers. He pronounced them as “brassieres.”
We never let him forget.
Oh my DM really leaned into that one. Had us searching for a golden brassiere as part of a ritual we needed to perform. We ended up picking up a rumour that the captain of the guard wears one, so on to the seduction attempt to go find out what she’s into and where she hangs out. Play through the whole bit, get the brassiere and then ask what we do next. Well, now we need to burn incense in the brassiere. Now everyone just looks at eachother completely confused. Then the guy sitting next to the DM suddenly perks up and asks to see the module we’re running for a sec. Tells the table it says brazier. Confusion dispelled and everyone laughing for days.
a friend of mine wants to know how to actually pronounce braziers. what a dumb friend, right?
The magic of the modern day means you can type “define” or “pronounce” then any word into Google and it’ll tell you how to say it. There’s also an absurd amount of YouTube pronunciation videos for basically every word that exists.
Not that there’s a problem asking, this is more advice for future words your friend doesn’t know. So you can help them. The dummy.
bray-zers
I’ve only ever heard it pronounced bruhzears so now I’m confused.
is this a bit? that is the underwear you’re referring to, not fire container that I am.
No it’s not a bit I’m just retarded. That makes a lot more sense though
I still mispronounce those words from time to time, and I bloody well know how they’re supposed to be said.
Had a DM that did the same thing. A different dm pronounced chitin as chai-tin
The DM for Critical Role did that in one of the early episodes. I think that if you’re making a podcast, you should check your words for pronunciation.
How are you going to bring up early CR Matthew Mercer without his most infamous pronunciation gaffe?
Sigil* as “siggle”. If I were at that table, I’d still be ribbing him about it (good-naturedly, of course).
^*SIJ-uhl
I imagine Dan Carlin gets a lot of crap over “Makedon” instead of “Macedon” just because he’s being extra
I learned chitin from playing Morrowind. Pronounced it like “chit in” (like in “chip”). But also my local dialect/accent tends to drop pronouncing t’s so it came out more like “chi’in”. To this day it’s an active effort to pronounce it correctly if I ever have to say it out loud
I did that once, but I’m pretty sure my group has long since forgotten
I don’t overreact to things I can tell are regional dialects and whatnot. But I recently watched a movie review where the guy pronounced linear as “li-nEAR” and I was the personification of the double take white guy meme. Never heard that one before. And he kept using it throughout, so, somehow, this 30ish year old man has never been corrected. I think everyone that knows him might be playing a cruel joke.
My friend wants to know how you actually pronounce “fugue”. What a dumb friend, right?
It’s like… “fyoog”
Don’t be mean!
It’s actually pronounced more like fo-GOY. Really odd word if you ask me…
Well, all this feels a bit weird to me as a european. Americans and british pronounce it as f-you-g, but it’s a french loan word, in french /fyg/ (y as in the last letter in particularly). The word itself however comes from the latin fuga, and in german and a lot of other languages the word is fuga or fuge. Fuga is of course pronounced foo-gah (well, not exactly, but close enough) so…I wouldn’t laugh that hard at someone mispronouncing the word in “English” if I were them is my point I guess.
Yes, a thousand times yes. I would much rather people pronounce it pretty than follow the English “language”
I could imagine somebody thinking of the word “segue” and thinking “Ah, so ‘fugue’ must be pronounced fug-way.”
RobWords? Yep, RobWords. He’s got some interesting video’s!
Oh, fuck. I just had one of those, ‘Duh!’ moments.
Pretty mainstream. When I was a kid most people struggled to learn how to laugh these things off. These days if you speak on any platform it’s a good idea to have some mispronunciations because it catches peoples attention. Even if it’s the only thing they’ll talk about as long as you’re good natured about it you’ve made progress.
Perhaps an accidental positive of engagement bait
My friend once put the emphasis on the first syllable of pedantic, and correcting him was probably the single greatest joy I’ve ever felt
pee-dantic puh-dantic?
He called me PED-an-tic, with the least stress on the middle syllable. It gave me immense pleasure to be able to say “erm, it’s ped-AN-tic…”
So it was ped-antic? I wonder if it’s antics by children or pedestrians
