Words: On Sayin' It Rong

[swan_tower]

There's a conversation I have occasionally with fellow reader-geeks, about the words you know perfectly well from books, but almost never hear in conversation. The words you think you know how to say . . . until one day you're forty-one and find out that all this time, you've been doing it wrong.

My personal go-to example for this is "chasm." I was in my twenties before I discovered that ch is not pronounced as in "chair," but rather as in "chord." How was I supposed to know? It's not as if that word gets used in everyday speech. "Debacle" is another one; like many people, I spent a long time putting the accent on the first syllable (DEB-ack-el) rather than the second (deh-BAH-kel). My sixth-grade teacher nearly cracked up when, during the health unit, I asked a question about kah-PILL-aries, rather than KAH-pill-aries -- capillaries.* I don't think I was ever in the pronounce-the-b camp for "subtle," but I know a lot of people who were.

I correct myself when I can, of course -- but the problem isn't doing the correction; it's knowing that you need to in the first place. To learn that you're pronouncing something wrong, you generally have to hear the correct pronunciation in use, but of course we have these problems to begin with because the words so rarely get spoken. (Plus, when you hear it, you shouldn't assume the other guy has it wrong; you have to second-guess yourself, and figure out who's right. Sometimes it will be you. Sometimes it won't.) You can't just ask, "what words am I pronouncing wrong?" You don't know. And unless a friend of yours keeps a list of words they've heard you mangle, nobody else is likely to have the answer ready.

But the tough ones are often widely shared, and so I throw the doors open to the internet and ask:

What words did you pronounce wrong for a long time? How were you saying them, and when did you find out your mistake?

Because it's entirely possible that if you post a comment to the effect of, "oh yeah, I said vuh-HEM-ment for ages, until my wife pointed out it's VEE-a-ment," somebody else will read this and think, wait, THAT'S how you pronounce "vehement"? So I am furthermore declaring this a Shame-Free Zone; nobody should feel embarrassed for admitting past or present errors. It's a common failing of readers, that we have big vocabularies we maybe don't use right in speech. Whenever I have this conversation in person, people bond over it -- knowing they aren't the only ones to have made those mistakes. Share your stories, admit your blunders, and maybe you can save somebody else from the same fate.




*Though I'm checking all of these in the OED as I list them, and now I discover that accenting the second syllable is a valid alternative, though not the preferred one.

Comments

[wldhrsjen3.livejournal.com]

HEEEE! I have this problem more often than I'd like to admit. And sometimes, even when I *know* I've been pronouncing something wrong in my head, force of habit is terribly hard to break! For years I thought macabre was pronounced "ma-CA-bré" and even though I know now it should be "muh-cawb," I still have trouble with it. >.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Bloody French, man. Its pronunciation doesn't work well in English-speaking heads. :-)

[yaleartificer.livejournal.com]

I'm sure I'm not alone in having pronounced "epitome" as if it were a kind of tome. I made the same mistake pronouncing "behemoth" as if it were a very scary kind of moth, and to this day have to stop before saying it aloud.

I had a Harvard psychology professor who assigned a book he pronounced in-FLU-ence. None of us corrected him, of course, but I looked it up just now to make sure it was IN-fluence. For once, my stress-first bias is right! But his does sound cooler in an Ivy league sort of way, which is probably why he's never checked himself.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Epitome: yeah, that's probably a common error. I know I've heard "behemoth" mangled the same way.

I think English tends toward a stress-first bias more often than not -- I know it's true for names, anyway. (Stupid wonkery during the presidential election about how the stress patterns of Obama's name made him sound extra foreign. No, really.) But I don't actually know what the rules are, or even if we have rules, that we follow more than 51% of the time.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

I learned "awry" from Shakespeare, damn it, from Hamlet his own self! Unfortunately, that was from Hamlet on the page, before ever I heard John Gielgud pronounce it. Therefore I thought it was pronounced "AW-ree". And sort of still do, that's still the place I go to in my head, before I find that little note I left to myself, "PS, it's a-RYE".

Oh, but capillaries? In England, that's definitely ka-PILL-aries. I struggle even to imagine any other way to say it.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Yeah, well, in England "mallard" doesn't rhyme with "bastard," so what can you do?

[mastadge.livejournal.com]

This happens all the time. For years waft rhymed with raft, not loft. And umbrage, until recently, sounded French. Misled was not to have been mis-led, but was the past tense of misle.

[kleenestar.livejournal.com]

Misled! Yes! Me too! I still hear it as "misle-d" in my head when I read it.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I can't recall specifics of the ones I had wrong at the moment. I think several of them have been cases of foreign imports, especially from French. It was really only recently that I finally really figured out that the nitch/niche pronunciations are meant to be the same word. In my head, they're actually different. A friend of mine refers to these sorts of cases as "readerisms", which I find charming.

I do remember having a very bad start in 7th grade or so when I first encountered the word "abyssal" and became briefly convinced that I had been hallucinating the 'm' in "abysmal" all that time.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Yeah, foreign imports are frequently the source of trouble -- they're often the more high-falutin' words, ergo less often used in speech, and French has such different rules for pronunciation, it's no wonder we get tripped up.

"Niche" drives me crazy. I say nitch, which is valid, but every time somebody says neesh (also valid) I have a moment of confusion. Actually, these days I think I tend to flip between the two, never making up my mind . . . .

[artemisgrey.livejournal.com]

I'm blank on common conversation words at the moment, although I can assure you there were dozens. What immediately comes to my mind, and still fits into the geek-talk theme is the names of characters from various old school books. Case in point: The Dragonlance series. When I attended DragonCon, I didn't meet one person that pronounced the various names the same way I did - and some people had reams of documentation as to why THEIR pronunciation was correct.

Oh, and I've now reminded myself of two words I did 'screw up'. Solace My version was SOL-ace while apparently most folk say so-LACE and Sojourn I said so-JOURN but it seems that most folk say SO-journ.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Nooo...! Nobody could say so-LACE, surely? Trust yourself; it's SOL-ace.

And, Katherine Kurtz's Deryni series? I grew up reading that as DER-i-NIGH, and I still do. And assumed that was gospel, until I met Katherine. She says D'RINNi. She's just wrong...

[pathseeker42.livejournal.com]

In a DnD game that I'm playing, one player kept declaring his "rip-toes" strike. It took me the better part of a year to realize he was actually trying to riposte.

But in keeping with the theme of humility, I have a long history of mutilating the English language, especially when I've encountered a word only in reading. The most obvious example is Samhain, which I didn't really understand until running with the Changeling crowd where it was common spoken.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, there's that too -- mispronunciations that come from a straight-up misreading of the word.

Samhain . . . having studied Irish, I give an automatic pass to everybody on mispronouncing it. In a language where "bhfaighidh" is identical to the English word "why," all bets are off.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Oh, and even now: I am writing about a wyvern. Which everybody tells me is pronounced WIV-ern, where I keep wanting to say WHY-vern...

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Merriam-Webster says you're right. (And I'm there with you.)

[doriscrockford2.livejournal.com]

I was saying as-PAR-ta-mee for aspartame in my head for years. Decades, really. The very first time I said it out loud (because really, how often do you use that word?) the guy I was talking to laughed long and hard. "It's ass-per-tame, you idiot!"

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Oh. Really? Until five seconds ago, I would so have said as-PAR-ta-mee...

[carbonel]

The one I recall acutely from my childhood was the first time I used the word "subtle" in conversation. How was I supposed to know the "b" was silent? My parents corrected me politely enough, but they laughed first.

It took me quite a while to realize that the word "CAL-ee-ope" that I saw in print was the same object as the "kul-lie-uh-pee" thing at amusement parks.

And for some reason I though that the breed of sheep was pronounced "muh-REE-no," but the wook made from it was "MAR-uh-no." It wasn't until I started spinning that I convinced myself I was wrong.

There's also words where the pronunciation is morphing. "Forte" should (for some value of "should") be pronounced as one syllable, but hardly anyone does that.

I had a nursing instructor (non-native English speaker, but fluent) who insisted that impasse was pronounced to rhyme with passe.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

"Subtle" is probably the most common one people bring up. Maybe because it sits right on the border of being uncommon enough you don't automatically learn the right way, but common enough that you're likely to get corrected on it. (Plus, y'know, its pronunciation makes NO SENSE.)

You're right that pronunciation shifts. I suspect "forte" has gone that route because of the collision between the French borrowing and the Italian; in music, it is two syllables.

[artemisgrey.livejournal.com]

Just thought of another word that also happens to be a name. Penelope. I was utterly UTTERLY devastated to learn that it was pronounced PA-ne-LO-py rather than PEN-a-lōpe The people I was talking to when I pronounced Penelope my way belly laughed, although not at me, so much as my take on the name.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I've always heard (and eventually) said it as four syllables, but differently stressed: peh-NELL-oh-pee. (In Spanish, it has an accent marked on the second syllable.)

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

I had huge trouble with phenomenon: my tongue just got tangled. It was only discovering the Muppets 'Ma Na Ma Na' song that let me get the rhythm right.

[artemisgrey.livejournal.com]

The Ma Na Ma Na song!!! *love* I agree. I can say phenomenon easily now. But cinnamon still throws me.

[anghara.livejournal.com]

I don't remember which TV show it was in, but one of the characters was KILLING themselves with procrastination because they had to make a phone call to somebody who was apparently named Asshole and could not make himself do it. In the end, finally, the character in question picked up the phone and began, "I would like to... uh... may I speak to... er... is Mr..." Whereupon the secretary-like person on the other side of the line said airily, "Oh, you want to speak to MR ASHOLEY. Just a minute..."

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Names are a nightmare. They could be all kinds of things, between original pronunciation rules and what they've been turned into over the centuries.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't know if you remember the time in the Mummy game when I pronounced brazier like the female undergarment, and then you all laughed at me. That's actually a mispronunciation I made for years. I knew the correct pronunciation by then, so it's almost funnier that I made that mistake.

It's also funny because everyone in my D&D group in high school made the same mispronunciation. There were dungeons lit by flaming bras, mounted on the walls, everywhere in that game.

Tony

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Hee, I remember that one. And yeah, it's a mistake that happens a lot -- brazier and brassiere.

[artemisgrey.livejournal.com]

Oh, here's one... sorry, this is fun... and strangely addictive... retard. I grew up with musical stuff so I always heard it pronounced quickly RI-tard.... only later did I learn many people say REE-tard, and not with appropriate connotations.

And another, equine. I always say ek-WINE but I've heard EEk-whine and various other versions.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Music creates its own difficulties, yeah -- there's fort/forte elsewhere in this thread.

Both EKwhine and EEKwhine are valid. (Online dictionaries are getting a workout today . . . .)

[artemisgrey.livejournal.com]

and the infamous aluminum. I grew up saying ah-LOOM-i-num but sadly I've lost the ability to pronounce it at all that way. Now I say al-yoo-min-ium like an Aussie... since an Aussie friend taught me that pronunciation...

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I never understood the British pronunciation until I noticed they actually spell the word differently, with the extra i.

[findabair.livejournal.com]

As a non-native English speaker, I have this problem quite a lot... I read a LOT of English, I hear it spoken on the telly, but don't normally speak it myself unless I'm travelling (with some exceptions, such as when there are visits by foreigners at work). -- So I've bookmarked this post, since I'm learning a lot here :)

For instance, I still have trouble wrapping my head around the fact that 'monastery' isn't 'mon-AS-tery' - I probably patterned that pronounciation after monastic, I believe.

As for names from fantasy literature, I usually stick with what I hear in my head when I read, whatever the glossaries say. And yeah, that did make for some very strange discussions in our WoT high-school fan-club! For some reason I made an exception for Siuan - if I remember correctly, Jordan gives 'swan' for that name, and I stuck with that because it sounded better than 'see-oo-ann', which is what the Norwegian prononciation would have been.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

You'd think you could use analogous examples to guess at the pronunciation of an unknown word.

In English, you would be wrong.

(I am so grateful I grew up speaking this language.)

[(Anonymous)]

Though I've come to accept and adopt it, I long thought "finite" should just be "infinite" without the "in-", not "FINE-ite."

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

But that would make sense.

[shadowkindrd.livejournal.com]

Actually, since English is a 1.5ish syllable language*, the stress usually goes on the second to last syllable in native words, with more than four syllables having a secondary stress somewhere in the first two syllables**. Most of the words being brought up are not of English origin; they're loan words. Different languages have different accenting rules, and those are the ones that things get confusing on.

My issue is with anything that has -cracy on the end. I'm always trying to put the accent as CRA cee, which just doesn't work for words like meritocracy, which is mera TO cra cee***.

Another word that I had to work hard to remember to pronounce correctly is bakalava. I tried to pronounce it ba KAL ava, and boooyyyyy howdey, did I get dirty looks and a quick correction to BAK la va.

One word I had no idea how to pronunce until I heard it was nauseous/nausea. I was like, OHHHHHH that's how that sounds! when one of my 8th grade classmates used it.

*I might be a few tenths of a point off on the number, but basically, it means that most words in English are one or two syllables, with the longer words being rarer. Look at previous sentence; two words are 3 syllables, four are 2 syllables, and the rest are one syllable.

**Again, IIRC, and it's been a while since I dug up that data from brain storage, so it might be off in places.

***I know it's not phonetic, as much as I'd like it to be. LOL. I don't want to hunt down the special keys to type them in.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Actually, since English is a 1.5ish syllable language*, the stress usually goes on the second to last syllable in native words, with more than four syllables having a secondary stress somewhere in the first two syllables**.

Ah, you're right -- thanks for correcting me. I knew that and had forgotten it. And yes, most of our troubles are with words borrowed in from other languages, most especially French. (Though really, English is more loan words than not, depending on where you put your horizon of "prior to this, things count as native.")

[wshaffer.livejournal.com]

I went through a brief period of persistently misreading "idiot" as "idot". I thought it metaphorically referred to someone whose intellect was as tiny as the dot on an i. Then at some point I took a closer look and realized that it was just plain old "idiot".

"Chasm" is a pretty classic one - I remember seeing film of Sting recording the song "Fortress Around Your Heart" (with the lyric "let me build a bridge, for I cannot fill the chasm", and having heated debate with the band on the correct pronunciation of "chasm". I hadn't been sure of the correct pronunciation myself before seeing that.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

It's always comforting to find out you aren't alone on these problems. :-)

[landofnowhere]

Inebriated. For a long time I thought it was prononunced with a short "e" (in-EBB-ri-a-ted), and the long "e" pronunciation still sounds sort of silly to me.

Misanthrope. I had been taught how to pronounce "Penelope" and "epitome" and overcorrected, and thought that "misanthrope" was homophonic with "misanthropy".

Cleavage. I thought that it (at least the last syllable) should be pronounced as if it were French, at least when used in the context of women's fashion. It just sounded more sophisticated that way!

(Yes, the drift of all this may be that I was too sheltered and well educated for my own good.)

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Misanthrope. I had been taught how to pronounce "Penelope" and "epitome" and overcorrected, and thought that "misanthrope" was homophonic with "misanthropy".

A perfectly reasonable error to make! Ditto lycanthrope.

I suspect there are a lot of words like "cleavage" and "umbrage" and so on that people Frenchify because they think, consciously or unconsciously, that surely the more "sophisticated" sound has to be the right one.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

banal.

I went until a year or two ago thinking it was BANE-ull, because no one ever used it in spoken language, until a friend of mine pronounced it Bah-NALL.

there are many, many others. That's the most recent.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Technically it can be either, but bah-NALL is more preferred.

[tiamat360.livejournal.com]

I thought maniacal was pronounced "may-nee-ACK-al." Dunno where I would've gotten that from ::glares at maniac::.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Silly English. :-)

[whaddayameandoihaveroomfordessert.wordpress.com (from livejournal.com)]

my shames:

reveled (I rhymed with "rebelled")
primer (I rhymed with "rhymer")
discontent (out of which I somehow got dis-CON-tent, and said it out loud in my sophomore [in college] philosophy class)

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

"Primer" is one I used to get wrong, too.

[starlady38.livejournal.com]

I think I still say "epoch" wrong--"EE-poch" (with a hard final C, like 'apocalypse') when it's supposed to be homonymous with "epic." But oh, I had scads of these words in, say, middle school. I've forgotten most of them, because my speaking vocabulary has expanded, but yeah, that was totally me. Of course, I feel like my speaking vocabulary has expanded without my writing vocabulary getting larger, which is sort of annoying, particularly when writing research papers...

OTOH, I also know a lot of random nautical vocabulary that I have no idea how to pronounce, since I only ever read or write it.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Nautical vocab -- I threw my brother the other day with the word pronounced "stunsils." Mind you, he didn't know what studdingsails were even when I said it like it's written -- most people don't -- but yeah, man, sailors are great ones for throwing out any syllables they don't feel like using. (Forecastle, I'm looking at you.)