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. >.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

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

[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.

[kleenestar.livejournal.com]

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

[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]

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

[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]

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]

I've definitely heard other people have the same problem with "awry." (And now I'm thinking of a link I saw to a few minutes from an original-pronunciation rehearsal of Shakespeare, in which you find out how much of that stuff actually did rhyme back in the day -- but if you used the rhyme scheme to guess at pronunciation today, you'd be led astray.)

Interesting that you say the British pronunciation of "capillaries" puts the stress on the second syllable, given that the OED promotes the other variant. At least, my understanding is that whatever gets listed first is the preferred option . . . .

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Damn right it doesn't; in neither syllable does it. Are you saying that for you it does?

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

What, is it muh-LARD? Or something else?

[desperance.livejournal.com]

As you say, interesting. I have lived in England for fifty-odd years, and many of my friends are medics one way or another, and it may not be a word of common conversation but it does crop up. I have never ever heard anyone stress anything other than the second syllable. This might be a historical thing, like the progression from hussif to housewife...?

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I have heard so many people say they had the "misled" problem.

"Umbrage" -- I wonder how many people realized they had it wrong when they made the connection with Umbridge in the fifth Harry Potter book. :-)

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Whoo, yeah. That too.

[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!"

[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 . . . .

[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...

[desperance.livejournal.com]

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

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Oh, man, names from books -- they're a carnival of variant pronunciations. Back in high school, I made an effort with the Wheel of Time books to make sure I lined up as best as I could with the ones given in the glossary, but of course the method of representation used there is so idiosyncratic, I can't be sure what I came out with was what Jordan intended. It doesn't matter too much in the grand scheme of things, but it gets funny in conversation.

Solace: you hear people stressing the second syllable? They're wrong, at least according to the dictionary I'm looking at. The first syllable can be a short o or a long one, but it's always stressed. (And, just to confuse you more, Merriam-Webster says so-JOURN can be okay, though it isn't preferred.)

[artemisgrey.livejournal.com]

Okay I gotta tell you every time someone says 'niche (neesh) market, all I can think of is quiche.... and then I get hungry and miss the rest of whatever they're saying... I'm a nitch girl myself.

[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.