I respect when people misuse meme formats that they’ve only had a verbal description of.
Also dialects are a thing. The way a lot of words come out of my mouth has been culturally labeled as ignorant. I go out of my way to change my pronunciations at work so I get taken seriously, but I’ve been doing it less now that I’m accepted in that world. Maybe that caps how much farther I can go, but maybe I don’t want to go further if it means continuing to act like people who sound like how I sound are less than
Segue still gets me. In my head I still pronounce it like rogue.
Every time.
I wonder how this works for logographic systems like Chinese, where the letter tells you nothing about the sound (though tbf English spelling is so bad that it’s almost at that level too).
I studied Malayalam (the language of Kerala state in southern India) and the script was fucking awesome. It’s purely syllabic and it’s impossible to pronounce a written word wrong - you just sound out the syllables and you’ve got it. Everything else about the language was impossibly alien to me as a native English speaker (like you can’t just say yes or no, you can only negate or affirm other words), but at least the script was easy.
Anyone remember the Eyjafjallajökull outbreak in Iceland?
About 20 years ago when memes started appearing there was a site called memebase. I pointed it out to someone and he laughed at me for pronouncing it mêmebase because I speak french
Poutain 😂
It’s spelt “Poutine”.
Is it meem or mehmeh? I use mehmeh.
It’s meem. Originally coined by Steven Pinker, IIRC, to contrast with gene.
I wonder if by the same criteria the opposite also holds true. Are misspelled words dishonorable? And if yes does it matter if they’re nouns or other functional words like there/they’re/their ?
Correct
This happened to me… The word was hyperbole. I said it as hyper bowl ee.
The kicker is I’ve heard the word hyperbole before, pronounced correctly, and never knew what it meant, nor how it was spelled.
So I spoke to someone who was a bit more linguistically inclined, both verbally and written (hes also older than me by a few years, and more “into” art and culture)… And he said “you mean hyperbole?” And everything finally clicked. At the time I was embarrassed because I knew both the written and pronounced versions of it, but never put them together, so I felt like it was something I should have been able to figure out on my own and didn’t.
Now? If someone made the same correction to something similar, I’d be like. Ohhhhhh. That makes more sense. Thanks! Instead, I basically exited the situation to go die in private from embarrassment.
I should not have been embarrassed.
I love learning new things.
I had an English teacher correct me on that, except I said hyperbola which is a math concept and is pronounced hyper bowl a.
I’m kinda the same here, except worse. I’m stuck saying Hyper-Bowl, and the “proper” pronunciation breakes down as hyperbally in my head. Sounding like an adverb trips me up so much, I just refuse to use the word now.
English is a garbage language anyway tbh you say words the way you like ‼️
Mine is sidereal… I always said side real. Then, I learned it was (roughly) Sid air heal.
Though I did use to say Copernicus as copper knickers too.
Mine was Ganymede. I read so much scifi but didn’t really ever see any scifi shows referencing the planet, and it never came up in conversation. I thought it was supposed to be pronounced gani-mee-dee, as if it was a Greek philosopher.
Currently staying here for a week and I have no idea how to pronounce Etobicoke. I’m sure it’s not “Et oh buy coke”. I asked a couple of canadiens but that hasn’t helped because what comes out of their mouth is so far removed from the spelling.
Etoba koh is probably the closest I can get to it for ya lol
I was pronouncing “Byrne” like “buy-er-nie” until I saw someone who had that last name pronounce it like “burn”. The way I was pronouncing it was as if I was excitedly saying “bye Ernie” 😂
Don’t count on last names for that stuff.
You’ll find duboise or dubois pronounced dubose which is horrifically wrong.
Brett fucking Favre (fav ray) who pronounces it farv.
I’d say favruh fast but damn this one kills me.
It was embarrassingly recently that I realized segue and “segway” were the same word which I apparently didn’t know how to spell.
segue puts me straight into a fugue state
Pronounced “foog-way”.
In your defense, “Segway” is a real brand of some kind of transport thingy, which might be where you picked it up.
And they’re named that because they make devices that move smoothly from one place to another, just like the literary device.
Bro let me tell you how recently I realized…
👆
Lol
Suff-ice.
:(
How’s it actually pronounced???
Clicking the audio button on the Merriam-Webster dictionary’s page for “suffice” has it say suff + ice
It’s pronounced suff-ice, but I always said suff-is before I learned.
Pour one out for all my epi-tome homies
Brian Regan presents: Epi-tome of hyper bowl.
Have some Worcestershire sauce on me!
Me as a small children: I’ll PRE-FACE this by saying…
Family: wait, what??
I did not feel honorable…
Same with pre-dator for me xD
Me as a grown-ass Spaniard right now: wait, it’s not pre-face? Is it pre-fis?
Pref-is
Damn, thank you
Just make it clear that it’s a short e like in preference and a soft s.
It is. And yet, we’re both still correct. Somehow…
This feels like my Achilles heel sometimes
Your achills heel?
