As a homeschooled kid with a big vocabulary I was largely not able to pronounce (more reading than talking), this is a sentiment I wish I’d heard earlier in life.
I’m sorry. I hate that the stereotype that stuck for homeschool kids wasn’t that they’re often very well read and advanced, because that has been my experience encountering them over the years.
In fairness, that stereotype is largely due to capital H Homeschooled kids like me. as in, the subculture as opposed to simply the method of schooling at home.
If you meet someone who was in the subculture, you need to navigate through a few levels of weird damage before our vocabulary is even close to the most notable thing about us.
Opposite for me. Homeschooled kids are weird and dumb generally. I’m sorry I’m weird too. May be my geography because I’m in a super conservative area. The people here who decide to do homeschooling are typically conspiracy theory rednecks.
Pour one out for all my epi-tome homies
Have some Worcestershire sauce on me!
Brian Regan presents: Epi-tome of hyper bowl.
“Facade” caught me in high school.
Interestingly (to me), I have the opposite problem in Spanish. I’ve learned mostly through immersion, so when I see a Spanish word written down sometimes I’m like “Holy heck THAT’S how you spell carrot??” Spanish is a language where the spelling/pronounciation rules are really consistent, but it’s still surprising to see some of these words without having ever thought of how they might be spelled. Toallas (towels) got me too.
When I was learning Japanese, I came across a sentence along the lines of “lets buy stuff at the <shoppingumouru>”, I could understand most of it fine, but didn’t recognize bracketed word, which was conveniently written in a script that denotes loan words (and I have trancscribed phonetically abovr). I probably spent at least half an hour trying to look up “shoppingumouru” simce I couldn’t find it in my dictionary. Eventually, I turned to Google translate and immediately facepalmed when I saw the answer.
Is it shopping mall?
Yes! Japanese is a phonetic language and loan words are just phonetisized versions using the syllables (sounds) they have in their alphabet. The katakana version of their alphabet is for just for loan words, onomatopoeias (moo, meow, woof), and other things that are not words. Katakana symbols just represent sounds, not meanings.
When learning Spanish I read in a book that skateboarding was montar en monopatin. In college I spoke that in oral exam. My professor was like what the fuck is that?
I studied Malayalam (the language of Kerala state in India) a few years ago. I learned the script quickly and one day walking through the capital of Thiruvananthapuram I saw a van with the word “POLICE” and then the Malayalam word underneath it. I was all excited to learn a new Malayalam word without needing my tutor, until I sounded it out and realized it was just “POLICE” written with the Malayalam script.
Fun fact: Malayalam is the only language whose named is a palindrome. Its English name, at least - in the Malayalam script it’s not.
I still have to “translate” that one in my head every time I read it.
Same!
And I definitely read it out loud in front of a class in high school the wrong way.
Up until recently, I thought that the US national park was pronounced “yo-semite”, as some sort of ghetto-slang for a Jewish person.
There was an '80s cop show called Hill Street Blues that had a recurring latino character named Jesus. All I heard as a kid was “Hey, Zeus” so I thought his actual name was Zeus and everybody just said “hey” to him when addressing him.
I love this so much!
Ahahhahhahahaaha that’s actually amazing
Wait how do you phonetically say this?
Yo - seh - mit - ee
are you Donald Trump by chance
I thought Yosemite Sam had pretty much taught all English speakers the correct pronunciation. I remember my parents saying their Swedish relatives pronounced it “Yohsmeet.”
I have no idea who that is.
EDIT: Oh, that guy. And now I know his name.
Non-native English speaker, young, or both?
The former. Noggie, to be precise. Plus I didn’t watch a whole lot of Bugs Bunny growing up either.
Wassa “Noggie”?
Norwegian
Thank you! Going to call my Brother In-Law that now…
That’s amazing
I say it that way sometimes for fun. I live nearish so sometimes, when visitors hear me say if, they ask if that’s how it’s actually pronounced
Or… or you read it in the 3 word title of a meme. Doesn’t matter, learned word.
Words go brrrr.
This was me with a number of words over the years, but most memorable “paradigm.”
The one that wakes me up in the middle of the night is albeït. I thought it was fancy foreign speak pronounced “all bait”, but it is just a short form of “all be it”, is pronounced exactly like that, and is a synonym for “all though it be”.
Doesn’t mean it isn’t cute/funny when it does happen, though. Just this week my SO pronounced chihuahua as “CHA-HOO-A-HOO-A” so I told them “you know this word, it’s the taco bell dog” lol
Thank you for the new method to make my family groan.
Les Nessman comes to mind.
That dog died over a decade ago. Do younger kids know what that is?
I have been pronouncing it like this since my buddy fucked it up in grade school lmao
See holler, tow-up.
Mispronounced words by British people are unacceptable though. The Brits need to be stopped!
And their wacky spellings.
Seriously though, I know there is no right or wrong, just cultures but “vit-a-min” (vit rhyming with bit) for vitamin , “al-loo-minium” for aluminum and “let-toos” for lettuce is like fingernails on a chalkboard. lol
The origin behind Aluminum and Aluminium is kinda interesting because the inventor that first refined the element used both pronunciations and iirc I believe I he had even a third pronunciation (“alumium”)that never caught on.
That’s nothing. I throw up a little in my mouth every time I see “cheque” misspelled, “check”.
They invented the language, the least they could do is spell and pronounce it right.
They invented it, but then they started dropping r’s while the Colonies kept them.
This was me as a 7 year-old, reading The Hobbit and LotR. 33 years, and many rereads later, I still pronounce Gollum as golem and Smaug as smog.
“[…] I still pronounce […] Smaug as smog.”
Wait, what? I can’t remember when it was pronounced in the movies and I also (mentally) pronounce it as ‘Smog.’ It has never come up in IRL conversation so I don’t know how it’s actually pronounced.
Does anyone have a clip/timestamp on a video to show how it’s actually pronounced? It’s been a long time since I’ve seen the movies.
It’s /smawg/, it should sort of feel like the name doesn’t fit me your mouth properly, English phonotactics doesn’t allow for gliding from W to G without a vowel in between.
I keep pronouncing “sweat” like “sweet”, even though people keeps correcting me about it because my stupid brain is stuck with the wrong pronunciation
It doesn’t help that it’s a meme to swap them out. Lol
It was embarrassingly recently that I realized segue and “segway” were the same word which I apparently didn’t know how to spell.
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.
segue puts me straight into a fugue state
Pronounced “foog-way”.
master ugue
Yeah, that’s very much an English thing. Many other languages use reasonably consistent spelling and pronunciation, so memorizing the handful of exceptions isn’t really a problem.
However, with English it’s the other way around. You need to memorize the handful of words that are actually pronounced the way they are written. Everything else is just pure chaos. If you read a word, you can’t pronounce it. If you hear a word, you can’t find it in a dictionary.
Bro let me tell you how recently I realized…
👆
Lol
My wife is Jewish. One day when she was little she and her mother were walking around the neighborhood and saw a Christmas wreath hanging somewhere. Having previously read the word in a book where it was spelled a lot like the word “breath,” she asked her mother why they didn’t have a “wreth” in their home.
In our household we now and forever pronounce it “wreth” on purpose because of how much I love that story.
haha, I’d never thought of that, but it’s true :D
Nah I learned words reading memes and take out menus
Unless it’s a YouTuber. Then they’re possibly pronouncing it wrong so people will comment about their pronunciation and fuel the algorithm.
