People who can't figure out how to pronounce written words or names

I am hoping that you get called this because of some mispronunciation of your name, and not, um, other reasons.

A guy that I work with keeps on talking about making a 'Forstian pact'. I don't have the heart to correct him.

"Who wants to be a milwonaire!?"

I've detailed this one on the co-workers' annoying habits thread, but my colleague is unable to pronounce an entirely simple Chinese name consisting of three syllables. She doesn't have to read ideograms or anything, it's written down in English phonetically and is said every day several times correctly in her presence.

I had one call me Nike! WTF?

The people at the QuarkXpress sales dept say it with an open A...
(I realised that was ambiguous after I posted it.)

Renasant certainly conjours up a vision of a thrusting, forward-looking, reborn...nose.

This was my first thought when I saw this thread.

I hate this, too. People call the clinic all the time and say "What is this Mee? So....? Prah?....STOL?!" all dragged out for a whole minute like that. God, sound it the fuck out. MISOPROSTOL.

Yeah, those are all reasonable guesses. But you have some confidence or pride on your ability to pronounce properly to run the odds on which are good guesses and which aren't. But I think there is a sense of doing it "extra-wrong" accidentally on purpose as some sort of defense mechanism. One time we went out for lunch on some cruise ship that went around the tip of Manhattan and back for some aunt's fiftieth birthday and the fish that was served was Mahi-Mahi and most of the afternoon's conversation was taken up with laughing at this strange fish "Mohu-Mohu" that they were given.

I was getting Wimbledon off the wire for my sports report this morning. Just looking at some of the names, I went ahead and moved on to Tim Duncan and Richard Hamilton.

My immediate boss (not the one that sings) pronounced Mitsubishi as "Mitsubooshi"

We had a client doing his own radio spot for his car dealership call this make of car, "Mitsubitches". You don't even want to know how he pronounced Volvo.

Like "La Bamba".

Argh! I can't hate too much on a little bit of ignorance or a mistake/typo, but it's the worst when people are actually stubborn with mispronunciations/misspellings. A woman I used to work with was like this ("Correck," "Libary," etc). By contrast I have a friend who, frankly, sucks at pronouncing the things he reads, but at least he tries to correct himself.

Except "subwoofer". He always uses a really long U in "woofer" for some reason. What is that?

Worse than this is not only are you spelling the word correctly, but it's a commonly used word, like for example a day of the week! I never say anything but I always wonder what misfired when the person I am thinking of was 5 that they learned this particular day of the week wrong. And how they haven't realized this since then.

Nah, it's in his interest to keep mispronouncing it, since to a large portion of his constituents, it reinforces the whole "regular joe" appeal about him.

I say that!

I worked as a warehouse temp from high school through college and had a coworker at the factory that manufactured taco bell packaging who would constantly refer to one of our forklifts as the "mitsu-BIT-see" in this really ornery, staccatto delivery.

I keep wanting the new hire to stand up and fight the oppression but I fear she is too polite.

this is probbly bcz i spend my worktime rewriting the bad sentences of ppl who are certain they can write (= they think they can read well but they clearly can't)

Anyway, like I said, probably not the cause of most mangling of words going on. It's not a terribly common learning disability.

Renah-sont

axe instead of ask drives me nuts too. although not as much as people who say "should of" and "could of" when they mean should have and could have. AAAARRRGH THINK ABOUT THE WORDS YOU ARE SAYING YOU DIM SHIT.

But that's how it's pronounced when you contract them.

jaymc, 'should of' has a full vowel between the d and the f. In 'should've', it's like a short 'i' at the most.

xpost emsk: ..."could've" is a homonym for "could of." You'll only know if the offending speaker is truly wrong if you ask them to write it out. (xposts)

As far as the chemical pronunciation stuff is concerned: lighten up. As k/l said: most people think back to chemistry class and stiffen up a bit. Knowing how to pronounce scientific words is an "educated" thing and there are a great many people in the world who are NOT "educated" and are self-conscious about it. Threads like this reinforce everything the "nuke-lee-er" crowd thinks about intellectual leftist snobs, btw. Vent now and forever hold your peace.

Yeah, that one makes me mad too.

What's beyond me is how some people look at my name and come out with "Rodriguez".

We had a client doing his own radio spot for his car dealership call this make of car, "Mitsubitches". You don't even want to know how he pronounced Volvo.

We had a client who consistently pronounced the 'baum' syllable in his company's name as 'bong.' This cracked the pothead producer the fuck up every time.

but it *is* very much (if not exclusively) a class issue, insofar as reading itself is a class issue.

Haha what's better though is that my dad somehow got on mass mailing/telemarketer lists as "Brain" instead of "Brian"! So he gets people calling up, "Is Mr....Brain Carny there?" That's when he loses it completely. Oh how we roffle! Sometimes my mom will refer to herself as Pinky and sometimes that makes him more irritated. "Who, WHO is actually named BRAIN!" he will say. "The dog on Inspector Gadget!" I will say. Oh he doesn't really like that much. I think he got over it though.

http://www.randomhouse.com/wotd/index.pperl?date=19991216

i know. i don't get annoyed with it anymore. i find the ways people abuse my name sort of fascinating.

"should of" is ratehr obvious

"should have" - stress is on first syllable, so the "ha" is weakened, and reduced to schwa. Schwa always gets gobbled up, so
"should ve" sounds a bit like...."should of"

"should of" seems sort of plausible. compound verbs are fairly common, so ignoring the fact that auxiliaries are normally verbs, a new form is accepted.

eg expresso: folk etmyology means that an unfamiliar word that sounds like "express" gets consumed by a hybrid of the two, and can be justified variously eg, an espresso is quick to make, or quick to drink. whats interesting about that one is that "espresso" and "expresso" are the same word anyway just that the italians arent keen on putting an x next to a p

But that's how it's pronounced when you contract them.

-- jaymc (jmcunnin...), June 30th, 2005.

! EXPRESSO??!??!!!! FUCK.

xpost emsk: ..."could've" is a homonym for "could of." You'll only know if the offending speaker is truly wrong if you ask them to write it out. (xposts)

-- giboyeux (ra...), June 30th, 2005.

no it isn't, it's should've and could've, surely. no "o" sound... and i've seen people write it too.

englsih rarely spells phonetically, sure we have got over that by now

"banana", why isnt isnt is spelt banarnuh?!?!

There's no "R" in "banana."

I absolutely agree that 'axe' is as valid a pronunciantion of 'ask' as nukular is of nuclear.

hm, i wonder if this happens more with people who have english as their first language while growing up in an english-speaking country? in the uk at least the teaching of languages, both first and second, is incredibly stunted in a lot of schools.

in the primary and secondary schools i went to (and they're both considered by the powers that be to be v good schools, repeatedly scoring high ratings in inspections etc) the teaching of grammar was almost nonexistent. i remember some vague half-arsed "oh yeah, a verb is a doing word, an adjective is a describing word" type crap from when i was about 9, but really, we were never taught how the whole thing worked at all. when it came to learning french at comprehensive school (can you believe they wait til you're 11 before trying to teach you another language? jeebus) they taught us it while somehow skirting around the whole grammar issue entirely (tho it still wasn't quite just learning by rote). as a result when i came to do the ib and i was doing french as a second language at subsidiary level, i was completely at sea compared to the kids from other countries who'd learned the langauge "properly" (err not sure abt this), from the inside out. i think the other brit in our year was in a similar situation, and she'd also been to a highly regarded comp school.

i don't think i've ever heard an english second language speaker say "should of" or "could of" - is this cos they're taught the language properly? and casu, i hear people say it with a really obvious "o" sound every fucking day. and write it "should of". hah if you ever want a hollow laugh pick up almost any student-produced uk university newspaper. the scale of misuse of language beggars belief.

bring back latin?

I have recently started doing business with a Lucy Adler. I now have to stop and think for five seconds whether I'm referring to her or to Madchen. It's a nuisance.

I used to find it quite cute in NY when the recorded phone message said "please axe your operator for assistance".

I love seeing the english change around me, new words ( or more frequently new meanings or senses of words), phrases, pronunciations, spellings. Im not really a patriotic type, but the English language is somethign that i hold a deep affection for, and its willingness to consume and to mutate is central to its atractiveness (and presumably for non native speakers, its incomprehensibility, although most people i have spoken* to tell me they find it easier than many other languages).

As far as maintaining a practical ability to communicate, i dearly would like more exploration and explanation of the way that language, not just English works at school, but i think maybe 60s fierce anti-prescriptivism in linguistic study might be to blame for the wiping out of studying any sort of syntactic or morphological study in schools nowadays. I think there can be a middle ground reached thoguh.

question: why do we need a standard english? "should of", whether "grammatically correct" or not, is easily understandable to englsih speakers. misspelled words are frequently as understandable as correctly spelt (sometimes more). english has only had a standard for....i dunno, the last 600 years maybe? and if communication is the essense, and communication is achieved, then why hand wringing about the non-standard** nature of much of todays spoken and written english

* i think most of them were russian tho, maybe that means something
** whatever the hell that means hahaha

I'm not intending to accuse anyone here of anything, but the pronunciation /aks/ is more or less the correct one for Southern blacks; it's a shibboleth, and making fun of people for using that pronunciation is the same as making fun of them for being Southern blacks.

(Ambrose: It's arguably more like roughly 250 or so years.)

Re: Adler/Alder

There's an Alder Street in Portland not far from me, and I always call it Adler, because a friend of mine grew up on Adler Street in Co-Op City, and so my brain favors the psychologist to the tree.

Not to mention French names in Detroit. What's that street, Gratiot?

clique ("click")
piqued my interest ("peaked my interest")
vocal cords ("vocal chords")
for all intents and purposes ("for all intensive purposes")
segue ("segway,"* "segueway")

*and they're not talking about electric scooters

I think this pretty much covers it.

jody, you're definately otm here.

I think I posted these on that other thread, but my wife had a student who thought he was fucking BRILLIANT because he'd interned one summer at the Chico paper, but wrote things like "visa vee" (for vis a vis) and "for all intensive purposes." He'd never done much reading, but still he'd tell you in a heartbeat how smart he was.

ha!

did he say vice-ah versa?

OK, I think the thing about reading, which I think Amateurist originally mentioned, and the thing about being educated which Nick mentioned, are both pretty OTM. Tonight for some reason I used a word I've never really used before, "harrowing," and it sounded funny and maybe pretentious to me when I said it so I repeated it to hear what it sounded like and then qualified my use of the word by redefining it or something like that. In any case, it IS stressful when you say a word for the first time, even when you've heard it or read it many times before, but most of us probably have developed some tricks to deal with this, and have learned enough over the years to feel we have at least improved our odds of getting it right or how to use the feedback when we get it wrong. We have presumably dealt with some more stressful situations such as having to learn to use professional jargon properly so as not to lose face or, I dunno, learning a foreign language, where you matter how much you study you still may come off like a babe in the woods, so mispronouncing the name of a unfamiliar chemical is really not so bad, hence we are more relaxed and more able to pay attention and less likely to make mistake. Or am I protesting too much?

Wasn't there an Onion headline that went along the lines of Ask Murderer Stalks African-American Neighborhood?

Here's two that I'll own up to:

1.) It wasn't until I was in my late twenties that I realized that "prevalent" wasn't pronounced with a VAY sound in the middle of it.

2.) That thing that I keep my clothes in? For the longest time, I thought that it was called "chester drawers".

you know that was intentional, right?

i think i once took 'intensive purposes' to somehow be referring to important ones, or relevant ones.

you know that was intentional, right?
I realize now that I should have typed "mispelling."

clique ("click")
piqued my interest ("peaked my interest")
vocal cords ("vocal chords")
for all intents and purposes ("for all intensive purposes")
segue ("segway,"* "segueway")

also "weary" when they mean "wary"

(which if you don't know is a pun on this movie from a few years ago)

You must be in Rochester! Don't forget Chili, pronounced CHY-LYE.

I'm sympathetic to mispronouncers, though, because my wife is one. I don't know if it's some form of dyslexia or what, but she has real trouble with lots of pronunciations. A lot of them are cute. I liked how she used to say "gor-zon-gala cheese." I was sad when she learned how to say it right.

i am also a nerd because as i was reading this thread and typing out my response i thought, "i wish everyone knew IPA so we could avoid trying to type out pronunciations syllabically."

your wife reminds me of small children who eat pasghettis! :-)

Little things like spelling the goddamn word correctly make all the difference in eliciting a proper pronunciation.

There's a town called Nevada that is pronounced nuh-VAY-duh.

she made up the word "trangent", when she should have been using the word "transient". this homeless dude killed some ppl on her street, and for months she went on and on and on about the "trangent" that was on the loose.

she also says "theartre" instead of "theatre". she adds a freaking R! can she not hear herself doing that?! she sounds like a retard!

she also mis-pronounces her best friends last name in a very noticable way. the friend is a person with a famous last name, so i dont see how she can say it wrong over and over!!

i ALSO cant stand people that make up certain words. this is a bit hypocritical, because i sortof do it...but not really. anyway, she used to invite her clients to meet her for "breky". as in, short for "breakfast". THAT IS NOT A WORD, NOT DOES IT SOUND CUTE OR COOL.

(also, if i have mis-spelled anything, sorry. im a horrible speller)

hyperbole

placebo

I pronounced both as written (place-bow, hyper-bowl). This was in middle school and high school, but still the sting of humiliation is with me.

The inability to pronounce certain words amazes (ie: "pisses off") me. I used to have a boss that would refuse to pronounce people's names correctly if she'd never heard that pronunciation before, but had heard a similar one. For example, (before he was popular) she would have pronounced Jerry Seinfeld as Jerry .. Sinefield. And she would pause before saying the last name because she knew she was wrong, but she couldn't wouldn't say a name that was slightly different from what she was used to.

HYSTERICS

MARGE: Run, Bart! Run like the wind! [pronounced with a long "i," like "kind.']
LISA: Mom, it's "wind."
MARGE: Mmmm . . . I've only ever seen it written.

Never fails to crack me up.

My last name is not that simple, but it's simple enough. The most common one I get is "Moosh-roosh." The fuck is wrong with you people? LOOK AT MY NAME. It's pronounced EXACTLY like it looks: MUSHRUSH.

It's like because it looks weird they assume it can't be that simple.

2.) That thing that I keep my clothes in? For the longest time, I thought that it was called "chester drawers".

So did I--this is how my (Arkansan) family pronounces it. When I was a kind I figured that someone named Chester designed it.