easy words you find it hard to say

i have a real block on "antibiotics" -- i have to slow down and enunciate it very deliberately to get it right

phrases my wife cannot say:

winona ryder - 'rinona wyder'
reliant robin - 'relobin ryant'

i on the other hand have beautiful diction and definitely do not sound perenially like a toothless drunk mumbling into a vomit stain on his chest

(also known as 'paolo nutini voice')

Sorry

I only say words wrong on purpose: "librarary", "pacific" for "specific" - this is the Hull pronunciation and I love it. although I work with people called "Sherri" and "Cheri" and it sometimes gets muddled up.

I considered doing wins's gag but then remembered I am always apologizing, it just trips off my tongue

sorry is easy, meaning it is hard ime

exackly

oh, I say "exackly" a lot too

Library's a stupid word, those r's are too close together. Ditto February.

NASA (always sounds like nassau)

I make a point of saying "Febrrrrewary" as well. love those crammed Rs

You've got no choice if you're Scottish, you have to say it like that.

this is the Hull pronunciation and I love it

this is what makes the question kinda difficult to answer imo - like, a majority of glaswegians would probably say 'sangwidge' instead of 'sandwich' but is that a mispronunciation or a dialect

I like "sangwidge" too

I mean RP is the language of the enemy basically so anything to fuck with it

my mum always said "host-pital" and when challenged would say "that's how people should say it, it sounds better"

my dad would sometimes say "unstable" with the stress on the "un" and make it rhyme with biddable but this was a weedy student joke he had never grown out of

I've always done the mispronounce on purpose thing as well, I think it comes from growing up watching looney tunes

My brother used to do that too - pronouncing picturesque as picture-skew always tickled me.

both my mum and her mum pronounce 'psychiatric' as psy-kree-attic and it bothers me every time

My friend always says "Charlie Therzon"

My granny suffered terrible from the arthur-itis.

My mother, on the other hand, was a big fan of Downtown Abbey.

mum was also enjoyably immune to branding puns: she pronounced portakabin as por-TAH-kuhbin and spudulike as spu-DOO-liKé

I can't say "statistics"

always comes out like sisszzzsisics

My mom used to pronounce "Toys 'R' Us" as "U.S. Toys Russ."

decisions - always comes out as 'decishions'

sorry, I meant 'deshishions'

my dad also sometimes used to say "mizzled" instead of "misled" (again a feeble student joke, as are come to think of it now perhaps known as "dad jokes")

at one time as a kid I seriously thought mizled ("I" sound as in "lime") was a separate word to misled, having only read the former and heard the latter.

further items on ken c's old thread:
words that should be easy to pronounce but you can't pronounce

(i am not calling for deej-style action: let a hundred flowers bloom!)

I'm always confused by people using "let a hundred flowers bloom" as it was a cover to expose those who didn't follow the party orthodoxy, after which Mao launched his anti-rightist purge. I'm 95% sure we aren't going to be sent to labour camps for starting overlapping threads, but would rather play it safe.

'anemone'

deej is our mao

I also have a problem with "antibiotics", I tend to say "anti-bee-otics" instead of "anti-bye-otics" unless I slow it down.

February. For me it's either 'Feb-yew-ree' or, if I get bored of that, 'Febree'.

I only relatively recently discovered that you're supposed to pronounce the 'h' in 'adhesive' too.

f that

Apparently, one isn't meant to hit the 'h' in 'vehicle' as hard as I do.

my mum's mum was scottish (well, rutherglen scottish, which is a kind of scottish) and was very firm indeed abt pronouncing the h in words like "wheel" (= you have to say Hweel not weel)

i live in london tho: if there's a glottal i can stop i will and do

ie i say wee-oo

cool hwip

I do say vee-hickle on purpose sometimes

(of course L is alveolar not glottal: basically i drop all the consonants of whatever articulatory type and i am right to, awwigh')

I think I occasionally 'mispronounce' words because I grew up all over the eastern side of the US and accumulated a plethora of conflicting regional accents throughout the course of my childhood.

Vehicle and the t in "often" vary regionally, don't let anyone (like Bill Bryson) tell you you're wrong

I don't let Bill Bryson tell me shit

^^^

my former roommate's granny could never pronounce janeane garofalo's name right, it always came out, and this killed us for some reason, as: JEAN-ANNE gair-uh-FOE-low

https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/vNEAAOSwdGFYr3ln/s-l300.jpg

haha yes

'innovative' and 'optometrist'

my mum's mum was scottish (well, rutherglen scottish, which is a kind of scottish) and was very firm indeed abt pronouncing the h in words like "wheel" (= you have to say Hweel not weel)

this reminds me of an elderly substitute teacher who was completely insistent that (iirc) 'what' and 'watt' were pronounced differently, much to our confusion

tbh tho i don't myself maintain the distinction i like when i hear it bcz it reminds me of my gran, who was grebt

grebt

Yeah my granny is also scotch & pronounces wh words with the h

I also like how you can tell when an English person is doing it as an affectation cause they occasionally slip up and put the h sound into a regular w word

Which is another good thing to do on purpose obv

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But the thing I have most difficulty saying is 'Jack DeJohnette'

with my NY accent, it's nearly impossible to say "horror." comes out like harrrrrrrr