I Always Say SherBERT – IOTW Report

I Always Say SherBERT

Are there any words you’ve discovered late in life that you were pronuncing wrong?

59 Comments on I Always Say SherBERT

  1. Iā€™m originally from Ohio and itā€™s sherBERT there too.

    My older relatives would add an R, ā€œ she moved to Seattle WARshingtonā€¦ā€ I didnā€™t pick that one up.

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  2. At one point in life I said “melk” and my friend broke out laughing at me. She says it’s milk, not melk. I said that’s what I said, didn’t even realize I was saying it wrong until I caught myself saying it wrong later on.

    Then there’s ruff instead of roof. Apparently that’s a Chicago/midwest thing, but I caught that early and always said roof.

    One that annoys me when people say exit. It’s not eggzit. There are no eggs in exit. Same applies for similar words like eggzpect and eggzactly.

    Then you got all the hipsters who say tezzla. No, it’s tesla, just the way it’s spelled.

    But the ones that really annoy privileged fragile people are all the pronouns not only am I expected to say, but also pronounce properly. I haven’t fallen for it yet and say He/Him and She/Her as the only options. Heads explode.

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  3. For “orthoepy” I used to say or-THOW-eppy.

    On purpose. Not one person ever got it.
    But then, I find humor in some mighty odd places.

    Today I find that the formerly mispronunciations of both orthoepy and cacoepy are listed in dictionaries as acceptable. They originally were OR-tho-eppy and CA-co-eppy only.

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  4. I always say “arthuritis”& “hy-eena” for hernia, but I began doing that on purpose to mess with people. The one that always drives me nuts is when people say “laxadaisical”.

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  5. Two words I always used to mispronounce are banal and mesquite. My husband laughed at me enough to force me to get it right.

    I get really annoyed when I hear people say “mute” point, nu-cu-lar, and Nev-AH-da.

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  6. Chimera, simulacrum, anemone, enmity come to mind, and I consider myself something of a student of the language. Humility is not a strong point of mine but these, among some others, have assisted me in at least brushing by it. Screw them, a proper language would have them pronounced my way.

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  7. As a child, I knew what an hors d’oeuvre was and would pronounce it right, but wondered what a whore’s devore was when I read the term in a story.

    Then a day came where I heard it pronounced as it was read on a sign. DOH!

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  8. riverlife_callie: I say Nev-a-da (a as in cat) because I used to live in a city in Marin County named Novato and if if someone said Nev-ah-da we had to listen to determine whether the subject was our city of residence or the state where Las Vegas was located.

    One word that I know I pronounce wrong is ā€œbrought.ā€ I used to hate it when people would says ā€œI went to the store and brought a loaf of breadā€ so I overcorrect3d and used ā€œboughtā€ when I really should have used ā€œbrought.ā€

    While I canā€™t think of any off hand, there are some words I canā€™t seem to pronounce correctly to save my life.

    In my senior year in college I had a class taught by a professor I had met a few months ago at the school radio station. When he was taking roll, he got to my name and said ā€œOoh, say Sacramento.ā€ While many people would say ā€œSacamennaā€ he loved how I hit every consonant in the name. I did not OVER enunciate them, but you definitely heard every-single-one.

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  9. @willysgoatgruff — Here’s a chicken-and-egg question:

    Is Worcestershire mispronounced or misspelled?

    There are a number of English proper names that fall into that category:

    St. John is pronounced SINN-jinn,
    Cholmondeley is pronounced CHUM-ley,
    and the actor whose full name is Ralph Nathaniel Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes pronounces the short version RAFE FINES.

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  10. I have relatives from U.P. Michigan who pronounce some two syllable words as one syllable, like sheriff/sherff, and syrup/surp.

    Wondering if this is unique to them? I am guessing it developed when my grandparents were picking up English, since their parents immigrated from Finland.

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  11. Why isn’t anybody commenting on how the guy got the right answer? He knew the 2 different desserts.
    Pronunciation has to be accurate on Jeopardy.
    I say the guy got hosed!

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  12. The major city in my newly transplanted area is pronounced Press-kit in spite of being spelled Prescott.

    And my old home-state is Or-ah-gun, not Or-ah-gone.

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  13. I know someone who pronounces celery as salary. She doesn’t hear it no matter how much you go over it. “That’s what I said!” I met her up north where they put an r in wash and don’t hear that either.

    We just giggle when she does things like that now.

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  14. When I moved south, I realized there were a lot more syllables in most words than I had realized, and I learned to take my time and pronounce every last one of them.

    Oh, and I quit saying ‘a whole nother.’ But I still like sherbert.

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  15. Although I was clued in to the proper pronunciation at a fairly young age, to this day I make a conscious choice to mis-pronounce ā€œgourmetā€ and ā€œbolognaā€ with a more phonetic reading (gore-met, bo-log-na) just to screw with folks. Most can tell what Iā€™m doing, but I get a kick out of the ones who gently try to share the correct verbalization, as if I were a particularly slow child. I just smile at them and suggest that it must be because Iā€™m such an ā€œig-nor-ram-usā€. (Ramming speed!!)

    But the worst I recall was a chat with a former boss of mine (a Brit working in the USA) when I used the word ā€œetherealā€. I had never had a conversation where I needed to SAY that word; it just didnā€™t come up much. Thus, the pronunciation in my head from reading it in my youthful years came out ā€“ ā€œur-reeth-rialā€. Which sounded a lot like ā€œurethraā€.

    My boss, with typical dry Brit humor, inquired if I was referring to a urinary issue, or did I mean ā€œetherealā€ (he pronounced it correctly).

    I still blush with shame every time I remember that day.

    Crap. Now I gotta pee.

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  16. I don’t “warsh” my clothes anymore since I left the Midwest. Now that I live in the Southeast, I “wash” my clothes.
    However. Every regional dialect has its quirky pronunciations . The very southern parts of the Southeast somehow have made the word, “Wow” sound like it has three syllables- “wah-ow-ho”. Go figure.

  17. It’s pronounced like it is spelled, and it is not spelled real-a-tor.

    I had an oh so erudite supervisor who worked for me for too many years. He was so dumb as to be dangerous, and was the embodiment of the Dunning-Kruger Effect. He said “mute point” once too often and I corrected him in front of the staff. He made my skin crawl each time he said irregardless. He graduated college in western Kentucky, but his roots were still down in a holler.

  18. I was born in Iowa but was replanted in New England as an infant. Iā€™ve heard easterners say ā€œEye-Oh-Wayā€. However now Iā€™m in Connecticut. One does not voice the second ā€œcā€ in that place name. Also, the city of Norwich is a one-syllable word pronounced ā€œNorchā€ and New Britain is usually pronounced (irritatingly) as ā€œNew Bri-henā€. Recently the Quinnipiac University won the NCAA Hockey Championship. This gave those who watched, a chance to hear sports casters from all over the country try to pronounce ā€œQuinnipiacā€. That was almost as entertaining as the games; virtually no one got it right. I wonā€™t even try to explain that or other place names like Poquonock or Mashamoquet but you just got it wrong.

    Related maybe but Iā€™m a bit embarrassed how old I was when I realized that there are both ā€œdiscreetā€ and ā€œdiscreteā€ with two discrete meanings.

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