I read so many fantasy books growing up thinking “draught” rhymed with “aught”, instead of just being another spelling of “draft”.
Another good one: gaol = jail. I kept pronouncing it in my head like “gowl”.
🤯
‘Epitome’ will forever be epi-tome in my head: ‘epi’ like in EpiPen and tome as in a big heavy book.
And the ‘c’ in ‘indictment’ also always gets pronounced when I read the word to myself.
Interesting, I never had an issue with those but the one that got my growing up was awry. I still want to read it as “aw-ree” like “awful” despite knowing it’s actually “ah-rye”. I also knew the latter as a spoken word but I guess I didn’t question how it was spelled for a long time.
Fun, less useful fact in a similar vein: “Antipode” is pronounced “anti-pode” how you’d expect but the plural “Antipodes” is pronounced "an-ti-po-dees"like A Greek word. I still have no idea why that’s the case.
Um…it is aw-ree? It’s not like a hard W, but it’s there.
It’s definitely uh-rye
Nope, check the pronunciations here:
Wait, what’s epitome supposed to be?
this language is bullshit
I knew that long ago, but it’ll remain drawt in my brain, just because…
So… that’s also how you say checkers in parts of Europe and both pronunciations are acceptable.
Tic Tack Toe is also called Naughts and Crosses.
Thanks, as a non native english speaker, TIL that I also pronounced it wrong the whole time…
I call this being bookish (pronounced bawkish or boo-kish)
What about “drouth”?
People will complain about that but not look twice at “rendezvous”.
I don’t think that I’ve ever heard anybody pronounce “chaise longue” correctly. It’s “shay long”.
Actually (pronounced acktschually) it’s ‘shayz long’ The ‘s’ is usually only silent when it’s the last letter of the word.
Shez Long
It literally means long chair. Not lounge chair.
Nobody pronounces “bruschetta” correctly; it’s “broo-SKET-ta”
An Italian told me off through the TV set and I promised never to say “broo-SHET-ta” again.
chez ≠ chaise
Wet Leg did a song about it
Queue
Every letter after the first is completely unnecessary.
They had dined on horse meat, horse cheese, horse black pudding, horse d’oeuvres, and a thin beer that Rincewind didn’t want to speculate about.
— Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic
All the homonyms with different pronunciations.
Read / Read
Lead / Lead
Compound / Compound
Bass / Bass
Content / Content
etc.
It could be a brain fart, but ‘compound’…?
The chemicals join together forming a new COMpound.
If you don’t correct a problem early on then the damage will comPOUND over time.
Niche drives me nuts as a French speaker. It is not Nitch. It is Knee-shh. I will die on this hill
As a non-French speaker, I completely agree with you. If I use a borrowed word, I do my best to pronounce it like a native speaker would.
As a colonizer, I consider it my duty to butcher borrowed/foreign words. You should hear me say bolognese.
Baloneys?
Buh-LOG-nees.
It’s an Italian sauce. Actually pronounced like bolonays
Ouch.
Could y’all please stop dieing on hills all the time?! I love hiking, but all the corpses are really disturbing.
That K is unnecessary in Knee-shh
Make it just a little bit worse, that œ hits the spot:
d’œuvreThe word ok expecting me to spell it out instead of pronouncing it like oak.
Not oak, just ok.
I mean…okay, that’s fair.
Capicola
Gabagool
Good name for an equine cleaner.
hors 🐎
I always thought there seems to be one “u” too many in colloquium.
One could save two U’s by not using colloquium in the first place. Five Dollar Words, and all that.
