Pajiba

Faeces - I can never remember if its fee-shees or fee-sees.

Nuke-you-ler.

There is no such word. But you could not tell me that as a child.

Now when I hear someone pronounce nuclear that way it makes me want to tear the flesh off of kittens. Please stop. Don't you love kittens? If you love kittens, you will stop.

I think umbrella depends on where you're from ahamos. I say it um-BRELL-a, most of the time. But I'm sure there are people here who will tell me I'm wrong.

I know a person who insists upon "kind've" and "sort've" instead of "kind of" and "sort of" (which in an of themselves aren't exactly correct). It drives me up a wall.

On the other hand, same person absolutely hates that I tend to go into British slang occasionally, including frequent usage of the word summat. I tend to do it more often these days on account of the annoyance factor.

I worked with accountants who really said "physical" year

I read The Giver when I was about nine, and at one point in that book the little sister gets "chastised," I asked my father what it meant, but not how it was pronounced. For whatever reason my brain looked at it and provided me with "catisized."

I eventually tried to use it in highschool, to the delight of my best friend, but she got hers in the end because she called cantaloupe "candelloop"

Also, I still can't say lichen or gnocchi without extreme mental preparations beforehand.

Actually, Amy, that's not strange, and conforms to the linguistic theories espoused by Jakob Grimm, that hard consonants soften over time: "tz" or "ts" becomes "t" becomes "ft" becomes "ff". Same with "p" becomes "pf" becomes "f". Eventually these sounds re-harden as languages split from one another.

An example is the German word for pepper: "pfeffer". The English version got stayed hardened because it split long ago, while the German form evolved.

"Irregardless" sets my teeth on edge. And, its jewel-ry not jew-le-ry.

Debris...for some reason, it took me a long time to realize it wasn't pronounced "DER-biss."

If I hear one more person at the school I work for mangle the simple phrase "I'm going to/gonna" by saying "I'monna," I will assemble the most vial Sandra Lee concoction I can afford (and legally carry on public school grounds) and then leave it out in the teacher's lounge with a note saying "I'monna literally treat you all to some delishus snacks this year." If involuntary bulimia, sugar/preservative caused migraines, and that burning sensation of chemical extracts/seasoning packets destroying their taste-buds doesn't fix their crimes against grammar, nothing will.

My son - now five - has picked up an Indiana dipthong, so that "there" - one syllable, rhymes with hair - becomes: They-yer. It burns my wife's NYC ears.

Also, I like the local plural of "all y'all" (itself the plural of "y'all") - "y'is." She doesn't.

Hey, can I ax you a question?

My mom says "boosh" and "poosh" instead of "bush" and "push" She also says "warsh" Hoosier breeding, y'all!!

And, whats up with "You'uns"?

My boss uses the word (read: non-word) irregardless. I want to punch her in the throat.
She has written issues also. She uses "peak" when she means "peek" and "except" when she means "accept" in emails.
I have a former boss that used to say "supposebly". Really? REALLY?

"Supposebly" might do it for me. Turn me into the nice girl with a whorish mouth into a murderous raging paj-assassin.

gah!

Oh yeah, and I'm actually physically incapable of correctly pronouncing the word "months." I say "mumps" with a slight lisp instead. People constantly correct me and there is nothing I can do to fix it. It's a secret shame and why I do everything in my power not to write any stories, plays, songs, essays, etc. with the word "months" in it. "Month?" No problem. The plural? Impossible.

I'm sorry, I meant "turn me FROM the nice girl..."

While I'm preaching I might as well practice.

Being from a french-speaking country, it sometimes annoys the merde out of me when people french-drop in the middle of a conversation and completely mangle the pronunciation.

I mean, if you've finally copped on on to how to say "je ne sais quoi", why is "coup de grâce" or "force majeure" so difficult? Trust me: ya not sayin' it right.

And why are you speaking French in the middle of an English conversation in the first place? It's only sexy when Audrey Tautou does it.

ahamos>> I'm with you on how American rules for quotation marks don't make logical sense at times. Sometimes I'll rearrange a sentence just to avoid it. Other times I'll knowingly break the rule out of a desire to change the system because it annoys me so much. Hell - it doesn't take much rule-breaking in the English language to bastardize something into the ranks of correctness.

Why can't people say "real-tor"? What is this need to add an a (real-a-tor)?

@ Lainey: ahahaha that brings back memories of my junior year of high school; my english teacher was batshit cuckhoo and during our vocab lessons every week would make us stand up at our desks, repeat the word, spell it, and use it in a sentence. one wayward week, i nearly got detention for insisting that egregious was not pronounced 'egree-gree-ous' the way she demanded, even after spelling it and pointing out that there was only one 'r' in there. she made me stay late and sort books for that. and that was my education in a nutshell.

I have also been making a concerted effort lately, both in speaking and writing, to avoid--at all costs in length, pause and general grammar-douchiness--to avoid hanging prepositions. But that's just how lame I am.

One day I heard my husband call something "the hair-bringer of death" and I said, "um, it's 'harbinger', honey." He still says it, tho, and I laugh at him every time.

Malk. Malk? Malk! Fuuuuck! M.I.L.K. Milk. Ten years woman ten.....years!

The following make me loopy, especially when it is an adult, axe for ask, supposebly for supposedly, pacific for specific and my all time favourite, guaranteed (a word I can never spell right the first go 'round) to get you a correction through clenched teeth, ascairt (or howthefuckever you spell that abomination) for afraid, scared or frightened. My husband is aware of my hate for these words and uses them at every possible opportunity. Jackass.

I recently read the phrase "for all intents and purposes", I had always said "for all intensive purposes". Embarrassing.

Grammar Guru's have at 'er (oh! and I am never confident in my use of the apostrophe s thing) .

Oh, admin! I knew we could never truly be happy together - I don't say "malk", but I do say "melk". And "pellow".

Yes, I'm sure it's very annoying to some people. Too bad. So's your mom.

Cindy beat me to "realtor." Drives me just as crazy as the mangling of "nuclear."

I wonder if the pronunciation of "often" is a generational thing, because I'm 49 and in my generation, *everyone* pronounces it "offen." I have only in the last few years stopped internally labeling "of-ten" people as backward.

"Clapboard." Not pronounced the way it looks.

And since we're allowed grammatical mistakes, I can once again rant about my #1 Pet Peeve: People who should know better saying, "Between you and I" (and its equivalents). GAH! "It was given to Suzy and I." ACK! BLECH! Make it go away!!!

The Hair-Bringer of Death!

That is so much better than the actual word.

The one I'm seeing more and more often is "Would of" instead of "would have". I HATE IT. It looks and sounds dumber than hell.

Should it really be com-fort-a-ble? That's kind of a mouthful isn't it. I've always heard it as comfrtable. The first six letters all pushed together.

HA! High-five, Sofia!

When I was about nine, I read a book where the big family lived in a rambling old house with a cupola. I was ragingly jealous and I announced that I wished we had a cup-OH-lah on our house.

Around the same age, I was reading a book in the Trixie Belden detective series and in my head I pronounced the word mosquito as MOS-quit-oh (the second syllable like the stand-alone word quit).

Also, you know how you can sometimes look at a completely familiar word and it just refuses to click in? Once my mom and a whole lounge full of her fellow teachers kept reading indict like it's pronounced in-DICKT. They were pretty dirty-minded, so it continued to be a running joke.

Not so much pronunciation but lending/borrowing.

If one more person tells me that he/she will borrow something of theirs to me (i.e. "I'll borrow you this book only if you promise to return it to me"), Godtopus as my witness, I will fucking snap everyone's neck in the room, including my own.

Posted by: Louise at June 30, 2009 9:21 PM

My grade 11 English teacher crossed out all the me's in my final essay with red pen and wrote "I", where "I" had no business being and then had the gall to include a note saying I should know better! I had to ask 3 teachers before I found someone who agreed with me.

My aunt says queue-pon rather than coo-pon for the word coupon. It's like nails on a chalkboard.

Also not pronunciation, but highly annoying: less versus fewer.

I am still unsure, is the saying: "we'll play it by YEAR" or "we'll play it by EAR"? Everytime I use it (which is a surprisingly large amount, I think my brain is scared of it and therefore seems to throw it up all the time to mess with me) I kind of just fudge my way through it and hope no one will notice. Neither seem to have any actual meaning to help me discern which is correct. Help anyone??

I recently noticed some song lyrics written in the CD book of a MAJOR Australian singer: "How my ever gonna..." Instead of "How am I ever" or "How 'm I ever" or however you want to actually write it. "How my" just makes no sense, and makes me so angry that this stupid singer is so successful. (Delta Goodrem for you folks playing at home)

Somehow as a child I misread "depilatory cream" to be "deLAPatory cream". I only used it once (the word, not the cream), but it was in a very public and embarassing way. I still have to concentrate when I use it.

Also, I always say ETHereal with this odd emphasis on the first syllable. It's how I first read it and I fear it's too late to change how it's written in my brain.

My other pet peeve is when people can't use the right tense of a word. There is a girl at my work who uses 'come' for all tenses, eg: He come over on the weekend. She also does it for words like bring and seen and it makes me want to gnash my teeth and spit in her eyeballs. Seriously: I bring my wallet to work today. I seen him on the weekend. WTF?

Also, despite knowing so much better, I always confuse 'bought' and 'brought' and have to really concentrate on which one is correct.

Oh. I'm totally guilty of "queue-pon". Sorry. "Coo-pon" just sounds wrong to my ears. :)

i had trouble pronouncing the name Tobias.
i thought it was pronunced Toby us

oh oh oh!

al-you-min-ium. My father (a Newfie) and my MIL (an Australian) are both guilty of this. Where is the second I? Where? Show Me! Ergh.

While we're talking about eye-rack, perhaps we could discuss those eye-talians from Italy (with a short I, make up your mind, please). But then, this may be a Newfie thing.....I dunno.

And, whats up with "You'uns"?

Posted by: dammitjanet at June 30, 2009 9:00 PM

I have always understood 'you'uns' to be the West Virginia/hillbilly version of y'all. I haven't heard anyone say it in years.

I am ashamed to say that I have been re-learning far too much from School House Rock. My kids keep playing it and I'm all "lolly, lolly, lolly, get your adverbs here", and 'So I unpacked my adjectives". These I at least knew well, but the prepositions and conjunctions and all the things I really ought to have retained have become like new to me.

Also, my kids have funny little speech impediments and for some reason sound like they're lispy squirts from the...Bronx I guess? "my skoit isth it-thy and it's sthtuck in da ca' doo-ah" (my skirt is itchy and is stuck in the car door, from earlier today).

I know I drive people insane with my weird tendency to slide into a kind of Newfoundlander accent. "Oh yar, I'm heddin' down to th' likker."

My delightful roommate said "aforemented" once when she meant "aforementioned," but that's the only time I've heard that gem.

It drives me NUTS when people say "a whole nother." Nother is not a word. Say "a whole other" if you must.

And of course: nu-kew-luhr. Not the way it's pronounced!

Also: people who write ya'll instead of y'all. Apostrophes join together the contraction where the letters were taken out. You + all = y'all.

I couldn't care less, people. It is not, "I could care less". If you could care less then that means that you care, correct? That makes me nuts, and it is so common. I lived in Lancaster, PA for a time. They put t's in the most fucked up places. For instance, at the end of "once". "Onct in a while we go over there, ya know?" They all ridiculed my western MA pronunciation of "aunt". My mother's sister is not an insect, jackass.

JJ McClay - it's "We'll play it by ear." Sorta like playing music by ear, nothing to go by, you're not making plans but making it up as you go instead.

I had another friend who pronounced "Arkansas" as "Ar-kan-sas" as if it rhymed with "Kansas." She also pronounced "lamb" as if the "b" were not silent. The more I look back, the more I'm amazed I didn't smack my friends when they spoke.

i had a genius college professor who i could never take seriously because he pronounced 'especially' as if it had a random K thrown in there: ekspecially.

also, i used to use the word 'irregardless' alot. until it was pointed out to me by an 85 year old retired teacher that it isn't a word. it's just 'regardless'. it was like a lightbulb went on, and now it annoys the crap out of me when other people do it.

MelBivDevoe They do that here, too! When I first moved to Ohio from California, I couldn't figure out what was wrong with the way people were speaking until it finally dawned on me that they drop the infinitive "to be". It still irks me from time to time when someone says their car needs washed, but it doesn't sound nearly as fucked up as it did to me 10 years ago.

Speaking of, JJ McCLay - do you live in Ohio? "Seen" instead of "saw" and "come" instead of "came" seem to be frighteningly common around these parts, especially if you're being interviewed by the local news station. I can't remember the last time I didn't hear a phrase similar to, "well, we was down at the bar and he come by just looking for a fight. I says to him, I says, "you should of just walked away"...*shudder* It hurts my ears and my soul.

PS: It's "play it by ear" as though you were a musician that didn't have sheet music for a song and you were going to "play it by ear", by listening to what sounds correct.

Haven't read the comments yet. But now my heart is fluttering like a chipmunk. This is one of my biggest pet peeves....it's hard for me to like people who can't pronounce words in the English language. I can tolerate accents and regional diction. But balls out stupidity really gets me. Now must read. Hope I can hold it together.

I don't remember any from recent years, but colonel used to fuck me up. I think I was laughed at in....8th? grade for pronouncing it phonetically.

Call-o-nell
Colonel.
You're telling me that shits pronounced kernel???

Oh and I'm sorry to use the 'Pick on Americans' card but I cant stand how some Americans pronounce Kyle as Karl... cos, you know, my Aussie accent is so sophisticated.

"They all ridiculed my western MA pronunciation of "aunt". My mother's sister is not an insect, jackass. "

Ugh. I cannot stand it when people DON'T pronounce aunt as ant. It sounds so snobby. Awwnt. Ugh.

Or worse. Awntie. Awwntie Kate. Kill me. I'm Aunt Kate, thanks.

My mother says "poy-em" instead of "poe-em". And she used to be an English teacher! But that's the only word I've ever heard her mispronounce. I've never had the uterine fortitude to correct her because I'm afraid she'll destroy me instantly. Yes, I'm 27 and still afraid of my mother. That's the proper way to raise a child, fuckers.

Also, my husband has a co-worker who mangles many words and expressions. To wit:
- "intrinsnic" instead of "intrinsic"
- "maah-cuh-bray" instead of "macabre" (and used when he means "glib")
- alls I knows (no, he is not from Seacaucus)
- "I just wanted to touch bases with you" instead of "I just wanted to touch base with you"
- pronouncing the phrase Chrisopher Columbus' ship as "Columbus ship" instead of "Colombus-es ship"
And, the best part, he always insists his pronunciation or diction is right even when looking at a dictionary with a pronunciation key!

Not to leave myself out, Ariel your eggs-it/exit post makes me wonder how badly I mangle pronunciations. I've got a pretty good North Florida drawl. It's so bad that when my husband and I honeymooned in England and Scotland people there could literally not understand what I was saying until they talked to me for a little while. Like, if I asked a bus driver about the stops they would listen politely while staring at me like I had two heads and then, when I had finished speaking, look at my husband to translate. He, being raised in New Jersey and lost most of the accent, would repeat exactly what I said. A look of epiphany would come over the British/Scottish person's face, then they would turn back to me and answer.

I really wish I were kidding about that.

also, i got the piss taken outta me the other day at work because apparently it is unacceptable to pronounce orange 'ah-runge.'

I got that beat. My sister used to pronounce it "urnge".

Me, I have trouble with names like Joachim. I keep going "Joe-ah-kim". And sometimes, when I type too fast, I transpose or skip over letters. So sorry for all the "becasue" you may see in my stuff.

Eyvi--in the UK, aluminum actually is spelled with a second "I" (i.e., "aluminium"). I had a British chem prof who pronounced it like that, and it was many years before I found out that he wasn't (entirely) crazy.

Kate that's one thing that has ALWAYS bugged me about English.

Pronounce it like it's written! it's easy! don't give me all these extra vowels and silent Hs and Ts and Ss. Listen, if you don't pronounce it like it's written, either change the spelling or don't yell at me because I don't understand your kooky language. Do you know how long it took me to figure out how to pronounce shit like "yacht"?

Stupid English. French is worse, but English is still annoying sometimes.

being from the south (mississippi), all my life i have heard people respond "pre-shade it" meaning they appreciate what someone has just done for them.
as a smart-mouthed kid, i would be all "post-shade it."

now that i live in oklahoma, people actually make fun of my long i's (as in 'whIte rIce at nIght'), which come out more when i'm excited, scared, or just off the phone with my mother.

Thankyou MelBivDevoe and Lainey! The playing it by EAR actually makes sense when thinking of it in a musical context. I will no longer need to be afraid!

And Lainey, I live in Australia, but it is pleasing to know that this stupidity re come/bring/seen etc is shared across the globe!

Eyvi, in Australia, and some other countries, we spell it 'aluminIum' and pronounce it that way too. Courtesy of wikipedia: "Most countries spell aluminium with an i before -um. In the United States, the spelling aluminium is largely unknown, and the spelling aluminum predominates. The Canadian Oxford Dictionary prefers aluminum, whereas the Australian Macquarie Dictionary prefers aluminium."

Cindy, how on earth does one fit three syllables into 'no'?!!

I love this comment diversion!

Have to chime in on aluminium: it's not pronunciation that's the problem here, it's spelling. North America removed the second "i" on some dipshit whim, while we Aussies, Kiwis, Brits (Seth Effricans too?) never did.

Pet peeve? North American insistence on bring, no matter the tense or POV.
I will bring it, I did bring it, will you bring it to the dry cleaner? Makes my blood boil.
Try these: I will bring it, I brought it (here), I took it (there), did you/will you take it to the dry cleaner?
*sigh*

@ Lance: Yes it is? Or at least, the dictionary says it's a verb. And if respect is a verb, I don't see why disrespect isn't.

Get this. After I posted my last comment I set my work laptop to sync up with the main system, looked back at my personal computer to browse to a couple other threads on this site, and looked back at my work computer to see if it had finished syncing yet. I saw, no shit, underneath the process bar that the caption read "Performing do after process." What....what the fuck? Was it too hard to write a caption that says, "Post-processing"? Really. A huge global company should do better than that. I need a raise just for having to read that shit.

Meaux, awww man! I can handle apologizing to my Dad for being a know-it-all ass, but I am not, I repeat not, going to apologize to my Mother-In-Law (it's spelled with the extra I down under as well, I checked. Doh!).

i often mispronounce 'catholicism'.

i hate it when people leave the T's out of the word 'button'. what is a buh-un?

I can't explain it JJ - it's in the intonation, I guess. I just know when I hear it it sounds like a three syllabled word.

My mom yells at/corrects people on tv who mix up "less" and "fewer" (though that's a grammar issue). I can't stand when some people use French words but completely bastardizes the prounceation.

Chic - rhymes with creek, not dick
Clique - rhymes with creek, NOT DICK AGAIN
(which, BTW, is a fun t-shirt slogan)
Foyer - rhymes with boy-yay, not lawyer
Niche - rhymes with leash, not itch

I'm so glad someone mentioned "I could care less". Whenever someone says that I think of them as a total idiot.

Well, I once knew a kid who would pronounce chasm as chaz-um, and we still make jokes about it today, behind his back, of course, as he is no longer a friend, for obvious reasons.

Otherwise, albeit has stoked some debate. One half of the party believing it to be i'll-bite. I regret I was on that half. I have had to atone to that for years.

Oh, and riposte. People always throw out rip-ahs-it.

As the albeit debate roused so much enthusiasm, we ended it by going to Webster's online dictionary to solve it. Now, anytime anyone debates any word, an enthusiastic call of "to Webster's!" is made.

one of my coworkers- don't get me wrong, lovely girl really- drives me up the wall on a daily basis with this gem:

'the printer needs fixed.'
'my car needs washed.'
'that kid needs smacked.'

...you mean 'to be,' perhaps? ohhhhh it makes me want to jab her eyeballs through with our readily-available staples and then shout 'she needs driven to the hospital' but i value my job, so i guess i won't. the thing that kills me in the stabbity bits of my heart is that she's a writing major. i just...yeah. no. no words.

While we're being picky...shouldn't the title of this post be "Commonly Mispronounced Words"?

A lot of people around here also say "crick" instead of "creek." I may or may not be one of those people.

Oh there's not enough bandwidth for my list. I'm an English teacher and a linguist and I train English teachers for a living. If there's anyone on earth who should pronounce words correctly, it's them. But no. I hear fuck-ups daily. BIG fuck-ups. And they don't even care. I know high school English teachers who don't know when to use "less" and when to use "fewer." It's a very simple rule. But they don't know it.

Oh and signs don't "say" anything. They "read." As in "the sign read 'Please stay off the grass.'" Or "I had a shirt that read 'I'm not illiterate, my parents were married!'"

Things lay. People lie.

Stuff like that makes my skin crawl, but ONLY with people who should know better.

For everyone else, things like "frust-a-rated" or "fus-trated" drives me crazy.

In sports, I always cringe at the following:

"We played physical tonight."

Can you play and not be physical? Kind of redundant. Besides, its supposed to be "physically," isn't it? Adverb? Am I alone in thinking this?

Dumb jocks...

I wish I had time to read all these comments! Well, I guess that's what office hours are for. I gots to get some sleep, yo!

I just wanted to say that I know a grown woman who says pacific instead of specific. She's 39. That's old enough to know better. Of course, this is the same woman whose kids would call her at work when they got to the babysitter's after school, and she would ask them if they were "being have", pronounced like "haven" but without the n. I assume that was her version of "behaving". She has the emotional maturity of a banana, so I guess that probably has something to do with it. (She's one of those women who gets on the phone with her boyfriend and starts the baby talk, so that should tell you something right there.) So glad I don't work with her anymore and have to listen to her mangle the English all day.

Also, my Media & Society professor (lovely woman, passionate about the subject) apparently had difficulty with "oligopoly", and decided it was pronounced "oh-LIG-a-pole-y". She had a hard time pronouncing it that way, and asked if anyone in the class would like to try. A few did. I kept silent.

How do you get through life without learning to read a dictionary and use a pronunciation key? You don't even have to do that anymore, the internet will actually pronounce words aloud for you! And yet, we have this diversion. Well, at least it makes for some fine entertainment!

Ok, so I'm far enough down that this post will probably go unnoticed (which is probably best due to my usual fear of posting on this most beloved site--I'm just not funny) but I had to join in on this one.

My best friend's husband cannot pronounce the word "oragutan." It always comes out as "or-gan-tu-an." You would think that this might not be much of a problem, but you'd be surprised how often this word comes up in everyday conversation. Needless to say, we usually stay away from the monkey houses when we visit the zoo...

Stardust Savant: "I've never had the uterine fortitude to correct her because I'm afraid she'll destroy me instantly. Yes, I'm 27 and still afraid of my mother. That's the proper way to raise a child, fuckers."

Your mom and mine must get the same newsletter. She's a steel bar, my mom and I couldn't be prouder.

What drives me crazy is "shrimps". It's on menus everywhere. The plural of shrimp is shrimp, unless you're talking about a group of short people.

I work with a proofreader who goes absolutely ballistic when someone says "Anyways..."

I'm with you all on the "could care less" discussion, and the fewer/less debate. I can't see the signs at the grocery store for "20 items or less" without wanting to correct some poor cashier who couldn't care less about it. If you can count the items, it's fewer. And our esteemed past president and his pronounciation of "new-ku-lar" made me want to scream. I have to admit that I pronounced "Arkansaw" as "Ar-kansas" too and was roundly ridiculed for doing so.

One thing I noticed about living in the South, is that we add dipthongs where we don't need them, and leave them out where they would be appropriate. Example "Do y'all want any di-yup?" instead of "dip." And then where the long "I" sound would be acceptable, we say "wyfe" istead of "wi-ife." I think that bothers me so much beacuse I sing in a chorus, and we work so hard to match dipthongs in our singing. Then we turn around and speak Southern.

What, exactly about the spelling of "aunt" leads you to believe it should be pronounced "ant"? Is it the U? I bet it's the U.

My dad's a South African who hated his own accent so much he purged himself of it when he moved to Australia, and since then he's been unable to bear any mispronunciations or grammatical errors. This is the man who taught me to speak. I have more to add to this diversion than you can know.

I can't understand the American obsession with loud silent 'l's. Like in the word 'calm', the 'l' is silent. It's not 'cawl-m'. And 'folk' and 'yolk', too, silent 'l's. Hell, I've heard people pronouncing 'both' with one in there. 'Bolth'!

And it fucking IS Alu-min-i-um! The extra 'i' is right there in front of the 'u', like all those other hundred words on the periodic table. Magnes-i-um. Sod-i-um. Rad-i-um. Alumin-i-um!

And the name Craig. It's 'cray' with a 'g' on the end, not Greg with a 'c'. And there's only one syllable in Carl.

Athlete. Two syllables, right? No, you're forgetting the 'uh' in the middle. Ath-uh-lete. Triath-uh-lon. I don't know where people are seeing that 'uh', but it is killing me. That one's not just American, though, my countrymen are just as guilty. Australians say some bizarre things.

Like asphalt. That one seems pretty simple to me. My English teacher in High School didn't think so, nor so many other people I've come across in Australia. Somehow they've come up with 'ash-felt'. Fuck me airborne.

The worst one, though, isn't technically mispronciation but misuse. Severe misuse. The word 'amount' is quickly turning into my Kryptonite. There is no time when it is actually necessary, there is always a better word, but people insist on inserting it into every sentence they can.

I've heard people say "there's a large amount of people", or "a large amount of time". No, fuck that shit. People are not measured in amounts. There's a large number of people, or just fucking "there's lots". Many. Anything but amount. And time is measured in periods. "A long period of time", or just "a long time". Measures, quantities, volumes; NOTHING IS EVER AN AMOUNT.

I got a fuckton of shit for pronouncing it "steer-eo" instead of "stair-eo".

I used to pronounce omnipotent as "om-nee-potent."

I also combined the words "woe be gone" and "vagabond" to create "woegebond." That was an interesting book report.

And, up until a couple years ago, I would ALWAYS say "sub-see-quent" instead of subsequent.

I won't even get started on when to pronounce bass as "base" or "bass." For a musician, I sure mess that one up a lot when I see it written out.

As for idioms, I read "follow suit" as "follow suite." I said this out loud once when someone was talking about getting desert. When someone corrected me, I said I was intentionally making a pun. Good save.

Back in junior high, knew that anxious was pronounced ank-shus, so made the leap that anxiety was ank-shitty. Yeah, that was an awkward English class the day I read that one out loud...

I greatly amused a friend who worked for the power company by pronouncing "impedance" like "impotence." After he got up from rolling on the floor, he informed me it's im-PEED-ance, not IM-pe-dense.

BTW, Mrs. , is at her mother's tonight, so I had the whole evening to myself to look for mischief, and I know you'll all envy me my pure hedonism when I tell you that, heady with freedom, I took myself out for a Carvalanche and finally saw "Star Trek."

Suck it, beetches.

I'm a Montanan, and people around here don't seem to understand that CREEK has two e's in it FOR A REASON. A crick is something painful that you get in your back. A creek is like a stream or small river. I work in retail, and we have a lot of rural areas that only use P.O. boxes. When someone writes a check, I have to get their physical address, and usually I'll verify that it's in the same city as the box. So if I say, "That's in Wolf Creek?", generally I get asked if I'm from somewhere outside of Montana. Nope, born and raised here. I just know how to pronounce words so I don't sound like a hick.

James, seriously, check out my wikipedia etymology link about Aluminium. I used to be adamant about it just like you - but in reality, neither side is correct.

It was originally labelled Alumium then later Aluminum by its discoverer, Humphry Davy. Only later did someone else add the "i" so it would sound more "classical", despite the presence of non-"ium" elements like Molybdenum and Platinum in the periodic table.

As a "Queen's English" stickler, American shortcuts bug the hell out of me too, but this time, we're in the wrong. Sorry mate.

Also: nth-ing the hatred for "could care less". Dumb, dumb, dumb.

I can't help but take it personal. You're right you take it personally. I swear this one makes me want to go postal.

I have always understood 'you'uns' to be the West Virginia/hillbilly version of y'all. I haven't heard anyone say it in years.

Posted by: greer at June 30, 2009 9:50 PM
---
Tain't Wes Virginny, that's a Pittsburgh/western Pennsylvania regionalism, and you can get a hot debate started there by asking whether it's pronounced "younz," "yunz" or "yinz." (I'm from the Pittsburgh area and lived in Virginia for four years and then moved back, so I learned to compromise with "yinz-all.")

Pittsburghese is a language all its own. Billy Mays was from the Pittsburgh suburb of McKees Rocks, and you can hear it when he says "pahrful"; in Pittsburgh, the guy who used to coach the Steelers was Bill Cahr, and many people used to work in the mills making still and ahrn. Pittsburghese is also "dahntahn" and "Sahside" and "sammich."

And "jagoff."

www.pittsburghese.com/

None of it matters. If we're accurately communicating our ideas, then it doesn't matter how you say a word.

"Nuc-lee-ar" vs "Nuc-u-ler" Doesn't matter.
"Rahw-t" vs "Root" Doesn't matter.
"Stair-eo" vs "Steer-eo" Doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter. None of it matters.

If I shout from my bedroom, "Hey fucker, turn down the goddamn (steer-eo)! It's too fucking loud!" You'll know what I mean just the same as if I'd said (stair-eo).

If I say, "We dropped a (nuc-u-ler) bomb on Hiroshima during world war two," you'll know what I mean. Unless you're a retard.

Language isn't perfect. The definition of a living language is that it is constantly evolving and changing (vs. a dead language like Latin that hasn't changed in over a thousand years). Words change meaning, pronounciation and context all the time. Just think about what "gay" meant 100 year ago. It didn't mean you like to suck dick, that's for sure.

The next time someone mispronounces a word, instead of jumping on their case about it, first think to yourself, "Did I understand the grunts that came out of that person's face?" If the answer is "yes" then let it go.

OK, couple more. I used to have to edit a guy who would write "make no doubt" where most educated people would use "make no mistake" or "no doubt." I'd always point out that "make no doubt" makes no sense, but he never corrected himself.

Also:

"When someone writes a check, I have to get their physical address ..."

Singular noun takes a singular pronoun. So easy to write around the conundrum: "When people write checks, I have to get their physical addresses." Or: "When someone writes a check, I have to get a physical address."

I'd say 99 percent of the agreement abuse I see (and I see a lot) could be rewritten to use proper grammar, but I always hear ad copy like "Ask your agent if they're a Realtor."

Like fingernails on my cerebellum.

Also:

The news nitwits on the local radio station are fond of saying "It's currently 76 degrees." You mean right now?

I can't remember how I said it, but I somehow butchered the word facetious. I think I was so ashamed after my friend pointed out how to say it, I can't remember the original way I said it. Also, anything too French messed me up until I heard someone say it (hors d'oeuvres?).

Unfortunately, majoring in speech-language pathology took out the speech snob in me. As long as I understand what you're saying and we're communicating effectively, we're good. Although, there's a difference in dialects/idiolects and just getting a word wrong--the worst is people trying to pronounce every letter of a word. Oral language is how people say it, and sometimes it changes. Deal with it. Also, we have way too much French in our language to go even down the "we should pronounce every letter" route.

I'm with kelsy, going into linguistics made me less of a pronunciation/grammar snob. Though I still insist on it when I edit someone's writing. Speech may have dialects and that's great (something I enjoy, in fact), but the written word has standards and until a change is fully made you will stick with it, dammit.

THAT BEING SAID, a year ago I was riding the school shuttle and heard a girl behind me ask her friend, "Can you even imaginate that?"
Her friend's response? "Uh, no. No one can, that's not a fucking word."

Stop with the back-formation, people! We don't conversate, or orientate, and we certainly don't imaginate. I'm still annoyed at commentate.

Quincy...where abouts in Montana? Yes, I get that everytime I say I'm visiting "Mon-TYAN-YA." Fuck that. My whole family is originally from Montana so I occasionally get made fun of for saying BAY-g as in "book BAY-g" or AY-g...as in "cook me a scrambled AY-g."

Also when I ask for a "pop" instead of a soda in Nevada I get funny looks.

Somewhere up there was a complaint about leaving out the [t] in button and pronouncing it as bu-en.
That is a completely valid way to say [t] in that word position, as the glottal stop (same noise made for the [t] Batman) in American English is an allophone of the /t/ phoneme. In fact, almost any /t/ occurring between two vowels will surface that way.
And now I may put my phonology lessons away.

I always find it nice and ironic when people say "pronounciation" instead of "pronunciation."

Ohhh idea for the next diversion.. "The dumbest thing I've ever heard/witnessed"

I think I may win automatically with this one:

Me -(meeting up with a friend during break) "Hey how was choir?"

Best friend in High School - "Oh my God it was horrible!"

Me - "What Happened???"

BFiHS - "So Mr. Crayferd is making me a solo.....and he's making me do it all by myself!!!"

Really.

Sharon, you fill my heart with IPA joy.

Orangutan's a member of the great ape family. It's not a monkey.

My best friend's husband cannot pronounce the word "oragutan." It always comes out as "or-gan-tu-an." You would think that this might not be much of a problem, but you'd be surprised how often this word comes up in everyday conversation. Needless to say, we usually stay away from the monkey houses when we visit the zoo...

Posted by: fattypants at June 30, 2009 11:36 PM

That's right, I'm the Federal Wildlife Marshal. See, you weren't ignored! But, seriously, it ties in with the thread. People always call everything monkeys, regardless of what they actually are. As an anthropology buff, it kinda grinds my gears.

Oooh, I remembered another of my pet hates. As someone who loves irony, I want to take heavy objects and beat them against the heads of those who use the word 'ironical'. And for the record, I'm Australian, and therefore fit into the category of 'foreigner', and therefore claim the right to put my punctuation outside of my quotation marks.

But can someone clarify for me: disoriented? or disorientated? I prefer the first, but it appears the world does not agree with me.

You are aware, though, that some of you are discussing wrong and right spelling in a language where pretty much any spelling goes. (Read A Plum In Your Mouth if you don't believe me. And yes, I know everything about a language that is not even my native one.)

I think a lot of British people say disorientated. I, however, was utterly perplexed the first time I heard someone say it. It sounds ridiculous.

These are not common at all, but my father says, "mark", instead of mart, as in "Walmark" or "K-Mark". My brother pronounces pretzels as "prent-zulls". My nephew asks for "puh-noobies" when he wants noodles.

I could fill a book with all of my mother's mispronounced words and phrases. Of course she says "li-berry" and "supposably", but she also calls the hair styling implement an "iron curler" instead of curling iron, and saying "get gone" as in, "I bought 2 dozen doughnuts, but they all got gone." She passed the latter two to me, and I'll still occasionally say them if I don't catch myself.

For some reason, growing up we called the comal (the flat cast iron griddle used to heat tortillas) a "blaca", and I still have no idea how that originated.

Oh sweet Jesus, redfeathers we are the same person. I just wrote a post (1) ranting about the use of the word "ironical", (2) quipping that, as an Australian I was free to put that punctuation mark outside the quotation marks, and (3) expressing my rage at "disorientated". Then I searched the page to see if anyone else had mentioned those words...

I'm behind you on "disorientated". There is no way that's a word.

Last one (I hope): you center on something, not center around. Because centers are points, so her argument, for example, could be centered on several merits, but she could not center her argument around opposing viewpoints.

Renumerate instead of remunerate. Easy mistake to make but no-one believes you when you correct them. Easier to let it slide.

A girl I worked with said 'pacifically' instead of 'specifically.' Set my teeth on edge every time.

"I wish I would have gone to the store."

NO. NO. NO.

I wish I HAD gone to the store. If I HAD gone to the store, I WOULD HAVE bought oranges.

THIS MAKES ME STABBY.

Runners up:

"Could care less" and "would of" make no sense, people, for all the reasons so eloquently detailed above.

"Mother-in-laws" is wrong. Wrong! It's mothers-in-law.

"Signage." I guess this is now considered a word, or so my bf tells me, but it makes no sense. Can't we just say "signs"? "Directions"? Anything? Signage just sounds dumb.

Stardust, It's late to the game but until a week ago, I worked in a coffee shop/office, called 'Expresso'

It was supposed to a be a play on words implying that we got your printing done super quickly but I'm an English Language and Lit nerd(though I'll admit my posts might not always reflect that) and It drove me absolutely fudging insane.

There are too many words that are mangled and abused by people for me to list them. Heh, though I do it myself, I'm one of those people who, when some one asks 'Can I *do something*' I always say 'I dont know, can you?'

My 13 year old kid brother is the cutest, he's incredibly smart but will always use words without fully knowing how to pronounce them, so cute.

As a non-native speaker I often encountered situations where my brain wouldn't connect what I heard and read. Eventually, I would connect the 2 but under stress, shit happens. This led to one of the most embarassing moments in my life and it involved me, my favourite college lit professor, Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians and my final exam in Modern British Literature. I knew I was supposed to say kernel but instead said kolonel.
oh the shame!

I in my purely idiotic dedication to speaking shit started referring to manslaughter as mans laughter. Needless to say this act of stupidity and many others are the reasons I will never make it out of law school.

I also for years had a problem with hyperbole preferring to say it as hyper bowl it just had more logic in my head as that.

I hear ya, jM... for years growing up, flipped back and forth between proper plural (American) "the chairS" or "the children" vs "da chair dem" or "da chil' dem".

And "banal" always gets me. Have to think about it before saying it.

Sharon - someone must have spell checked your version. I know for sure I've read the word 'disorientated' in one of my Harry Potter books. Which is probably the reason I asked the question, actually. Because surely JK didn't get it wrong?

Oh, and Mrcreosote: I did not know that. Thanks for the enlightenment. But I can still scream at people for saying 'fort' when referring to music, right? Dipshits.

Late to the game....
Cannot stand: eCspecially instead of especially and eC cetra instead of et cetra.
Had only ever read the word macabre. Ha, that was a fun one to say.

Just thought of another grammatical sin that my boss commits on a daily basis.

"Ex-pecially" instead of "especially". My eyes bleed.

I'm also not a fan of crowns. I prefer to color with crayons, thanks.

Clarity,

I am also guilty of having measured weight in "labs"

On Pittsburghese, ugh! The following:

worsh instead of wash
horness instead of harness
arn instead of iron
crick instead of creek

My parents have mild Pittbsurghese, I managed to escape with only a couple words :

gumband for rubber band. (my grandmother calls they rubbers. oy)
slippy instead of slippERy

Though thats a (regional?) British pronunciation as well, so I don't feel so bad

It isn't just the Brit, the Australian or the South African who writes Aluminium and pronounces it with two Is- most of the English-speaking world does. The IUPAC spelling is Aluminium, making this the definitive spelling of the word. Growing up in India, I learnt Aluminium - I hadn't even been exposed to "Aluminum" until I came to this strange land, where people swallow their Ts and convert their Rs into a strange tongue contortion.

The closest I have come to an American R is a letter in the Tamil language - however, Tamil has two letters for R sounds, and this isn't one of them. That sound did not originally exist in the English language, and when they were trying to transliterate the name of the language Tamil, they had to use an 'l' at the end to substitute (poorly) for it.

The first time I tried reading the word "Gaol", it came out Gay-ol. The hysteric laughter of my much-older cousins soon cured me of that problem.

Re: You'uns....my ex-in-laws from Pittsburgh used it CONSTANTLY. So, I thought it was a Pittsburghism (these are the same people who told me that I, as a Hoosier and an English major, former proofreader and general anal asshole about language, had a Southern accent.

Now, however, my fiance and his family, who are from Kentucky, also use it, as well as a co-worker from New Hampshire!

The co-worker also says, "Brar" instead of "bra," "Idear" instead of "idea" and "draw-wer" instead of "drawer." We make fun of her mercilessly.

I can't even read all of these, it is making me so angry.....

most of my pet peeves aren't how people SAY it, but how they write it. However, that one (to/too, effect/affect, they're/there, your/you're) has been beaten to death.

thanks for the irritating start to my morning, guys! haha.

ACK. This one just came up. A friend of mine just said: "I'm going to bath the baby".

Not bathe the baby, not even going to give the baby a bath.

BATH THE BABY

I guess I'll go drank my coffee.

I'm right there with you on "awry." It wasn't until my senior year of college that I was corrected. I was directing my peers in a show and was expressing my concern should things go badly. I said it phonetically (as I'd always done) and was met with 36 blank stares.

What's worse is that I often used the term, "awry" correctly. I just didn't think it odd that I had no memory of ever having read it.

I also mispronounce "Suave," but only when referring to the shampoo brand.

i worked with a guy who constantly used the word "alls"

example: "alls i know is, i'm hungry"

"you'uns" in old school cleveland talk is "yous guys".

Example: "oh, yous guys shoulda seen that spshida (spider)"!

my husband pronounces supposedly "supposebly".

also- i know a girl who refuses to use caps. she says it's because she loves e.e. cummings, but really she's just lazy!

..."arbitrary". Apologies.

Somewhere up there was a complaint about leaving out the [t] in button and pronouncing it as bu-en.
That is a completely valid way to say [t] in that word position, as the glottal stop (same noise made for the [t] Batman) in American English is an allophone of the /t/ phoneme. In fact, almost any /t/ occurring between two vowels will surface that way.
And now I may put my phonology lessons away.

Posted by: Sharon at July 1, 2009 1:57 AM

Sharon, I think I love you. I was just getting ready to start slapping glottal stops around when I came across your little gem. Thank you thank you thank you. We should make sweet, beautiful, literate babies.

And the English teacher railing against coworkers' abuse of the language: it's they. "If anybody should..., it's they." Of course, the whole structure is still awkward. "They, if anybody, should...."

But ya know what gets my goad more than anything in the whole freakin' world? "Is is." Can't. Fucking. Stand. It.

"What it is, is a big mess." No, motherfucker, I'm afraid this is the part where I have to stomp on your throat. "It's a big mess."

Oh, yeah: and I used to pronounce "malfeasance" like it was a proper French word. I still think it sounds better that way.

I'm guilty of pronouncing "ornery" as "awnry". I heard and said it before I saw it in life. It stuck. :)

I also have the "awry" problem. I pronounce it correctly when talking but not when reading.

And NUKE-u-lar drives me crazy.

It's spelled NUclear because if you swap the first two letters, it becomes UNclear.

I just got off the phone with a friend who said to me, "I think I have a Herpe! A HERPE!"

I replied, "There is no such thing as a singular 'herpe'. The virus is called 'Herpes'."

I'd like to nominate myself for the friend hall of fame for being more concerned about his grammar than the fact that he may have just contracted an STD. Sorry amigo.

This is my first post, wrought with possible quotation errors, but I felt it necessary to share.

When my friends and I were cleaning out a house we were moving out of(out of which we were moving), we found our roommates Junior year paper.

Choice quotes:
point of few
so post(in place of supposed)
extra circular activates(yeah, read that again)

He got a fucking B(a high B). I am most pissed of about "so post" because I can understand(but not condone) "point of few" and the last one was just laziness with spell checker. But "so post" shows a fundamental misunderstanding of not a phrase, but a fucking word that is quite commonly used. This guy has a degree from the same university as I do...

My favorite word is mondegreen(fuck you spell checker) because it is itself a mondegreen. Look it up. Fun times...

Aluminium. Herbs. The first one has a 'mini' in it, and the second one starts with an audible 'h'. hhhhhherbs. The former makes me yell at the tv, and the latter gives me the complete shits. Urbs. Urbal. Gnah.
And in case it matters, I'm from South Africa.

ahamos, yes. YES. "The thing is, is that..." NO. YOU ALREADY HAVE AN 'IS'. You only need one verb, dangit! This mangling, unfortunately, has really stuck as of late; I've even heard our esteemed President use it. Stop, America! Just say "The thing is..." and then state your issue.

Another thing that massively peeves me is the misuse of 'comprise'. Okay, world, here it is, once and for all: parts compose the whole, and the whole comprises the parts (or, alternately, consists of the parts). As in, the high school choir comprises sopranos, altos, tenors, and basses; the cookies comprise flour, sugar, egg, and chocolate chips; and so on. It is never, I repeat NEVER, 'comprised of'. Composed of, consists of, but never comprised of. I have heard English professors, writers, and even the narrator on The Universe say 'comprised of' and it drives me completely 'round the bend.

The former barista in me weeps with joy that so many people are similarly irked by 'expresso'. Also, I worked at a chocolate shop for a while, and you wouldn't believe the amount of "Grand Mariner"s and "Cog-nack"s I heard.

As you can tell from this post, I count myself as one of the game-changers trying desperately to correct the institution of always putting the punctuation inside the quotation marks. I know it's supposedly correct, but sometimes the whole sentence isn't a quotation! Thus, the sentence-ending mechanism should be outside the quotation marks! It's just like in math, with parentheses. The parentheses only contain the terms to which they actually apply. As a copy editor, I try to subversively change this on corporate documents as much as possible. This will be my mark on the world; this, and 'comprise'.

People are writing 'loose' for 'lose' more and more often. And 'to' for 'too'. "I had to much coffee." It burns.

Another word that nearly everyone misuses is 'nonplussed'. It actually means the complete opposite of what everyone thinks: it means you could not be more awed. Instead, everyone uses it to describe someone not being impressed, or meh.

When I was a kid, I read 'translucent' as 'trans-succulent' and went around saying that until my dad corrected me. He was pretty enamored of my mistake, though, and agreed that 'trans-succulent' was much more fun to say.

Ok, I have another one. I really cringe when, while standing in line, I suddenly hear, " I can help who's next!",from the cashier.

Also, to those that are complaining about the aluminum/aluminium thing....it depends on where you live. In North America it's spelled "aluminum". Elsewhere it's spelled "aluminium", so quit yer bitchin'.

I love the regional pronunciations too. Where I live (just north of Boston):

Craig = Creg
Aunt = Ahnt (I hate Ant...yuck)
Caught and cot sound the same
Button and mountain don't have t's

When I was living in the UK I was made fun of mercilessly by my British friends for saying things like "budder" and "dirdy" rather than "butter" and "dirty". Good times.

Misled. When I was a kid I thought it was 'my-zeld.' And ginger - I thought it had hard 'g's.
I know people who say 'libary' not 'library', and I hear mispronunciations and words being misused in public every day. It always makes me wince the wince of a pained grammar nazi.

'Nu-cu-lar' annoys the fuck of out me, too. Especially when politicians use it.
And 'must of' and 'bored of' bring out my inner grumpy old lady. So does 'obeast'. Seriously? Not even a word. Fuck off.

Kate,

Any red dog in your driveway? Most people use gravel now, I suppose.

, (Canonsburg)

The word I mispronounced for years--JEWELRY. I pronounced it for years as Jew-ry. But at least I don't say "nu-cu-lar".

'Momentarily'. As in 'we will be pre-boarding momentarily'.
What the hell is wrong with the word 'soon', for God's sake? Gah!

My husband offends me the following:

"You know what I should have did?"

He also says lar-nyx, rather than larynx. How I've managed not to slap him these many years, I'll never know.

Dear Whorish Mouth,

Crayons are great for coloring. But do you pronounce it Cray-on, or Cran? My fiance and I have been debating this for years. I didn't know "cran" was weird until he pointed it out, but I think it may be a regional thing.

One of the formative events of my youth was reading aloud from the advent book and inviting my family to sing a hymen.

Which is not remotely the same thing as a hymn.

I've yet to live it down.

ahamos and kelsey,
I'm glad someone likes my little IPA lecture! One of the weirdest semesters was when I was learning the IPA. My girlfriend would come home every day to find me saying random vowels and trying to produce non-native consonants. She thought I was completely crazy.
Not as bad as when I was trying to figure out what the hell a speaker was doing to the first vowel in "fever." That thing was like the triphthong of hell.

It's probably been said, but I'll add "segue". It is not pronounced "se-goo" like my office's IT guy thinks it is, but more like "saygway".
This word had the reverse affect on me, I knew how to say it, but could not spell it until my second year of university.

For some strange reason, I ALWAYS think "vag" (rhymes with "bag," ha) when I read the word "vague."

Same goes for the word "plague."

I have met at least a couple of people who refer to the clitoris as "Cli-TOR-us". Like it's a dinosaur.

Dear Whorish Mouth,

Damn.

danaeee
OH MY GOD I love Lionel Shriver.
The first book I ever read by her, Checker and the Dereilleurs, blew my mind (I was 12).
Between that, and Kevin, and Female of the Species . . . she is so great.
And NO ONE I know has ever heard of her. It hurts my heart.
You just made my fucking day.

OMG I just remembered one that is driving me batshit insane:

impact for affect.

As in "how does that impact the curriculum?"

You mean how does it slam into the curriculum or how does it AFFECT the curriculum? AFFECT FUCKING AFFECT IS WHAT YOU MEAN.

People use goddamned impact for everything now.

A sentence no one on this thread wants to hear said in public:

Things went awry when the realtor's crayon jewelry tripped the alarm at the nuclear physics library and her caramel espresso impacted the floor.

Sharon - disorientate is the British form, to those outside America there is no such word as 'disorient'

The Harry Potter books were edited into American spellings, so actually JK didn't write it, perhaps the audio book was a reading of the original

Likewise with aluminium/aluminum - not mispronunciations, they're spelt differently - in fact aluminum has a red spellcheck line under it as I write it

One that really gets me is Americans saying 'wada' instead of 'water'

bedraggled, for years read it as bed-raggled. Redolent- RE-dolent not RED-olent Marcel Proust, rhymes with Faust, try picking up English majors with that one...

ThirdVentureBrother
That bonus "S" is one of my biggest peeves! I swear, it makes me see red.
Girl with Curious Hair
I hear "supposably" on a regular basis. It is good to know that I am not the only one.

Somewhere I picked up the word "chagrin" and really thought it was a great word. I started using it all the time. One day I'm on the phone with a friend of mine, and he asks me to spell the word. He had no idea what the hell I was saying. It was so bad I can't even remember how I was trying to say it.
Missouri
How is this one pronounced? Is it miz-er-i? or miz-er-a? I've heard it both ways.
other annoyances:
wutter instead of water
melk instead of milk
irregarless
ain't
ax me a question
pacificly
funner
people who abbreviate gram as a capital G or gm
my teacher having misspelled words on her power point. Try using the spell check, please!

When I was a senior in high school it was finally pointed out to me that there is a "g" in background and a second "r" in surprise. I'd like to thank my local school system for letting me get as far as I did with those words.

I know it was way, way up there in the earlier comments, but I'd still like to respond to whoever said they couldnt get the hang of "schadenfreude": It's pronounced like Freud, the psychiatrist/psychoanalist.

And as a German, it makes my eyes/ears bleed whenever I see someone in an English context use the word "verklempt", which is a really, really bastardized version of "verklemmt". And it doesn't even have the same meaning!

On a random note: One of the the most difficult words to pronounce/spell in German is "Feuilleton" (probably since it's actually French). You can always get people with that one.

I'm late to the game, but I agree with all of the above, and can offer only one addition: Karoake is pronounced kar-OH-kay. It's NOT KARIOKEY! Read the word and there's no way you can pronounce it that way!