Pajiba

Mrs. Riles always says li-bary, and I can't get her to stop!

Me? I'm perfect. Nothing to see here. Keep moving.

So are you saying I should have been embarassed when I told my principal in 5th grade that I was positive my teacher was "impotent" when I meant "incompetent". Well damn.

realtor

it is real-tor (as in real estate)

not real-la-tor

"awry" was pronounced: a-rye. I'd always pronounced it to rhyme with "bawdry."

Oh, FUCK ME.

When I was a kid, I read "A Little Princess" and thought the father's name ("Ralph") was "Rah-luff." I read it that way for YEARS before being called out in class. Of course, there's no such name as "Rah-luff," but it never in a million years occurred to me that Captain Crewe would be called "Ralph."

I got a good one. Possibly offensive.

I grew up in Texas and went through a phase with my friends where we loved to go knock on people's doors and run away. Hilarious right? We called it "Nicker Knocking" or so I thought. I figured it was a singsongy thing: nick nock, like tick tock...

Yeah, actually, it was "Nigger Knocking." I was horrified when corrected and never said it or did it again.

Fuckin' Texas...

I once read epitome outloud in class to rhyme with epi-tone. My father corrected me a few years ago that to be anonymous was anonymity not animosity. And it took a teacher in the 9th grade to finally teach me that maybe wasn't spelled mabye.

Here's a toss-up: I've always said (accurately, I would argue) "all of a sudden." But I know a few people -- in the south, so maybe this is a geography thing -- who say "all of the sudden."

I used to say "EH-VA-PORT" instead of "evaporate."

PEN-E-LOPE (like cantaloupe) instead of "Penelope."

And when I was a child, "seben" instead of "seven."

Is it "case IN point" or "case AND point"?

And ever since Rhianna, I've caught myself writing "umberella" rather than "umbrella".

Expresso. That is just unacceptable for adults to utter.

For years, my "albeit" rhymed with "bite."

I guess I really only read it for years without ever hearing it used in spoken language.

Me love grammar. Me no pronouncy words wrong.

3 commonly mispronounced words that make thejodester stabby: jewelry, nuclear, drowned. Say 'drownded,' 'jewlerry,' or 'nucular'. I dare you.

I used to date this guy who ALWAYS pronounced moot as "mute". AAAAARRRGGGHHH! Drove me crazy! I finally corrected him and he called me ignorant. I dumped him and vowed to only date intelligent men.

Chasm = K'azm not CH'azm

also, Mr Stella and his whole family used to say How dare her/him! Drove me up a fuckin' wall until I actually mapped out graphically why that turn of phrase made no sense. Now Mr Stella will be heard to say, "How dare h--she!"

Also, I know people who interchange these:

They blew me out (instead of blew me off)

They narked me off (instead of narked me out)

Drives me insane.

OK, I don't think I'm mangling anything, but my mom drives me nuts because she refers to parmesan cheese as "parmesian" and oxygen "ockshagen."

http://www.cracked.com/article_15664_9-words-that-dont-mean-what-you-think.html

Check out cracked.com's list of Words That Don't Mean What You Think. I myself have been guilty of these!!!

I still remember pronouncing "wanton" like "won ton" in school. I'd read it in books but never heard it pronounced, and I assumed it sounded like the soup, even though I knew the meaning was completely different.

This is one of the hazards of being an advanced reader as a child, and as a result I have long found the dictionary to be at least as useful for pronunciation help as it is for spellings.

I thought that jicama was pronounced with a hard J like in my name until a few years ago.

I didn't fully grasp the difference between its and it's until freshman year of college (oh the horror).

I saw a lot of funny stuff while working in the Writing Center in college...for instance, one girl thought that interview was two words. Lordy.

When the whole pilates craze first came about I worked in a bookstore. I read up on the subject and knew quite a bit about it. I however was pronouncing it "plate-lets" like the stuff in your blood. I have no idea why. But one day I was helping a customer and they corrected me as I was giving an in depth speech about the subject. Talk about embarrassing.

beckyloo... that's not just a Texas game...

I get really angry about using an apostrophe to make a plural. Squeegees, not squeegee's, people!

Also, don't capitalize nouns; we don't speak German.

Oh, and "is" should be capitalized in titles. I know it's only a two-letter word, but it's a verb, I swear.

Mr. Skegg pronounces orNAments, orDAments. I only noticed when he pronounced it correctly and corrected himself "orDAments". Turns out his parents say it too. He was adamant.

I've never really had pronunciation problems, I read a lot and have a good ear for linguistics. Mischevious is tricky. Not even sure I spelled it right...

My brother is a freaking goldmine of mispronunciation though. He once read "chaperones" as "cheaper ones"

I almost made my mother drown in the pool from laughter when I pronounced "hernia" Her-EE-Na. I was 9, I'd only seen the word in the damn Garfield comics!

As an ashamed Romance Novel addict, I admit I have no idea how to pronounce "cravat". I only know it's something that gets ripped off the dude right before go-time. And "clandestine" is one I just heard spoken a few years back and thought OH! THAT'S how you say that fricking word. Now if I figure out cravat, I can read about a hot clandestine encounter and feel all grammer-ific.

There's a couple of words that my wife consistently butchers: she says "supposively" instead of supposedly, and almost always uses the word "scald" when she means scold. I still halfheartedly try to correct her when one of these comes up in conversation, but by now it's generally for naught.

A particular friend of mine also loves to use the word "premise" in place of preface. As in: "Let me premise this story by saying..." I've corrected her, at length, at least thrice now.

Me? I'm with Riles. Grammatically perfect.

I always keep hearing different pronunciations for the word "impugn" so I'm still not clear on how it is to be pronounced. So I just avoid ever saying it. Thank God I don't argue in court.

Unfortunately, I mispronounced the word "facade" to rhyme with arcade, instead of the correct "fuh-sahd" Although, I would hold that any word that is part-and-parcel stolen from another language (like French) can be pronounced however we as a nation decide it should be pronounced. In my book, "quesadilla" rhymes with armadillo!

Until my late 20's I thought "all intents and purposes" was "all intensive purposes." As a child, I had a really hard time with "ask" instead of "aks." My mom described that I would want to "ask her" something instead of "axe her" something, which finally made it clear.

On a related note, to this day, I CAN NOT say words like roar, drawer, etc. I can not have a friend named Rory, it would be too embarrasing.

And in reviewing my comment. I did have to correct the order of my ." from ".

I'm a word- and lyric-Nazi (as Mr. Babe will attest!) and a big time reader, but I always thought "segue" was pronounced "seeg" instead of "segway." The horror!

I also have two young kids, and my daughter, at 5 1/2, still says, rather hilariously, "mocun retroll" for remote control. So, of course, the mister and I do too;-)

A big pet peeve is inch and foot marks - they're straight up and down, people - used for apostrophes and quotation marks, which are curved. You can't always control it when writing online, but in print, pleeeeeease!

I had several embarrassing mispronunciation incidents growing up. My vocabulary was well ahead of my age because I read so much, but I never heard the words pronounced. The two biggest ones: I used to pronounce 'parenthesis' as parent-thesis until I was in middle school. Also, I always pronounced 'Arkansas' Ark-Kansas. My mother knew I was mangling the pronunciations, but she never bothered correcting me because she thought it was cute. I usually ended up having the ignorance knocked out of me in a classroom with 20 other kids instead of in the privacy of my own home. Thanks, Mom.

oh, i love this! until i was in college, i thought the french word "voila" was phonetic - i always said VOY-lah. It was years later i found out "wah-LAH" was the same thing. i stopped cringing about it years ago.

I find it annoying what folks spell "rapport" "rappore". (Was that's period supposed to go inside the quote? ;-)

And Beckyloo don't feel bad: My grandad who fought in WWII used to call all Asians "Japs" and when I used this term with an Asian person they rightfully cussed me out.

Phat - I had a similar gaffe with "impotent," only I meant to say "impudent." And I was referring to my father. Yikes!

In the second grade, I also described the Von Trapp children's curtain outfits as "kinky," when what I really meant was "quirky." Which left my parents very confused as to which version, exactly, of "The Sound of Music" I had just seen.

My brother is a freaking goldmine of mispronunciation though. He once read "chaperones" as "cheaper ones"

Hee hee. When I was a freshman in college I had to give a group presentation, and during her segment one girl in my group kept pronouncing "organism" as "orgasm." The topic? Was euthanasia. That was a great day.

Alright, peeps. I grew up in some backwards-ass towns throughout Texas and Oklahoma and I can add a few that piss me off. Many of these come directly from my in-laws, interestingly enough...

I have heard the phrase "taken for granted" pronounced "taken for GRANITE" over and over and over again. Infuriating.

I constantly see in people's writing the phrase "must of" instead of "must have," as in "that must of been hard for you to deal with."

I don't know where this came from, but I hear people use the phrase "of a morning" a ton. People will say things like "sometimes I like to go walking of a morning." *works with evening too ("sometimes the deer come out on that field of an evening")

My mom pronounces the word "egg" like "ague" and somehow inserts a "g" into "onion" so that it comes out sounding like "ung-yun."

I have a plethora of these but these are the only ones springing into my cranium at the moment. I'm sure more will sprout up as the afternoon wears on. Good diversion.

Once in middle school I was reading aloud and I pronounced the word "heaven" like HEEV-IN. I don't think anybody corrected me, but I knew I looked like an A-hole. I felt like a heathen for not knowing how to pronounce heaven, but at least I can pronounce heathen.

Also, once I was taking an exam and as I was proofreading one of my essay question answers I found that I had written "bird defects" instead of "birth defects," which kind of makes me think of the chicken lady.

Brie, I also used to think that "Penelope" was pronounced like "cantaloupe." And I wasn't all that sure about "Hermione" when I first read Harry Potter, either. (Guess you can tell I'm not Greek.)

I made my Mom laugh out loud the first time I said the word chameleon -- I'd only ever read it, so of course I pronounced it cha-meleon, with a "ch" sound as in "Charlie."

lilianna28: Cravat is pronounced cruh-VAT. "Cruh" as in crush, and "vat" as in a vat of wine, which I find generally accompanies a bodice-ripper quite well.

For YEARS I thought hyperbole was pronounced hyper-bowl, like Super Bowl. And no one could convince me when I was in grade 1 that it wasn't pronounced TRY-annosaurus Rex, rather than tyrannosaurus.

Ooh, I forgot to add, one thing that drives me crazy is "sanGwhich" instead of "sandwhich." I never did that, but several of my friends do and I always cringe!

When I first read pedestrian I read it as pedestranian, then I never bothered to read the full word through again so I never noticed until I was in a position to suggest we cross the road at the next pedestranian crossing.
Re its and it's it took me ages to figure this out. But I think the usage is wrong. I mean the "book of Chris" is "Chris's book", but the "look of it" is "its look". If it's genitive in both cases why does "its" NOT have an apostrophe?

I'm from southern Indiana, where apparently we mispronounce a lot of things, and a lot of my vocabulary growing up came from books, so I often didn't know how things were supposed to be pronounced, so I have a lot of these, but my biggest ones would be:
crick. I will never be able to say creek, ever. Sometimes the i sound creeps into other double ee words too. also, the so finds it absolutely hilarious that I call those big orange squashes 'punkins.'
for which, in revenge, I'm going to reveal his worst one, because even crick doesn't come close: One day we drove by some apartment buildings and he looked at one of the signs and exclaimed "I just realized B-L-D-G means building!" apparently, when he was a kid living in an apartment with his dad he thought the 'bldg' listed on his address was an actual word, so for years when people asked for his address, he'd tell them quail run apartments, blodg 12, apartment whatever. And nobody ever corrected him.

I still remember pronouncing "wanton" like "won ton" in school. I'd read it in books but never heard it pronounced, and I assumed it sounded like the soup, even though I knew the meaning was completely different.

Holy shit, I did this, too. I did this so much that my best friend and I have an ongoing joke now about ordering wanton soup. That soup! It just doesn't know how to behave!

Also, for years I thought my family's prayer before dinner started with "Call more, Jesus," and not "Come, Lord Jesus." I guess I just thought we were beseeching the Christ to pick up the phone once in a while...

macabre

I still can't pronounce that damn word correctly

and grammer and I have never gotten along, so we won't even go there

Pet Peeve: people would say "idea-r"...there is no "r" in idea people!! drives me nuts!

i never actually said it out loud, but until i was about 22, i thought the word "paradigm" was pronounced "para-diggum". oh my that's still so embarrasing.

Chimney, pronounced by some as "chim-a-ley", and spaghetti, "pu-sketti".

It's one thing when it's a little kid saying either of these; I'm okay with that. However, I have heard these two mispronunciations uttered from the mouths of adults. Seriously?

Oh, yeah. Living in the south, I hear "warsh" (as in "I need to warsh my hands") a lot, too.

ENHHH!!

I prounounced crayon as "crown." My father finally decided that he didn't want his daughter to sound like she had a speech impediment, so whenever I mispronounced the word, he would take said colorful writing tools away from me for a day and in the pocess of taking them away would say "This is red CRAY-ON, this is an orange CRAY-on, this is a blue CRAY-ON," etc etc.

In other news, I now hate art.

OH, I also had my pronunciation of Isabel Allende's name corrected by a coworker once. THAT was super embarrassing. I pronounced the double-L in her last name (in my defense I took French in school, and not Spanish).

Oh, beckyloo, I feel your pain. To this day, I can't do "Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Moe," since I realized that "tigger" was almost certainly just a pc gloss on the original...

God, this thread has seriously caused me to delurk...here's another peeve. This is a Britishism, and so technically not incorrect, but drives me nuts. My Scottish husband denotes companies as plural instead of singular. For instance, I'd say "Apple makes great computers"...the company is a singular entity. He'd say "Apple MAKE great computers." I've noticed it in other British writing and speaking, but I have to resist the urge to correct him EVERY time! How can ONE company be a plural??

He says "aluminium" for aluminum as well...with a hot accent, so I try to cut him some slack.

Yikes! Sorry for the bolding!

While on a "professional" radio station I pronounced "Indicted" In-dick-ted instead of In-di-ted.

I was 2 yeas out of college and had an English minor. Not to mention the tens of people who heard me say it.

I felt like such a dick.

My freshman roommate always used to say "ironical". It drove me up a wall....

At least once a day when I'm on this site, I myself say Pajiba out loud correctly, because I still think of it in my head as pah-jee-bah as I first read it long ago.

Ok, this is really embarrassing, but not until a few years (when I started taking French) did I connect the spoken and the written word "rendezvous." I thought they were two different words that happened to have the same meaning. Whenever I pronounced it in my head, I would spell it like it sounded - wrendezzvuss. And whenever I heard it, I never really thought about how it was spelled - I just absently assumed it would be spelled something like "rondayvu (oh god, this is so embarrassing). I mean, if I had actively thought about it, I would have made the connection, but it just never occurred to me. Thank god I never had to spell it out on anything.

I used to work with a girl who said 'ar-chives' instead of 'archives' with the hard 'c.' She worked on a journal with the word in the title and said it wrong repeatedly in conversations with the editor.

There was much debate about whether someone should correct her but, since it was much more fun for everyone else if she continued to mispronounce it, we never did. Freaking hilarious.

Is that wrong?

really young: pronouced the 's' in island

slightly older: rendezvous - pronounced every consonant, ren-dezz-vuss

embarassingly older: acquiesce - pronounced it as aqueeze

And it took me until the 4th Harry Potter book to stop calling Hermione Her-mee-own

angelbabe: I believe aluminium is just the British way of saying aluminum. I've noticed it in places where you wouldn't expect mistakes like that, like TV shows and books. Me, I kinda wish it would catch on over here. It's a lot more fun to say "aluminium!" than plain old "aluminum."

Ooooh and my dearly departed paternal Grandmother used to pronounce "jalepeno" like "japaleeno," she called cartoons "laminated," and she called her gazebo a "gabeezo." Silly grandma.

I forgot to mention the one that makes me crazy, another from my husband and his parents.

It's not should OF or could OF, it's have people! HAVE! Should HAVE!

I can see how they get it from hearing the contraction but his mother has a Master's for chrissakes.

I love my grandmother dearly, but instead of "mozzerella", she says "mootsarella". And y'know the restaurant "Fazolli's"? She says "Ferjolies".

She's getting better, but I still feel bad about slapping her when she slips.

My friend Amiee once tried to order "colonal" strips from KFC once, she kept insisting it was pronounced co-la-nal, until the 16 year old employee asked is she meant "kernel" strips. Good times.

Ok, thank god he doesn't read this, but:

My hubs says "mortified" when he really means terrified.

And when I was in grade school, I thought that being a virgin meant you had never been kissed. So, at age 11, this little boy gave me a kiss, and I proclaimed to my entire class that I was no longer a virgin. And I couldn't understand why everyone was so horrified. Heee!

staramour: Until my late 20's I thought "all intents and purposes" was "all intensive purposes."

What? It's not? Well, chalk me up for not learning that until my late 40's. Thanks.

When my husband was 5, he ran into the house and told his mother, "My independence is hurting me." He couldn't understand why she laughed her butt off.

And I still pronounce Yosemite YOS-uh-mite. It's yoh-SEM-mit-tee, but I can't get it out of my head.

Add me to the list of those who thought Penelope rhymed with canteloupe, and Pilates is pronounced like the guy who ordered Jesus' death.

Two of the biggest ones when I was a kid were lick-war instead of "liquor" and vay-lid isntead of "valid". I am told that I taught myself to read when I was four (?!) and didn't learn through phonics, so mispronunciations abound. For this reason, I can't really be judgmental of mispronunications, can I? Okay, maybe in extreme cases of pure idiocy...like the girl in my junior year Health class who pronounced "interpreter" as enter-pret-er.

and of course as soon as I push post I think of 20 more. I once asked my mom if we could make 'hors devores,' and I tend to add an extra syllable to synonym to make it synononym (which I think flows better anyway).

My mom almost died when I said to her that I'd read a great tip in the paper that day, in the column "Hints from Heloise," which I pronounced "Hints from Helloyce" instead of the correct "Hints from Hell-Louise."

Not long after I said I'd like to name a daughter "Chlow" (soft "ch," one syllable). Again laughing hysterically, she informed me that the name was pronounced "Klo-ee." I said, "Ooh, that's even prettier!"

Years later and now a mother, I cannot name a kid Chloe, as my mom would call her "Chlow" all her life.

ugh, my husband and his whole family can't seem to wrap their lips around the word bagel. It's BAYGUL not BAGGLE.
Every time they offer me a BAGGLE, it takes me a half beat to figure out what the hell they are talking about. And even when I do, I must decline as they buy them at the grocery store. Everyone knows that is just wrong.

When I was younger I used to think that when your stomach hurt it was called a "tummy egg" as opposed to a "tummy ache." I'm from NJ, so my pronunciations on most words are a bit off, but in this case, for some reason, I sincerely thought it was a tummy egg. At my sister's 10th birthday, my 8 year old self yelled out to my mom (in front of all of my sisters older and cooler friends no less) "mommy I have a tummy egg." I was promptly corrected and have not made the mistake since.

I mispronounced chorizo sausage (korizo) to many a confused butcher before figuring out that the 'ch' is actually pronounced. In my defense I never had cause to utter this word until spending three months in Italy where it would have been pronounced with a hard C. Lo and behold the Spanish have different pronunciation rules than the Italians. Go figure.

i remember being eight and my reading book for school containing the word 'picturesque'...for aaages I was pronouncing it 'picture-skyoo'. same goes for 'grot-es-kyoo'.

I'm sick of hearing "Iraq" pronounced as if it were something from Apple.
I stand shamefully corrected on "awry" and "albeit", I had no idea how wrong I was about those. I used to have a big confusion about "direction", then again I blame musicians for that. Finally, for a long time I was pretty damn sure it was "Pa-jee-ba".
But as a reader from the lower half of the world, I'm not putting my dear commas inside those quotation marks.

Oh! Oh! One more! One of my pet peeves is when people use "impact" as a verb, as in "the lobotomy impacted his ability to use the word 'impat' properly in a sentence".
That is all.

ALSO - my third grade teacher used to mispronounce the word coupon and it would annoy the hell out of me. She'd say it like CUE-pon. AH. It's not a precursor to a pickle, it's a discount.

sarahbot: That's so wierd, I've always heard "cravat" pronounced "cra-VAHT," with the last syllable rhyming with "yacht," not "vat." Perhaps this is a Canadian thing?

Mattfactor:

The phrase "of an evening" is a direct translation of how one would say it if they were speaking in old Irish (or Scottish). There are also similar variations in French and Italian. Therefore, it's not actually incorrect, it's an appropriate phrase that has become embedded in the language over generations (assuming the first generaion was translating from its native tongue). Another example would be that irish and British people say "I went to hospital" not "I went to the hospital" because the way one would say that in the original Celtic languages would not have had the equivalent of a "the".

But moving on...
I have a friend who says "that's one to save for prosperity" and refuses to be corrected.
Mr. PaddyDog has a co-worker who always says "they're going to throw me over the bus" (instead of under) which is made funnier by the fact that he's quite a large gentleman.

And worst of all, just this week, in my forties, I found out (courtesy of the never-ending primary) that Wilkes-Barre, PA is prnounced "Willsberry" not Wilks (like Milks) Bar.

I totally did the Pajiba (pajeeba) thing for the first couple of weeks like many of you probably did. Just seemed to make sense to me. I was truly embarrassed at the age of effing 18 that genre was not pronounced Jen-Er. How the hell did that one slip by. Also when I was 4 I used to pronounce hospital, hopistal. Yeah, that's how cute I was.

I can't believe I missed this one the first time around - it's the biggest offender of my whole life and it comes from the mouths of my in-laws on a regular basis...

They say the word "retch" instead of "reach." As in, "I retched down there to pick up a hammer and blah blah blah."

My brother-in-law's answering machine message actually used to say (I swear to God I'm not kidding) - "hello, you have retched the home of ... and ..., leave us a message..."

Wow.

"alls i know."
i repeat it back to my friend who says this all the time hoping she'll realize i'm mocking her.

I always used to say "pique" like as "pick" until a guy I like corrected me that it was "peek" and I felt like an idiot.
And my sister used to always mangle the saying "Hindsight is 20/20" she would always say "Hindsight is 100%" Ha ha. We still make fun of her for that.
Also what drives me crazy is I work in insurance and I constantly get accident descriptions that say: "The person has sever pain to the left hand. Diagnosis sever left hand pain." So I'm like they have a severed left hand? But no it's SEVERE! Amazing what an "e" can do.

I think all of us who read the Harry Potter books in America had a fun time with Hermione's name. I went from thinking Her-mee-ohn to thinking Her-mee-oh-nee to finally hearing Her-my-oh-nee in the films.

Nu-cue-lar drives me nuts. My roommate says it all the time and he's otherwise fairly intelligent.

You can't center around something. You can center on something, but you can't center around something. I say "vast majority" a lot even though I realize it's pretty redundant. "Revert back" is redundant, too, but I use it all the time.

And I remember when I was four or five at preschool, a book said "Voila!" in it. I knew it was French and I knew how to pronounce it. The teacher reading the book did not. She came to it and looked puzzled, then said, "VOY-LAH!"

Oh, and thanks PaddyDog for the heads-up regarding "of an evening." I never knew that and it now makes the phrase quite enjoyable.

College in Western Pennsylvania made me hate the following....

Usually, houses need TO BE painted. Cars need TO BE washed. Shoes need TO BE tied.

Nope...not in fucking Pennsyltucky they don't.

{why they have a southern twang in western PA is beyond me but...in a southern twang}
My house needs painted. My car needs washed. My shoes need tied.

Dumb motherfuckers! Looks to me like your brain needs taught! Or maybe just your ass needs kicked?

I swear...I've never wanted to beat the shit out of an entire region of people before. Can you possibly sound any dumber. Talking to these people gave me a fucking twitch in my left eye to no end. This is why we decided to dress up as zombies at 3am and wonder around wal mart scaring the locals. Or do a fake hanging in front of our school using a well-hidden repelling harness and a shotgun squib in the chest for effect. i swear, these people were only fun when we were fuckin with 'em or when they thought they were bein' vigilantes.

In the words of Casey McCall: "Remember please, if you are going out on a date and you want to impress someone, it's a 'dog eat dog world,' not a 'doggy dog world.'"

All the voracious readers! Did anyone else pronounce "gist" with a hard g like goose?

forgive me if someone already said this,
but it greatly bothers me when people say:
"for all intensive purposes" instead of
"for all intents and purposes"

Of course manglings are much easier in a foreign language, I used to think 'zerstorrt' (spelling?) meant bombed because all churches in Germany (that I've seen in the ruhrgebiet) have plaques saying they were 'zerstorrt' in the war but rebuilt. Turns out it just means destroyed. I figured that word out when I saw it on a paper shredder.

Oh, I forgot the best one. When my former landlord was 15, he spent the summer with a family in Orgeon who let him drive for the first time around their farm. They had a tractor and a Volvo. At his wedding, his mother read out a letter she had kept from him where he wrote "Mrs. Stephens is really great. She lets me fool around in her vulva whenever I want."

There is a laundromat in my home town named "The Warsh House." no joke.

I still cringe in embarrassment when I think of passing on a witty t-shirt-ism as a 17 year old waitress (to my manager no less). Explaining my laughter, I referred to the mention of a "vast-eh-commie".

Ah the joys of youth.

In related pet-peevitude, why oh why can't people stop with excessive apostrophe use?

My dad and I still get a laugh at saying 'dehydrenate' instead of 'dehydrate' and 'sciences' instead of 'sinuses', two words that my mom always pronounced wrong despite how many times we told her.
I'd give anything to hear her mis-pronounce those words again.

As far as I'm concerned it's Pa-jee-ba. Can't say Pa-jai-ba, as I really don't like the word va-gina, so I won't say it if I can help it.

Wilks (like Milks) Bar

That's SUCH a common mispronunciation Paddy :) And I've done it to other PA towns myself, I still to this day want to pronounce Lancaster as Lan-(as in can)-caster.

oh, since Paddy brought up town pronounciations....Native American town names abound in New England, and the first time I saw a sign for Haverhill Mass a few years ago, I prounouced it phonetically, only to be told by the Boy that it is Hay-vrill, and that if I said it my way in town I would definetly be beaten to a pulp

to this day if I am in the mood to annoy him I just repeat Have-er-hill a few times and it does the trick

I can't beleive that no one mentioned "fustrated" instead of "frustrated" IT FRUSTRATED THE HELL OUT OF ME! GOD!

Oh...and crown vs. crayon. First person that tells me both of those words sound the same gets stabbed in the neck with my car keys.

Look in the fuckin' dictionary....cray-on. Two syllables ya stupic dick nose!

I think all of us who read the Harry Potter books in America had a fun time with Hermione's name. I went from thinking Her-mee-ohn to thinking Her-mee-oh-nee to finally hearing Her-my-oh-nee in the films.

My brother and I actually got in a massive argument over this. I have been obsessed with Greek mythology since the sixth grade, so I had the correct pronunciation, but he championed "Herm-oh-nine".

When I stopped giggling we spent more than an hour arguing about it, and my dad even hopped in on my side. He had to relent when the movie finally came out.

It was virtually impossible to discuss the books with him when he kept calling her that...

1) I could care less... then corrected to I couldn't care les... made so much more sense...

2) people often mistake Jealousy and Envy... Jealousy is afraid of losing something you already have, envy is wanting something someone else has... Stop saying you're jealous of that guys boyfriend/girlfriend, it drives me nuts...

Anyone else think in grade school that Martin Luther was way punk for nailing feces to the door?

Also, I hate it when people say "drawling" in stead of "drawing." I go to art school and this still fucking happens. There is no department dedicated to Painting and Drawling, dumbshits.

My house needs painted. My car needs washed. My shoes need tied.

[whimpers]

That makes my hair hurt.

I love this diversion! My friends and I talk about this all the time...self-declared word snobs. My pet peeves: supposably, irregardless and when people say, "You welcome," instead of YOU'RE...it drives me crazy.

For the longest time I thought ethereal was pronounced etha-real. Then one day it clicked...I'm glad I never said it out loud.

Some others that I have heard: wallermelon - watermelon, obeast - obese, flustrated - frustrated, dramastic - dramatic (or drastic, who knows), old timers disease - Alzheimer disease. Gotta love it.

I mispronounce crayon and say "crown." My mom always mispronounces attitude. She says "addy-tude." Whenever I got in trouble and she tried to yell at me about my bad "addy-tude" I would interrupt and correct her. It didn't really help me any, but I just couldn't resist.

in the words of Natalie Hurley: "So help me, I thought it was a doggy dog world..."

HOLY SHIT I just remembered a great one...

My parents' neighbor, God bless her, has a thousand malapropisms (hammer-er instead of hamburger), but by far the best one was when she kept describing something as taking place "rectal-actively." I almost choked to death on my hammer-er.

As a kid reading 'Anne of Green Gables,' I could not be convinced that "beaux" wasn't pronounced "bewaks" because the woman correcting me, my ever-patient mother, still pronounces "salmon" "sal-mon."

She also pronounces "tortilla" as "tortila" (she's lived in Texas her whole life, dammit!) and I'm terrified of what I must still be pronouncing incorrectly because of her gaffes. At least she has the excuse of being deaf in one ear.

"I couldn't care less" versus "I could care less"

One means that there is nothing you care less about - meaning you just don't care.
The other literally means the opposite and only makes sense in a sarcastic statement... which most people miss entirely.

Also, the whole trailing punctuation in quotations thing? That doesn't fly in technical documents, where every character in the quotation marks carries meaning. In those cases it is appropriate to place the period after the quote.

And, I'm with JC on the punctuation thing. Just because you Yanks decided to make up your own English rules doesn't mean the rest of us have go along. Punctuation marks go inside of quotation marks only if it's a complete sentence being quoted or of the majority of the thought in the sentence is part of the quote. Otherwise, the punctuation says firmy, happily and correctly OUTSIDE of the quotation marks.

So here's another possibly offensive one...I used to think that the word for the offspring of a mixed race couple was "milano," and that's where they got the name for the cookie.

...I'm with Stella... I, too, say PUH-JEE-BAH.

There shoulda been a goddamed pronuncimination thingamagoo... Because now, a place I love, I cannot pronounce.

And that make the baby Jesus crap his drawers.

A close friend of mine doesn't BATHE her baby, she BATHS her baby. WTF?

A friend of mine pronounced Binghamton phonetically for the first few weeks of college in Ithaca. For those not in the know, it sounds like 'bing-em-ton.'

One for the Philly locals -- it's 'Sansom Street,' not 'Sampson Street.'

Pissboy: I used to work in a call center and take info from people from Pennsyltucky. I would have to get up and take a walk after those calls because of how dumb they sounded. That made me laugh!

Up until last year (I'm 25), I thought it was "For all intensive purposes."

My coworker told me that he didn't know the difference between "erotic" and "erratic" and once told an attendant at the DMV that he had gotten a ticket for "driving erotically."

Last one for me, I swear - I work with a dude who regularly uses the word "unrelentless." What the hell does that mean?

: : jingles keys : : Back away Erin. Back away slowly.

Two mispronunciation stories for you:
1) When I was in college, I worked with a very attractive woman named Regina. I probably would have had more of a chance with her had I not thought her name was supposed to rhyme with "Pajiba."

2) Also in college, I went to a librarian's convention that included some very small-town librarians. I saw two of them studying the menu and overheard this conversation:
Librarian #1: "Kwitch?? What the hell is a kwitch?"
Librarian #2: "It's a French dish, sort of a cheese pie. And, uh, you probably don't want to say 'kwitch,' it makes you sound like a hick. I believe the French say 'kee-shay.'"

I spelled "weird" wrong for a really long time - "wierd".

Also, I cannot for the life of me say "theatre" correctly. Most people agree the normal, dignified way to say it is kinda like "theeter" (I think- again, I always get confused here). I say "thee-a-ter", emphasis on the "a".

Also, I never do this in writing or when it matters, because I obviously know the correct way to say it, but when I'm speaking with people I'm comfortable with and being lazy, I always say "me and so and so" when it should be "so and so and I." My mom never stops correcting me on this. What can I say? I know I sound like an idiot when I say it, but it just comes out when I'm not paying attention. Very few of my friends growing up knew much of anything (and didn't especially care - I was friends with a lot of jock-ish / dumb cheerleader types) and I picked it (along with a variety of other bad habits) up from them. I certainly did not learn it from my English-and-literature-teaching mother or well-spoken father.

A lifelong sufferer of ennui, I'd somehow managed to never see it in print. I read it out loud once as "en-you-ee," sort of rhyming it with Inuit. Ugh.

Worcester.
Herb.

to this day i get tripped up on the word "catholicism". when i was a kid, i thought "shoppe" was pronounced "shopp-y" and "hors d'oeuvres" was "whores dou-vrees". i hate it when people leave out the t's in "button"...it's not a "buh'un". and i thought it was "puh-jee-bah" too.

One for the Philly locals -- it's 'Sansom Street,' not 'Sampson Street.'

!!!!! That one makes me want to beat someone with the Liberty Bell.

Another that drives me nuts is a pretty common one: pronouncing it 'supposably.' :dies inside:

Skeggjold - the word mischievous made me lose a spelling bee in the 6th grade because the asshole moderator pronounced it "mis chee vee us" - now, who is not going to add an "i" before the "ous" when you hear it pronounced like that???!!! If only he had pronounced it "mis chu vus" I might be president today.

I did not notice mispronunciations at all until I moved to Kentucky. People here say some crazy shit. For example, 99% of the population says "welp" instead of "welt" and use it in a sentence like so: "I got stung by a bee and it welped up on me".

99% of the population here also says "ideal" when they should say "idea". I can't count how many times I have heard someone say "I have no ideal" or "I have a great ideal".

I have a million of these and unfortunately this type of thing is my biggest pet peeve ever! Here are some more classics . . . "medium" instead of "median", as in "He drove his car up on the medium" . . . . "curve" instead of "curb", as in "He drove his car up over the curve" . . . "window seal" instead of "window sill" (it's not the southern accent, I have seen it written like that!)

I'll have to come back when I think of more!

My boyfriend's mom says "I seen it over there" instead of "I saw it over there". Drives me nuts, but what can I do?

Oh, this is one of my favorite things, I especially love malapropisms, where you intentionally change a word to another similarly sounding word in order to be funny/silly. Anywho, here are several that I came up with:
When I was little and my mother had friends over, I was trying to be the hospitable little hostess and said, "Please, sit down and make yourselves convertible." I think I bawled when they couldn't stop laughing at me!
S. Pisaster - I am from the south, and I absolutely abhor it when people say crick! I mean, what the hell is a crick? I'm looking out the window right now at a creek, however...
Peachfish - my mema was famous for her silly pronunciation, Jebus love her. She used to say "parmeeesean" and "I-talian" as well. It was generally only with the 'foreign' items, and like she was trying to learn italian, but failing miserably. Also, my mother says euthanaze instead of euthanize. I used to work with a weird chick who tried to use the term versus a lot, but could only manage to say vices. That was PAINFUL. Ugh.
My two biggest grammar peeves, however, are supposedly (not supposably, dammit!), and the way some people (mostly northerners in my experience, especially Ohioans?) say "that dress needs cleaned" or "my car needs fixed". What the hell? You dropped the entire conjugation of the verb! Did yuo skip 5th grade or something?

Facetious. I heard the word all the time growing up and knew what it meant, but I didn't know how it was spelled. I read it aloud one time as "FASS-a-shuss."

Also, I only learned a few months ago that "bite the bullet" and "bite the dust" do not mean the same thing.

tt-marie:

"weird" is Samuel Johnson's cruel little joke I think. We spend our entire childhoods being told "i before e except after c" and then along comes "weird", not a "c" in sight. I call foul.

i work in a travel agency and it takes all my effort not to defenestrate my co-worker every time she pronounces "itinerary" as "AR-tenery"

AAARRRRGH

This one's for my mama:

No matter how many times over the years I've corrected her, my mom refuses to pronounce ramen any other way than "ray-min."
Drives me up the fuckin wall sideways.

"Salmon."

I have a coworker who says "sal-mon" and not "sahmon." Does the same with almond. Drives me nuts (heh).

Also, this is more of a turn of phrase issue, but "begs the question" does not - I must emphasize again, does NOT - mean "raises the question" or "suggests the question." It is a specific term from logic that essentially means that the response implies the question. "The painting is trash because it is obviously worthless" is an example of begging the question. Here, begs means "improperly take for granted." Old usage of the word, but that is its origin.

ARG. Please, bloggers, newscasters, journalists, and others - stop it.

As a kid, I had a hard time not pronouncing the L in "salmon." I still hate that word. Same goes for "salve." Stupid L pisses me off.

"her and I" - always indicates the talker is from the Pacific Northwest, usually Seattle area.

menagerie - former co-worker used this to describe piles of paper on her desk.

Oedipus

wait, Almonds are pronounced Ahmonds???? wh-what?

Also, I totally did not know about the whole "begs the question" bit - holy crap, I don't even understand the explanation! I'm never using it again.

Oh Beckylooo, you and your friends certainly had fun times growing up. And I see you all played "Nigger Knocking" a staple in any playground in America. I'm a little curious though, how does the word "Nigger" works it's way in the equation?

Thought of another pair: as a kid, I would insist that the "Angelican" (rhymes with "Pelican") Church was closely associated with the "Episcupelian" Church.

It's no wonder that I minored in Linguistics. I had to, just to figure out what the hell was going on.

Damnit, Skit: There is a pronunciation thingamajob right here.

You know what makes the Baby Pajiba crap his drawers? When people pronounce it PUH-JEE-BAH.

Foot stomp. Pout.

I'm gonna start pronouncing Jesus to rhyme with vagina to spite you all. -- DR

"Flesh it out" versus "flush it out"; I don't like the word "flesh" but I'm almost positive "flush it out" is wrong, and one of my editorial directors uses it all the time.

A teacher of mine used to say "intensive purposes" rather than "intents and purposes" (thankfully, not an English teacher). I hate her. She should eat nails.

Someone above listed the use of "impact" as a verb. That sucks. Kill that person.

Do your ears hang low, do they wabble to and fro, can you tie them in a know, can you tie them in a bow, can you throw them over your shoulder like a continental soldier, do you ears hang low?

I thought continental soldier was "cotton picking n*gger" for years.

I will admit I call it PUH-JEE-BAH too. *hides head in shame*
However, I will not rhyme it will vagina. I'm SORRY! I am going to still call it PUH-JEE-BAH.

Damn my lingering visitors for keeping me from the party! (Just kidding. It was my mom.)

Up until I met Mr. Pink in college, I gave the word "vicinity" an extra "n" and pronounced it "VIN-cinity". Apparently, the people in my life either assumed that was the way it was pronounced too or were too sweet (or afraid) to correct me. Enter Mr. Pink who refused to accepted my butchered pronunciation as just another of 'bama's endearing quirky qualities. He bore down on my mercilessly for about two years until I finally starting saying it correctly.

But still to this day I have to pause for a brief moment before the word leaves my mouth to make sure that interloping "n" doesn't weasel his way in.

To the person who said 'epitome' like it rhymed with 'epitone'--ROCK ON! I had to read a clue in Trivial Pursuit with 'epitome' in it and I guess I hadn't seen it written enough to know that 'epitome' wasn't spelled 'epitomy'. To this day, my family STILL makes fun of me for it(and this was at least three years ago).

Irregardless also drives me crazy--it may be in the urban dictionary but it is still NOT A REAL WORD. It's REGARDLESS for fucks sake!!!!

"Sherbert" instead of "sherbet"
"Ar-kan-sas" instead of "Arkansaw" Hey, it made sense because Kansas is, well, Kansas

I still don't know how to correctly pronounce gyro. When I first moved to the big city and went to the greek restaurant up the street, the employees said "ge-ro" (with a hard g, not gee-ro like gee whiz) as rhyming with hero. But it seems that most people I talk to actually say "hero" or even "yee-ro" for gyro. Did they learn it that why because they frequent a different greek restaurant where the employees have different accents?

I thought Hermione was pronounced Hermoyne.

I thought Pajiba was pronounced "puh-heee-buh" until I saw the IPA breakdown. I took Spanish for years, sue me.

Also, my sister once pronounced misled as "mizzled" (rhymes with grizzled). It's still a family joke. "Sorry, I was mizzled!"

WITH VAGINA! God I need to read before I hit post...and yeah, it's in caps...

Also, it's library, not li-bary.

Thanks, Dustin!

Fucking "Kroger's" and "Barnes and Noble's". Rankle me like nobody's business.

Oh...and crown vs. crayon. First person that tells me both of those words sound the same gets stabbed in the neck with my car keys.

Look in the fuckin' dictionary....cray-on. Two syllables ya stupic dick nose!

HO-LEE SHIT. It's not just my sister (and now niece, though she SWEARS she didn't make her do it)???

Oh, and it wasn't until I had to describe the symptoms of an ingrown toe infection that I realized that it is Pus, not Puss...not pussy. Now I just write pus-filled when needed.

That's some awesome caps lockiness there, lyricalcatt :p

My peeves mostly come from my husband-unit. He insists on saying hepa, as in hepa filter, as "HEEEpa." Helicopter is "HEEElocopter." I don't know why it bugs me so, but I just grit my teeth and keep my yap shut when he does it.

A few years ago there was a tv ad campaign for (I think) Jack in the Box and their bruschetta sandwiches. They kept pronouncing it "brew-shhhhetta" which totally grates my nerves as I'm fluent in Italian. I'd scream at the tv or radio every single time I heard it. Why am I wound so tight about tomatoes on bread?

Say it with me:
"Brew-sKetta"

That WAY, dang it, not why. I even previewed.

So I'm from Missouri and my mom is from Mississippi. I now live in Boston and my boyfriend is a Mass-hole. Between him and my mom, I have a ton of mispronunciations to gripe about, but I'll just name a few:

My mom always refered to a "chest of drawers" as "chester drawers." She also can't pronounce Massachusetts or salmon (she calls it simon).

My boyfriend says "idear" instead of "idea" and calls a "drawer" a "drah." His aunt can't say geneaolgy and always calls it a "gee-an-ology." Morons.

"that dress needs cleaned" or "my car needs fixed".

Haha, my boyfriend will not, NOT stop doing this. He's a successful lawyer and very well-educated, but this is one awful farm-boy habits he refuses to break (along with always having a toothpick hanging out of his mouth). I think he thinks it makes him sound down-to-earth.

And Paddy, thanks for that. You made me feel a little less stupid ;)

1. My biggest pet peeve in writing is people who write "should of" instead of "should have" (or other variations of this same damn mistake.

2. My fiance constantly tries to tease me about a word that I still insist I'm saying correctly and she insists I'm not. The word is "often" which she believes is pronounced "off-en" but which I always pronounce the T. What say you Pajibans?

I love these. I skipped to the bottom so I could post. My boss asked me the other day if awhile was two words. He also uses the word "irregardless" CONSTANTLY. My boyfriend pronounces office like Ah-fis, and my best friend says radiator as rah-diator. I'm a nazi about these kinds of things (not an English major, but I studied Voice and Speech in college and had to learn how to speak correctly by IPA), so I usually don't do them myself. I do have the darndest time saying anemone, however... :-(

I pronounced facade as fa-kade when reading it. I knew how to say in when speaking but never realized it was the same word any time I read it. I also badly mangled echelon by pronouncing it as ek-a-lon. I was recently corrected by my wife for pronouncing museum as mu-zim and not the proper of mu-zee-um. She is a bit of a grammar nazi so I guess I will take her word for it.

My younger siblings used to refer to the lawn mower as a "mow lawn" and it almost made me fratricidal.

Also, my grasp on the rules that govern comma placement is tentative at best.

I mispronounce "sandwich" as "sangwich" - I have no idea why - my parents don't do it but my sister does as well. Its not intentional, I just do it. I also cannot, for the life of me, say egg as anything but AYgg and orange as rrrange(like a pirate). OH! And, ruined - I can't phonetically spell out how I say it, but I'm told I sound Scandinavian. I from South Texas. That one really annoys my boyfriend. Also, I have a tendency when not really thinking to say passport "pass-a-port".

Reading over this, I realize I sound like some kind of idiot. Oh, well.

One other thing - in Houston, there is a street spelled Kuykendahl. Its a pretty major road on the north side of town, and everyone pronounces it as Kirkindoll. No clue why - it was totally confusing to me as a non-native Houstonian when I first moved here. Along with the suburb of Humble (no H, its Ummmble) and San Felipe (San Phillippy), we have some doozies 'round these parts. YEAH TEXAS!!!

Ears? I always heard it as, "Do your boobs hang low, . . ." Makes a bit more sense, actually.

If I hear W say NUKE-U-LAR one more time, to the moon, Alice. It's easy to remember because if you swap the first two letters "nuclear" becomes "unclear."

"Comely" -- I'm still kind of fuzzy on this one. I'm pretty sure it's "kuhm-ly," but I pronounced it "comb-ly" for decades.

It bugs the hell out of me when Patricia Arquette says "Distric Attorney" on Medium. I love you, Patty, but there's a "t" on the end of that.

When I was in Norway my army buddies and I went to a pizza place. The waitress was explaining one of the pizzas and said it had "yah-lah-peh-noes" on it. (Think about it.) We cracked up about that, which makes me feel jerky now.

I had a boyfriend who corrected me that celery was "sell-ree," when I had been saying "sal-uh-ree." Scew you, and make your own damned tuna salad.

My father uses a "tr" sound instead of "thr" and a "d" instead of "th," so it comes out like "Give me tree dem der cookies." I sometimes slip into that mode of speech when I visit....

My grandma regularly butchered words. She took us to see "Jur-uh-sick Park" when it came out in the theater. Semi unrelated, but she also was amazingly tolerant of cursing, such as when my 4 year old cousin, who had a speech impediment, asked for ice cream, and my grandma's response was, "Ass cream? What do you need ass cream for? What's wrong with your ass?"

I absolutely hate it when people say "orientated." "Oriented" works just fine.

I also hate it when people say "once and a while." Makes no frigging sense.

Say it with me:
"Brew-sKetta"

I can't!! I can't. I know that's correct but no no no. I feel like I'm trying to be all pretentious fake-Italian, when in reality I am a pale-assed Irish girl. :)

And I call it sauce, not gravy. Muah ha ha.

Nice one on the TV ad mispronunciations, krix. Several years ago I saw a horribly grating, locally made ad for some discount-furniture outlet where the announcer kept informing us that they were having a clearance sale on "bedroom suits [suites]."

I say you and your old lady are headed for a divorce before you all get married if the both of you continue being so anal.I don't have that problem with none of my bitches.

Also, MattFactor, "of a morning" or "of an evening" is a very Irish expression. So it's possible it just translated overseas and became a colloquialism. (Which I'm nearly 100% I just spelled wrong. Womp womp.) I also remembered that when I lived in London, I found out how to pronounce queue. I used to pronounce it as "qway" instead of "Q." Whoops.

Before I knew what sex was I used to get confused between the word organism and the word orgasm. It took me saying the wrong one in front of my mother (Oh the humanity!!) before I got straightened out. It still creeps me out that she had to explain it. Don't look at me like that, I was nine years old.

I remembered one more:

"Palast Indians" instead of Palestinians... whew that was embarrassing in grade 9 History...

OH! And it's PANERA, not PANERA'S. There is no Panera family who owns this chain. I can't even tell you how many people say "Panera's".

Oh, and you shouldn't pronounce the "s" on the end of "Illinois". There are actually people who do this.

Dustin, thank you for making making an exception for "foreigners".

I was taught to put punctuation marks inside of quotation marks, if the punctuation is part of the quotation. Otherwise, even when using commas and periods, they should be placed outside the quotes.

Blame the Queen.

On another note, my name is a pretty good test of people's basic spelling skills.
"What's your name?"
"Celery."
"How do you spell that?"
"Like the vegetable."
Blank stare.

Bistro: Often is pronounced off-en. When in doubt, just check a dictionary.

Oh Krix:

I feel your pain. Once I was in a (very pricey) restaurant in DC with my then boss who was born and raised and still living in Rome. He asked for bruschetta (as it should be pronounced) and the waiter gave him a patronizing sigh and told him "it's Brushetta actually". We left and he refused to pay for the drinks we had up until then.

My mom insisted on ordering pizza with An-shwah, and when I gently pointed out that Americans pronounce it Anchovies, she threw me a blistering look and said, "The correct pronunciation is An-shwa, from the French, which I speak fluently."

Also, my best friend manages to mangle any proper noun he encounters while reading. Character name: Arya, pronounced Awry. Town name: Wausau, pronounced Warsaw. I used to correct her, but now I just try to figure out if I can come with the same wrong word as she does.

Hey, Angelbabe

I think the "Aluminum" vs. "Aluminium" is a case where you're either both right, or all Americans are wrong. I seem to recall that the original patent on aluminium was British and had the extra "i". When the patent was registered in the U.S. a clerk acidentall dropped the second "i" and created aluminum.

I hate, hate, hate it when people say "I could care less". It's couldn't care less, people! If you "could care less" you're implying that you do actually care since there is a lesser level of caring you could drop to.

Sheesh.

On the Bruschetta comment - I love when I pronounce it correctly and the wait-person "corrects" me. Love it.

Also, the word "Factoid" means something taken as true but is, in fact, not true. It does NOT mean some bit of trivia. Thanks CNN for screwing that one up for all of us.

I'm not saying I'm perfect, by any stretch, but I actually derive some sort of perverse pleasure in intentionally mispronouncing some of these words that rile y'all up. "Idear" is one of my favorites. Also, "pair-uh-diggum" and "warsh." Pretty much anything on the list here. But I say it with a smirk, and in the right company...This makes me sound like a tool.

Another sort of related one: In an English class once, the teacher brought up the phrase "people who live in glass houses..." and asked for the ending. Being the dutiful know-it-all I was, I said, "shouldn't throw parties." Thankfully, everyone thought I was joking. But I wasn't.

hmmm... on my screen, my post is mashed in with three others and then cut off. here's all and only what I meant to post. Feel free to delete the first one.

Dustin, thank you for making making an exception for "foreigners".

I was taught to put punctuation marks inside of quotation marks, if the punctuation is part of the quotation. Otherwise, even when using commas and periods, they should be placed outside the quotes.

Blame the Queen.

On another note, my name is a pretty good test of people's basic spelling skills.
"What's your name?"
"Celery."
"How do you spell that?"
"Like the vegetable."
Blank stare.

The most common mistake is "cellery", but you would be surprised how many people over ten think that celery starts with an s and/or contains an a.

Accidentally dropped the "i"! Accidentally!

Me no speak English good beer without.

Here's one . . . I thought that piece of furniture that is in your bedroom, the tall one with all the drawers, was called "Chester Drawers", not chest of drawers. Chester being a proper noun, Chester Drawers, like Wurlitzer Piano . I was 20 before I found out it was called a chest of drawers!

The next asshole I hear say "I could care less" is going to die a horrible, violent death. The phrase is "I couldn't care less". If you could care less, then that means you do care, dickhead. Think about what you're fucking saying. Okay, all better now.

How boring this world would be if everybody pronounced everything the same way and used English uniformly. It's things like "need washed" that makes regionalism so interesting. Also, how awesome is it that "pants" and "fanny" mean something totally different in the U.K.? Thus, I'm going to admit my legitimate mistakes rather than pick on other people (for once).

My offenses:

-I thought "precipitous" meant rainy until very recently.

-I did not know what sublime meant until I was about 25. I steered clear of the word and cringed whenever I saw it and, yet, never bothered to investigate what it meant.

-I, too, pronounced aw-rie as aw-ree for years. I misspelled "a lot" until I hit my junior year of college.

-I cannot say the word "brewery."

I live in Cleveland. (I do NOT say things like "car needs washed.")

One of our major downtown streets is Carnegie Avenue. Now, I realize that dictionaries list two pronunciations as acceptable, but it drives me fucking nuts when people pronounce it "car-NAY-gee." Fucking NUTS!

Is there anywhere else in the country where this pronunciation is prevalent? Certainly not near Carnegie Hall or Carnegie Mellon.

Godtopus, I hate people.

tt_marie- I live in Pittsburgh and people here say that stuff all the time and it drives me crazy!! I have gotten into arguments with people here who are sure that they are right! Your room needs TO BE cleaned! Not needs cleaned! I just think it makes a person sound like a fool.

Mr. Atoz - oh my god, my in laws say that ALL THE TIME. We inherited a bunch of bedroom suites after Grandad passed on and holy shit I was so confused!

But I couldn't say anything because I had argued that the word "verbiage" was spelled "verbage" and tried to correct my mother-in-law - and well, that didn't go over so well, so I thought maybe I was wrong about the whole 'suit-as-suite' business.
VINDICATED bitches!

My sister used to pronounce the 't' in Chevrolet.

My mother-in-law says Pee-nyoh Knee-ar instead of Pinot Noir. It really makes me want to rip her face off. She also can't say narcissistic. She says "narcisstic."

My mother says JurassTic Park instead of Jurassic Park. She's done this for 15 years now.

Both my mother and father use "is" instead of "are." They say, "Is there any more corn?"

I often confuse "was" and "were," although I'm getting better at it.

Damn...another discussion I can't participate in because I'm perfect.

1. chamois, I said 'sha-moise'
2. hors d'oeurvres, 'whores dee vores'
3. while in Canada, the table d'hote (should be said table doh or something french), I knew the table was not pronounced like the American 'table' but I had no clue for the d'hote part. I butchered it until the waitress corrected me.

As you can see, I have issues with French.

Oooh, ooh, my husband also says 'suit' for 'suite'--it drives me nuts! He also insists on calling our Netflix queue our Netflix 'K', though I've also heard other people say it that way. I still think it should be 'Q'.

And, my inlaws insist that the plural possessive of my last name, James, is 'Jameses'. As in 'the Jameses house'. I think it's acceptable to say it that way but they refuse to believe that it is supposed to be spelled James'.

I can't say brusKetta either. I know that's the proper way to say it in Italian, but I feel like it's become so Americanized that it's ok to say it the way it would be pronounced in English.

But along those lines, probably the worst thing I have to deal with in my life is the lingering animosity from my husband toward my parents every time they say eye-talian, instead of Italian. Especially since his Italian roots don't go all that far back. I swear he's going to explode when ever it happens. It's not pronounced eye-taly mom and dad, so why would you say eye-talian?!?

I also have to deal with the added r in wash from my family. And we live in Oregon so not only do I have to put up with hearing warsh, but also Warshington.

I used to pronounce facade like arcade. Because, you know, that's how it's spelled. It wasn't until high school when my then girlfriend was like "what did you say? It's fa-sahd," and then proceeded to mock me mercilessly.

I also used to pronounce wound like wownd. Because, again, that's how it's spelled. I still do it on occasion. Worst is when one of my college professors corrected me.

Fuck the English language. I'm an English major, too. Go figure.

Words: I said 'ethereal' as 'erethral' (aka, almost 'urethral') for yeeeeears, which is a particularly unfortunate disparateness of meaning.

Idiom: Just recently found out it's "all intents and purposes," not "all intensive purposes." That one made me feel stupid.

I hope no-one mentioned this one yet, but I can't stand when people say they "could care less". That's really not making much of a statement, is it?

I was born February fifth, and as a wee one, I couldn't pronounce either of these. My family, however, thought this was hilarious. So everytime they came over, they would always ask me when I was born, to which I would reply:
"Fairy Berry Five".

God my Mom's a bitch. But it's genetic, so I love her.

Hegemony. As a kid I read it as "hedge-eh-moany" and didn't hear it pronounced for a long time. And for a brief time I thought there were two different words with similar meanings and being the budding English major that I was (heh), I assumed it was because they shared the same root in Greek. Finally the lightbulb went off, but if I had to read it aloud today I would likely hesitate or screw it up.

Okay, I can't stop. There's a pretty famous Irish writer called Oliver St. John Gogarty and one can always tell which US tourists do not watch Masterpiece Theatre because they ask for "Oliver-Saint-John-Gogarty's house" instead of "Oliver Singin Gogarty's house". Similarly, if you're all paying attention: the family name Beauchamp is pronounced Beecham". And Worcestershire sauce? It's "wooster sauce". Don't blame me. Blame the Normans. And yes, I posted this commnent just to be able to put as many periods as I could outside of quotation marks.

"And, my inlaws insist that the plural possessive of my last name, James, is 'Jameses'. As in 'the Jameses house'. I think it's acceptable to say it that way but they refuse to believe that it is supposed to be spelled James'."

Strunk and White say otherwise.

Ooh, got another. My best friend used to explode on people when they pluralized Cracker Jack. In his words (after the calming): "You do not have 'Cracker Jacks.' You have boxes of Cracker Jack."

He also used to get really upset when others would add an 's' to words like forward (forwards), backward (backwards) and toward (towards). Admittedly, that still bothers me a little.

My sister as a kid would say all sorts of words wrong, and we made fun of her severely. Poor kid. Church was "certs" like the breath mints, shampoo was "pan chew", and after we laughed she would try to tell us to shut up by saying "shup".

Then there's my husband, a Penn state guy, he pronounces winter like "winner", Oregon like "organ", and orange like a pirate "Arhhhhnge".

Couple of funny ones:

I always pronounced aclimatized as a-clit-a-mized. A very horrified mother had to correct me on that one.

My wife always pronounced pseudonym as poseidon. Wasn't until two years ago (when the remake of Posiedon's Adventure released) that I pointed out this gaffe to her.

sweetfeed you can pronounce hegemony two ways. Hi-jem-uh-nee or your old way hedge-eh-moany. So, you're right any way you slice it. Yay!

PaddyDog--

I still call it "Worchestersheestershustershire..." sauce, (usually with random added syllables) because of Bugs Bunny. Yeah, I know how to say it, but Bugs' way is way more fun.

Same thing with "ignoranimus" for "ignoramus" and "ma-roon" for "moron."

Who says cartoons aren't a bad influence?

Always thought the word 'draughts' was pronounced 'drots,' just found out the hard way that it's 'drafts.'

Always pronounced 'cacophony' with the emphasis on the first syllable, but according to the same person who caught me out on 'draughts,' the emphasis is on the second.

Took me until about the eighth grade before I figured out that the spoken word 'prejudiced' (which I knew), and the written word (which I pronounced in my head as 'preejoodiced') were the same word. Figured that one out on my own.

I'm the same way. I enjoy pronouncing things in alternate or outright incorrect ways. "ARE'inge" instead of "OR'inge". Hard-G "gerrymander". "Re-NAY-sahns" rather than "REN-ih-sahns."

Someone once told me this, and my rudimentary understanding of latinate languages made me believe him: It is incorrect to ask for "a biscotti" because "biscotti" is plural.

I also read that there's a law on the books stating the correct pronunciation of Arkansas. My dad joked that it was a completely justifiable pronunciation, and that the true pronunciation of that other state was "Kan-zaw"

Et cetera. That is how it is pronounced. I can usually stop my fist right before it hits the face of a person who says "et cetra", but all bets are off if anyone says "ek cetra" or "ek cetera".

Websearch "Dialect Survey" for some interesting pronunciations and phrases around the United States. I'd never heard it before I read the survey, but now every time it rains when the sun is shining I pronounce that "The devil is beating his wife"

As a child I thought the can broth my mother fed me wanted to be eaten. That is why it was called consume-me.

People correct me all of the time for saying "Hand me the scissor" instead of "scissors." "Pair of scissors" is fine, but how can you use "a" with a plural object? I may be wrong, but it seems reasonable to me.

oh, and I have been told I pronounce "quarter" very oddly

I maintain I prounounce it just fine, thank you very much

"One of our major downtown streets is Carnegie Avenue. Now, I realize that dictionaries list two pronunciations as acceptable, but it drives me fucking nuts when people pronounce it "car-NAY-gee." Fucking NUTS!

Is there anywhere else in the country where this pronunciation is prevalent? Certainly not near Carnegie Hall or Carnegie Mellon."

All of my friends from Pittsburgh put the emphasis on the middle syllable. As that's essentially where Andy C. spent much of his time, I tend to think that was the intended pronunciation. I emphasize the first syllable when saying "Carnegie Hall" because I live in NYC, but I'm pretty sure that's wrong.

One thing in NYC that gets on my nerves: when people lose their damn minds if somebody mispronounces "How-ston Street" as "Hyoo-ston Street." Give me a break - it's spelled "Houston" and Houston the city is a hell of a lot bigger and well-known than Houston the street. It's just total snobbery.

I have to confess to the seeg/segue confusion as well. Again with the hearing and reading separately!

Several years ago (maybe 6) I was in the laundromat, and some woman I'd never seen before was having a long and loud conversation with another patron about her financial problems and how she resolved them by being "digilent." It bugged the crap out of me then, but she said it so many times that it wormed its way into my head, and to this day I have to think about it before I say it out loud.

I fucking hate that woman.

BWeaves - I have checked multiple dictionaries, and most offer both pronunciations as correct. I just wanted Pajiba opinion I suppose...

I'll fight the next person who insults my Yinzer honor. White glove=poised.

I know it bugs the holy living hell out of my pitch-perfect wife, but I'll never stop dropping the infinitive "to be," saying "crick" and using phrases like "redd up." Sorry, honey.

See, regional things, no matter how retarded they may sound to outsiders, tend to mean something to people. That's why I still laugh when I think of a story told by Pittsburgh radio guy Scott Paulson about his trip to France: He and his wife are walking down the Champs-Élysées, they've done the Arc de Triomphe, the Louvre, etc., experiencing Western culture at its finest, when he hears, "Hey, Scott Paulsen! Wha're yinz doin' in Pairs?"

That said, there's a little road that runs through our township, Dutilh Road. There's churches named after it, for cripes sakes. So every time I hear some taint-sniffer say "Duluth Road," I die a little inside.

From my cadet days, "orientate" drives me absolutely fucking insane. That it passed the spell-check feature here just might cost this office its keyboard. Also, I hung around way too much with a guy who used "at this appointed time." FUCK. YOU.

But you know what? I hafta help my gramma worsh her babushka inna crick, den pick up some jumbo dahn Gine Iggle. Peace.

FrumpieFox:

That is brilliant. I would never question the wisdom of Bugs Bunny on these matters.

On a related note, does anyone know what the threshold is for a mis-pronunciation becoming acceptable because it has been become part of the common speech? Is it widespread use? Numbers of years in use? I'm thinking of the way Americans pronounce "baroque" or the way Irish or British people pronounce "filet". Anyone?

Oh Pissboy, I hear you! I went to Edinboro and the way the people spoke there drove me crazy and has forever scarred me. "The car needs warshed". They also use the word "ignorant" for indignant. My roommated used to tell me how ignorant she was to her boyfriend (!).

Until a few years ago I thought wheelbarrow was wheelbarrel.
I also constantly interchange toothpick and Q-tip.
It's always fun asking a waiter for a Q-tip. Funny looks ensue.

I'm sure I have a ton of these considering I had to take speech therapy three times a week starting at the age of three because I had what the doctors called a "lazy tongue."

I literally had to think of each word before it comes out otherwise it's complete jibberish. At least thats what they taught me, oh and how to read. This problem still arrises when i'm drunk or stoned. Much to the hilarity of my friends. Who literally wait for me to fuck up. I mean waiting in the blades of grass, eyeing their target of prey mama lion styles!!!

My most recent idiom that i've come across is "Last ditch effort", which has been in the book i'm currently reading. I've always thought it was "Last stitch effort".

Oh and when I was a kid, I was hellbent that the word commercial was pronounced COM-MER-SHICAL. Much to the dismay of my speech therapist!!!

i thought of another one: rural

In Austin, there is a street called Manchaca. Pronounced:"Man-chack". Stupid Texans. Why the hell do you put an "A" at the end if it's not there to be pronounced?!

Also, the auto repair shop that says their name is Sa-LAY-zar.... dood, it's SAL-a-zar. Saying it different doesn't make you any less Mexican.

Also, I never do this in writing or when it matters, because I obviously know the correct way to say it, but when I'm speaking with people I'm comfortable with and being lazy, I always say "me and so and so" when it should be "so and so and I."

Actually 'me and so and so' is right.

If you haven't already read it I highly recommend Steven Pinker's 'The Language Instinct'. He discusses lots of grammar stuff, he points out the differences between the science of linguistics and the random prescriptive rules that were made up a century ago and that make people overcorrect perfectly good grammar, as above. Also he discusses 'could care less' (sarcasm, obvious from the tone) and points out that grammar mavens often have no idea what they are talking about (he reanalyses an an analysis of Barbra Streisand's speach).

When I was 7 my parents decided that perhaps we should celebrate the four Sundays of advent at home. The best part (for my 7-year-old self) was that I got to read aloud from the book of instructions. Until one night when I came across the words "Now, let us all sing a hymn" and read aloud "Now, let us all sing a hymen."

It was a few years before I found out what my parents found so damn funny.

I'm thinking of the way Americans pronounce "baroque"

As in "ba-roke" PaddyDog? How else does one pronounce it?

"Actually 'me and so and so' is right."

Depends on wherre it is in the sentence:

"Me and so and so went to the park"--no!

"Harry met me and so and so at the park"--yes!

I had a friend who up until we were seniors in college pronounced hors d'oevres as "ors de voors."

And she didn't believe me when I corrected her. And she worked as a waitress at a country club for many years before that.

hehehe kellee, the "rural juror"

that 30 Rock could carry an entire episode on two words was genius

Oh man, I've got a million...I work in customer service and we ask callers to verify their mailing addresses. You'd be amazed how many people live on a "skreet."
I'm from MA, and growing up I thought Worcester and Wooster, Gloucester and Glosster, and Leicester and Lester were all separate towns. And here's a weird one I've never heard outside of my podunk hometown. Instead of "so DO I," they say "so DON'T I." It hurts my brain every time.

samantha t,

The Houston/Houston Street is actually interesting, and I don't think it's snobbery to call things by their proper name. They were named after 2 different people, both with a lot of history behind them, and while Houston Street is a corrupted spelling of the original name (Houstoun), it predates the naming of the city of Houston by more than 2 decades. Whatever, I think it's pretty cool...

I learned all this the other day. Some tourist asked for directions to HoUUUUUston Street so I had to kill him. I figured the next time someone asked directions to HoUUUUUston Street I could explain his or her error using some cold hard facts before assisting in his or her demise.

My hubby and his father pronounce padlock "pad-a-lock" Drives me insane.

I was guilty of the hyper-bowl for hyperbole too. I remember looking around wildly the first time I heard it said out loud at a book meeting.

I still say stat-cha-toots for statutes. I can't stop it.

Sayings I've gotten wrong...

"bleeding like a stuffed pig"
"I'm not your wet nurse" (I so meant nursemaid)

David - I was merely pointing out that it's not some ridiculous error in pronunciation. It's perfectly reasonable to think "How-ston" is pronounced "Hyoo-ston." Mind you, I'm writing as somebody who absolutely refuses to pronounce "Budapest" as "Buda-pescht", so precision isn't really my thing.

Re: aluminum -- my ex-girlfriend's father called it "aluminin," which I can't even say if I try.

There was also a colleague in my GRADUATE WRITING program who was so concerned about genre that he couldn't even say it right. Fuck's sake, man, it's not "Jon-Ra," although it did allow me to fantasize about being a Thundercats villain.

Luckily for me, most of my mispronounced words are in my head, because I read them over and over again and don't usually say them out loud. (My high school isn't exactly filled with the sharpest knives in the drawer, you know?)Case in point: Canapes.
Until last year I was convinced they were can-a-pees. Classy, huh?

I never had trouble with Hermione, but around the time I was reading the fourth book my sister laughed at me when I said Ginny like guinea.

Lastly, I once attempted to date a kid that lived in New Gloucester. Imagine my chagrin when my mother and friends laughed at me for asking how far New Gloo-kester was. It didn't work out.

Here's another one - conversate. Doesn't converse sound so much better? Am I wrong here?

When I was a kid, we had a babysitter who mangled the language all the time. My dad nearly choked to keep from laughing when she said her sister was in the hospital for testes (tests). And my brother and I walked in a walky-thorn(walkathon).

One thing that bothers me is when people use the ___ and I/me incorrectly. "Paul and I went to the store is correct," but "the package was delivered to Paul and me." Trying to explain that "me" is correct when it is the object of the preposition and "I" is correct when it is the subject in a sentence is just too much for some people to understand.

Mr. McGee has lots of stupid pronunciations. Breakfast is pronounced breaffest, spoken quickly and almost like one syllable. He also says supposably instead of supposedly.
I was an early reader like some of the other commenters and was devastated in first grade when I learned chameleon was not pronounced with a ch- sound at the beginning.

OMG how many people say be "Pacific" instead of SPECIFIC. My ex used to do that it drove me NUTS!

Of course I mean I was devastated to learn it was pronounced like the ch in cheese and not the ch in chasm. Buh.

Erin--

"Can-a-pees" is acceptable! (Well, maybe not in France, but in the US, anyway.) :) I called them "ca-napes" (like "tapes") for years, figuring "can-a-pees" can't possibly be right....

I said "taunt" in place of "taut" until I was about 13. Until recently, I thought assuage was pronounced "ah-saw-ged" (with a soft g sound). Luckily, I don't recall myself saying that one out loud too much.

Although I get laughed at all the time, I insist on saying it is thundering and lightninging . I still think I am right and the rest of the world has no idea what they are talking about.

Hee. I have a funny one for this. I had a roommate who was very insecure about her intelligence around me, our other roommate and my boyfriend. She would get upset whenever we used words she didn't know. So one day she came out of her room when the rest of us were watching TV, looked at the screen and said, "Well, that is just the epitome of stupidity." Except that she pronounced epitome to rhyme with palindrome. We were looking at her, very confused, and she was soooo happy because she thought she finally had come up with a word to stump us. My other roommate finally figured out what she meant, and we couldn't help it, we laughed for about 10 minutes. The "of stupidity" part really got us. She didn't talk to us for about a week. Still funny though.

I had my share of 'never heard it said, only read it' mistakes as a kid ('ginger' with a hard middle g, 'mie-zeld' for 'misled'), but as an (ostensible) grownup, if I don't know a word, I'll look up the pronunciation before I try it. How smug am I? ;-)

I do get annoyed by the grammatical and spelling errors others make (& I hate when I mistype and make them myself - but that's my fingers, not my brain...) I'm a total bitch about misplaced apostrophes, and I think 'bored of' is an abomination. Don't even get me started on people who write 'phased' for 'fazed', and supermarkets with queues for 'five items or less' (it's 'fewer', you dimwitted arseholes!!)
Well hell, I'm getting old... I have to find my fun somewhere!

My favouritest ever grammar correction was the English professor who, correcting a line in a pupil's essay which read:
'she crashed down the stairs and lay prostitute at the bottom',
commented that the pupil needed to learn the difference between a fallen woman, and one who has merely tripped...

The one that really gets to me is when people say "supposably" instead of "supposedly." A few more that are pretty common in NJ that make me want to rip the offender's teeth out are, "irregardless," "hisself," and "youse." Gaaahh!!

It got so bad where I worked before that my friends and I actually kept a Coworker Dictionary and wrote down all the mistakes that people made on a daily basis. Yeah...we had a little extra time on our hands.

*it's not PA JEE BA?

*I will still put a "g" in onion as in ung-yun

*I commented to my mom when I was in the fifth grade that the sky looked very "omni us" and then got pissed when she laughed at me.

samantha t,

I just wanted to fight with you. I know exactly what you mean. I've been living here for a few years, and I still mispronounce it once in a while.

Anyway, I'm gay, but maybe we could go on a date? I think we can work through the obvious problems.

Love,

David

When I was a kid I repeatedly called people "Eye-dots" because some how the second "i" in "idiot" was invisible to me. No-one ever corrected me because they had no idea of what I was trying to say!

Coveredinbees:

Americans (at least those around me) say "baroke" (like "joke") while on my indigenous side of the pond we say "barock" (like "dock"). And that's how it was pronounced in France when I lived there so I assume it's correct. But I also assume that the American pronunciation is considered correct here since even the poshest music critics pronounce it that way on WFMT.

Paddydog,
Another one is 'Cholmondeley' - pronounced 'Chumley'.
And my favourite 'upperclass name pronounced totally fucking different from the way it is spelled, dammit!' is: Featherstonehaugh.
That's 'Fanshaw', to his pals.

My theory is that the aristos were drunk so much of the time that the slurred pronunciations of their names became standard!

Up until last week, when I heard her say it and corrected her, my girlfriend thought that "for all intents and purposes" was "for all intensive purposes."
And when I was little I loved to sing along to the famous Bob Marley song "I Shocked the Sheriff." My parents didn't have the heart to let me know that the sheriff was not taken aback by Bob's antics, but in fact, dead.

I thought interpretate was a word FOREVER. it made total sense to me. Interpretation ----- Interpretate.

No. not a word.
Level of embarrassment when I was told the word is interpret? - high.

BWeaves - I have checked multiple dictionaries, and most offer both pronunciations as correct. I just wanted Pajiba opinion I suppose...

Posted by: Bistro

Yes, but "off-en" seems to be the first pronunciation listed, so I'd say your fiance' wins. Strangely enough, I pronounce it both ways.

These are halarious.
Some of mine:
For the longest time I thought 'hello' was spelled 'hellow'. I argued rounds with my father about that in 8th grade. I also said 'pacific' instead of 'specific' and the first few times I read the word 'ocean' I had no idea what it was. "Ockeean? What the hell is an ockeean?"

Mr. Vivian is French and while he speaks English better then most people I've met he has a bad habbit of adding an 's' where it dosent belong.
Good examples?
"Lets make pastas tonight"
"I need to fill out the paperworks"
"We need to get some new frunitures for the house"

And since my grammer is horrible (as many word/grammer nazi's have already realized by reading this post) I cant even explain to him, logically, why he shouldnt add an 's'. I mean, it is plural, but it just isn't right!

Le Sigh.

Diplodocous: Dip-lo-DOH-kis
Episcopal: Ep-i-SCOP-al
Debacle: DEB-uh-cull (and conversely thought "debacle" was spelled debauchal, but since I never used the word, spellcheck never had a chance to pick it up)
Rapport: RAP-ort

I also had a friend who once asked if the vet was going to seduce the dog before he neutered it, and I asked my dad once if southern Utah was where all the plagiarists lived. Not really mispronunciations, but certainly malapropisms.

And as a joke, my dad always calls the fighting Uruk-Hai from "Lord of the Rings" "my fighting Iroquois."

My personal best: saying Ah-RIS-toh-faynes instead of Air-is-toff-an-ees (Aristophanes), at the age of 25, to a group of high school honors students. genius!

My college roommate's best and brightest: saying "weary" when she meant either "wary" or "leary".

In my first debate round in high school I kept pronouncing regime as "reg-jime." And I would have won some spelling bees (I was a major nerd if you couldn't tell) if I had known the proper pronunciation of ennui and malady--I knew how to spell them, but didn't recognize what the announcer was saying until it was too late.

I had a boyfriend once that could not spell anything to save his life. When I was making fun of him for the millionth time, he defended himself by saying, "Well, maybe I can't spell, but I've got really good pronOUNCiation." I almost lost it.

And mispronunciation of Italian words also drives me crazy. If anyone ever tries to correct me and say "brushetta," I think I might punch them in the face. And on the issue of biscotti, it's the same way with panini--technically, if you just want one, it's a biscotto and a panino. Hearing someone ask for "a panini" just makes me shudder.

Well if we're broadening the category into stupid things people say because they think they're being eloquent, can somebidy please stop the world from inserting "go ahead" into sentences where it's not needed? PLEASE?

All day long I hear people saying "I'm going to go ahead and give you a bag with that" or "After you caulk the bath tub, you can go ahead and seal it" or "when you've filled out that form, you can go ahead and line up for the test" or "now we've washed your hair, we can go ahead and cut it". Why people? Why?

Paddydog,

I like your pronunciation of baroque very much, but if you say it that way these days, people will think you are referring to Senator Obama - hee!

Hey Thejodester -- how about "relator" for realtor?

Also, my ears bleed when I hear somebody say "where you at?".

Tarn:
Ten points for Fanshaw. I'd forgotten about that one. Thank God for P.G. Wodehouse or I'd never be able to keep up. Your theory on the blue bloods may be correct. I had always assumed they were so in-bred they just couldn't read properly.

Sorry -- guess the "relator" one was taken earlier in the thread!! I'm reading too fast for my own good!

PaddyDog, "baroque" as a homophone for Obama's first name? Neat!

Pissboy: My step-father (who is from Pennsylvania) does the "that car needs washed" thing. What's worse is that this usage has somehow transferred to my normally very-correct mother (who is from the Philippines). I used to correct them on it every time, but it never helped. Now I live away from home and try to forget.

And Julie: Where I'm studying now, in Lancaster, England, it is LAN-cas-ter.

I'm usually a stickler for accurate pronunciation, but the one I always get wrong is "subsequently". I stress the second syllable instead of the first. I can catch myself if I have a second to think about it, but have never corrected the problem completely.

I'll never forget when I was in high school and one of my classmates asked me what "chalant" meant. Guess we were studying prefixes -- nonchalant/non-chalant -- guess you had to be there.

I used to pronounce 'chastised' as 'chatsized'. I read The Giver when I was eight or nine and I never heard it spoken, and it just kind of fermented in my head so that even later when I learned how to read good my brain just kind of skipped over it.

And currently, I have a professor who pronounces 'chasm' with the soft 'ch'. I cringe every, single, time.

Wow, something about writing a post about words made it incredibly hard to type.

How about asterisk? It drives me crazy when people say "asterix." Which someone does daily on ESPN talking about Barry Bonds.

Also, Mr. Sarah B (why does everyone on this site do that?) pronounces mail and male as "mal" and sale and sail as "sal." And so on. I have no idea where this comes from.

Remembered a couple more:

In southern Idaho, probably 80 percent of people pronounce "Italian" as EYE-talian. I said it as a joke for awhile until one day I accidentally said it seriously, and then I had to stop.

My mom was a radio reporter, and for her very first broadcast, she reported from Tuck-son, Arizona.

One of my co-workers writes a blog, and one of our older co-workers asked if he was "still messin' around with that bloog."

my best friend and i have had a lot of discussions about mispronunciations, mostly because my parents are lexicographers (and i learned lots of big words very, very early), and she was a big reader growing up. basically, i learned words by hearing them, and she learned them as she read them. every now and then, she will say something like "epitome" or "banal" (epiTONE and bay-nal) and i laughingly correct her. i guess my point being: saying a word wrong doesn't mean you're less smart, it means you don't hang around enough people with large vocabularies. misUSE of a word, on the other hand, cracks everyone up.

ps: maybe i'm neurotic, but did anyone else have to go to dictionary.com and listen to the audio pronunciation thingamagig before they posted ever-so-knowingly about their word gaffes?

I once saw a poster that read "baroque is when you are out of Monet."

I recently found out that the word scenester is just the word scene with a ster added on... I thought it was something like "sen-esther", rhyming with banister if banister were more of a ben