Misled on Beijing: The words that twist our tongues
(This is a reader-participation posting. You, too, can embarrass yourself thoroughly by fessing up to the words you’ve mispronounced, misconstrued or generally mistreated for most of your natural born days. Hit that comment button!)
Comes this, from the venerable Associated Press: Apparently the host city of the Michael Phelps Quadrennial Swimathon is Bay-JING, not Bay-ZHING.
Who knew?
Well, more than a billion Chinese citizens, for starters. And probably Richard Nixon, may he rest in semi-peace, and Henry Kissinger, who (I never thought I’d say a thing like this) might have been a handy fellow to have around to fend off the Russia-Georgia hot-war tiff that seems to have been made possible partly by American diplomatic and political miscues.
But not me, until the AP set me straight. And not the majority of our television talking heads. And maybe not you.
Some people seem to gravitate to the soft-z Bay-ZHING because it sounds, well, foreign and exotic, according to the AP. But that, the news service points out, is like saying New ZHER-zey: It just ain’t right. (And there’s nothing much exotic about New Jersey, although the views of Manhattan from West New York are pretty darned killer.)
So, the big question: What other words have we been mangling, misconstruing, mixing up? Which words in our private lexicons have meanings or pronunciations known only to us, even though we blissfully believe the rest of the English-speaking world is fully attuned to our singular and quaintly idiosyncratic interpretations?
Some years ago — oh, say when I was in my early 30s — a friend confessed that when she was a kid she thought the word “mis-led” was “MYZ-uld.” Heh-heh, I replied, and never let on that until that moment “misled” had MYZ-uld me completely. Oh, I knew about mis-led, and what it meant. But I was under the impression that there were two words: ordinary, garden variety mis-led, which was merely descriptive, and the beautiful MYZ-uld, which meant mis-led, but with nefarious purpose — a pirate word, a word signifying skulduggery. I miss it still.
I did better on ATH-ens, only tumbling to its true pronunciation in fourth- or fifth-grade world history, when the teacher got around to talking about Mt. Olympus and the Acropolis and other stuff I’d been reading and dreaming about for a few years. Trouble is, I’d only been reading about it, and in my little personal classical cosmos the great city of the ancient world was AY-thens, with a “th” like “the,” not like “therapy,” which I almost needed to deal with the disillusionment.
Sure, there are others. But why embarrass myself still more? Time for you to embarrass yourselves. Give us the lowdown on your badspeak. All of Art Scatterdom wants to know!
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In junior high there was this poor guy who pronounced the word “determined” as DETTER-mined, much to the amusement of then entire 7th-grade class. That followed him around for years….but I can’t be too superior about it. I pronounced “bas relief” as BASS relief well into young adulthood.
Comment by MrMead — August 19, 2008 @ 4:20 pm
Bas, humbug, Mr. Mead. (As a stage adapter of “A Christmas Carol,” that’s a subject I believe you know a thing or two about.)
Actually, you could have been showing your nascent progressive politics: Bass relief could be the dynamiting of unnecessary dams to return the free flow to rivers and streams, thus allowing the fish to move unimpeded to their spawning grounds. Surely that’s what you meant!
Comment by Bob Hicks — August 19, 2008 @ 4:40 pm
A high school friend of mine pronounced ‘both’ with an ‘L’, ‘bolth’. He spoke with such confidence that others (including me) would pick up the pronunciation. Later I would sit and mouth the work truly confused about that misplaced ‘L’. Now he is a trial lawyer.
Comment by rachael — August 19, 2008 @ 6:22 pm
For years I bought the Reading (as in what you’re doing to this post) Railroad in Monopoly games until I took a trip to Reading (as in Redding) Pennsylvania. I went through the Po-KO-nos to get there.
Comment by Laurel Hicks — August 19, 2008 @ 8:16 pm
My pals at CultureShock and I still chuckle over the pronunciation of “denouement” by a board member of a major theater company (and prominent attorney) as he discussed a play. Rather than pronouncing it in the French manner, he spoke of the plot’s “de-NEW-ment.” Of course, that’s how we all say it to this day.
More recently, I was chagrined to hear my father (a well-read, well-traveled educator and theater-lover) refer to a performance venue as a “VEE-new.” Had he been saying it that way for all his 80 years?
My own source of embarrassment is about meaning, not pronunciation. Well into my adulthood, I had the meaning of “hubris” backwards. Because it starts with “hu”, I assumed it had the same root as “humility.” Now I know that admitting my error demonstrates a lack of hubris.
Comment by MightyToyCannon — August 19, 2008 @ 9:17 pm
Oh, where to begin? I’ve always read much more than spoken (or listened, unfortunately). I have a “hubris” of my own…I said hoo-BREE until just a few years ago. I probably said it with great confidence and a bit of a lilt. It felt good on the tongue and I’m sorry to have been obliged to give it up.
Comment by Sherry Lamoreaux — August 20, 2008 @ 5:47 am
Ah, yes! There’s the point: the pain of giving up something we’ve held dear, even after we’ve discovered it’s been making a fool of us! We love our hoo-BREE, our MYZ-ulings, our de-NEW-ments, even our overly literary railroad towns, because they sound true and comforting to us, and to lose the use of them is to reluctantly give up a little bit of ourselves to the Greater Good, which can be a cold master. I know an intelligent, well-read woman who always refers unironically to that place where shows are put on stage as “the thee-YAY-tur.” It feels right to her, and I have never felt the urge to set her straight: Why steal the pleasure of a thing well wrong?
Comment by Bob Hicks — August 20, 2008 @ 6:02 am
Ah, Penelope. She unraveled her weaving in the dead of night to ward off suitors, and she rhymed with envelope. It didn’t quite seem to have that epic flair to me, but who was I to argue with Homer, who, after all, was much older and deader than me?
Comment by Sarah — August 20, 2008 @ 6:34 am
Let’s see, beyond some of the words that growing up in the middle of Kentucky stretched in weird ways (I lived in Versailles, Kentucky, pronounced Ver-sails, for example), I have two words persistently mispronounced into middle age, when I finally caught them but now fear using: ebullient and desultory. I still don’t like that ‘bull’ in ebullient (i was accenting the first e and dropping the i altogether). And I quite enjoyed accenting the ’sult in desultory.
Comment by barry — August 20, 2008 @ 6:34 am
Oh! And “demur.” I knew it was a way of responding to something, since Jane Austen uses it as a dialogue tag, but somehow I mixed it up with “demure,” so I figured it was a way of disagreeing without actually disagreeing, maybe by making polite, non-word sounds. I figured that one out about a month ago, actually.
(So, is there a word for that? The “you’re-an-idiot-but-I’m-not-going-to-say-it” noise? I miss having that word.)
Comment by Sarah — August 20, 2008 @ 6:38 am
Having just returned from lovely New Jersey, I must point out that many natives there actually pronounce it JOY-zee. And, can you honestly say an accent like that is not exotic?
Oddly enough, I recently came upon a word that defines the misuse of words: “catachresis” (kat-uh-KREE-sis). My own example is envelop, which I once pronounced envelope. “The smoke enveloped him.” There’s no way to cover that one up…but my friends mocked me so much, I never made that mistake again.
Comment by Sharon — August 20, 2008 @ 10:02 am
We were just discussing this topic last night when one of our party asked, “Is it pronounced NIGH-ilism or KNEE-ilism?” and no one could answer.
Sometimes it’s fun to intentionally mispronounce a word, like one writer friend who always says, “High-larious” to describe her mirth. Or the way I insist on pronouncing Willa-met, which is the way the word Willamette was pronounced in Colorado Springs (where I lived before Portland).
And, by the way, how do you pronounce Emmaus, as in the religious painting “Christ at Emmaus,” which features prominently in “The Forger’s Spell,” by Edward Dolnick (a wonderful read by the way)?
Comment by Marc Acito — August 23, 2008 @ 3:36 pm
A young friend referred to a “molester” — mole-ster, like shyster or monster — and it took me a second to realize what he was trying to say.
(You can count me into the “myzled” brigade too; I think I had somehow conflated it with “miser.”)
I think the “bolth” pronunciation is regional — I’ve heard other midwesterners use it. I associate it with my late mother-in-law, who also said “warsh” for wash and “srimp” for shrimp.
Comment by Janet — August 23, 2008 @ 9:24 pm
I seem to remember a certain big brother giving me grief for pronouncing Liberace “Libber-ace”… And then there was that awful time as a community college remedial English teacher when I referred to Proust (to rhyme with “oust” of course) and was corrected by a student–who consequently dropped the class because I was such an idiot!
Comment by Barbara Jean — August 24, 2008 @ 11:18 am