Comments on: Misled on Beijing: The words that twist our tongues

By: Barbara Jean

Barbara Jean — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 19:18:22 +0000

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!

By: Janet

Janet — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 05:24:42 +0000

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.

By: Marc Acito

Marc Acito — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 23:36:21 +0000

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)?

By: Sharon

Sharon — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 18:02:03 +0000

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.

By: Sarah

Sarah — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 14:38:43 +0000

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.)

By: barry

barry — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 14:34:44 +0000

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.

By: Sarah

Sarah — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 14:34:29 +0000

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?

By: Bob Hicks

Bob Hicks — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 14:02:36 +0000

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?

By: Sherry Lamoreaux

Sherry Lamoreaux — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 13:47:00 +0000

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.

By: MightyToyCannon

MightyToyCannon — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 05:17:58 +0000

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.