Up until recently, I thought that the US national park was pronounced “yo-semite”, as if it was some sort of ghetto-slang used for greeting a Jewish person.
Ahahhahhahahaaha that’s actually amazing
That’s amazing
There was an '80s cop show called Hill Street Blues that had a recurring latino character named Jesus. All I heard as a kid was “Hey, Zeus” so I thought his actual name was Zeus and everybody just said “hey” to him when addressing him.
I love this so much!
I thought Yosemite Sam had pretty much taught all English speakers the correct pronunciation. I remember my parents saying their Swedish relatives pronounced it “Yohsmeet.”
I have no idea who that is.
EDIT: Oh, that guy. And now I know his name.
Non-native English speaker, young, or both?
The former. Noggie, to be precise. Plus I didn’t watch a whole lot of Bugs Bunny growing up either.
Wassa “Noggie”?
Norwegian
Thank you! Going to call my Brother In-Law that now…
I say it that way sometimes for fun. I live nearish so sometimes, when visitors hear me say if, they ask if that’s how it’s actually pronounced
are you Donald Trump by chance
You’re not alone, brother.
Wait how do you phonetically say this?
Yo - seh - mit - ee
Doesn’t mean it isn’t cute/funny when it does happen, though. Just this week my SO pronounced chihuahua as “CHA-HOO-A-HOO-A” so I told them “you know this word, it’s the taco bell dog” lol
Thank you for the new method to make my family groan.
I have been pronouncing it like this since my buddy fucked it up in grade school lmao
Les Nessman comes to mind.
That dog died over a decade ago. Do younger kids know what that is?
Also dialects are a thing. The way a lot of words come out of my mouth has been culturally labeled as ignorant. I go out of my way to change my pronunciations at work so I get taken seriously, but I’ve been doing it less now that I’m accepted in that world. Maybe that caps how much farther I can go, but maybe I don’t want to go further if it means continuing to act like people who sound like how I sound are less than
You should never mock someone who pronounces a word strangely: They might be from Reading.
Me whenever someone can’t pronounce a word
Which by the way is a town name that very often gets mispronounced by people who only read it in books.
Made even more confusing if someone is reading literature at Reading.
Whew don’t get me started about towns called Lebanon in the USA Midwest…
Was that pronounced like red-ing?
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Pour one out for all my epi-tome homies
Brian Regan presents: Epi-tome of hyper bowl.
Have some Worcestershire sauce on me!
Or… or you read it in the 3 word title of a meme. Doesn’t matter, learned word.
Words go brrrr.
It was embarrassingly recently that I realized segue and “segway” were the same word which I apparently didn’t know how to spell.
Edit: BTW - the weird way that English words are spelled or pronounced - and why - is one of my favorrite nerd subjects. I love this thread so freaking much. And how RIGHT nearly everyone here SHOULD have been.
In your defense, “Segway” is a real brand of some kind of transport thingy, which might be where you picked it up.
And they’re named that because they make devices that move smoothly from one place to another, just like the literary device.
Bro let me tell you how recently I realized…
👆
Lol
segue puts me straight into a fugue state
Pronounced “foog-way”.
Yeah, that’s very much an English thing. Many other languages use reasonably consistent spelling and pronunciation, so memorizing the handful of exceptions isn’t really a problem.
However, with English it’s the other way around. You need to memorize the handful of words that are actually pronounced the way they are written. Everything else is just pure chaos. If you read a word, you can’t pronounce it. If you hear a word, you can’t find it in a dictionary.
As a homeschooled kid with a big vocabulary I was largely not able to pronounce (more reading than talking), this is a sentiment I wish I’d heard earlier in life.
I’m sorry. I hate that the stereotype that stuck for homeschool kids wasn’t that they’re often very well read and advanced, because that has been my experience encountering them over the years.
In fairness, that stereotype is largely due to capital H Homeschooled kids like me. as in, the subculture as opposed to simply the method of schooling at home.
If you meet someone who was in the subculture, you need to navigate through a few levels of weird damage before our vocabulary is even close to the most notable thing about us.
Opposite for me. Homeschooled kids are weird and dumb generally. I’m sorry I’m weird too. May be my geography because I’m in a super conservative area. The people here who decide to do homeschooling are typically conspiracy theory rednecks.
This was me with a number of words over the years, but most memorable “paradigm.”
The one that wakes me up in the middle of the night is albeït. I thought it was fancy foreign speak pronounced “all bait”, but it is just a short form of “all be it”, is pronounced exactly like that, and is a synonym for “all though it be”.
Gif
Jjjjjifff
“Facade” caught me in high school.
Interestingly (to me), I have the opposite problem in Spanish. I’ve learned mostly through immersion, so when I see a Spanish word written down sometimes I’m like “Holy heck THAT’S how you spell carrot??” Spanish is a language where the spelling/pronounciation rules are really consistent, but it’s still surprising to see some of these words without having ever thought of how they might be spelled. Toallas (towels) got me too.
I still have to “translate” that one in my head every time I read it.
Same!
And I definitely read it out loud in front of a class in high school the wrong way.
When I was learning Japanese, I came across a sentence along the lines of “lets buy stuff at the <shoppingumouru>”, I could understand most of it fine, but didn’t recognize bracketed word, which was conveniently written in a script that denotes loan words (and I have trancscribed phonetically above). I probably spent at least half an hour trying to look up “shoppingumouru” simce I couldn’t find it in my dictionary. Eventually, I turned to Google translate and immediately facepalmed when I saw the answer.
Is it shopping mall?
Yes! Japanese is a phonetic language and loan words are just phonetisized versions using the syllables (sounds) they have in their alphabet. The katakana version of their alphabet is for just for loan words, onomatopoeias (moo, meow, woof), and other things that are not words. Katakana symbols just represent sounds, not meanings.
I studied Malayalam (the language of Kerala state in India) a few years ago. I learned the script quickly and one day walking through the capital of Thiruvananthapuram I saw a van with the word “POLICE” and then the Malayalam word underneath it. I was all excited to learn a new Malayalam word without needing my tutor, until I sounded it out and realized it was just “POLICE” written with the Malayalam script.
Fun fact: Malayalam is the only language whose named is a palindrome. Its English name, at least - in the Malayalam script it’s not.
When learning Spanish I read in a book that skateboarding was montar en monopatin. In college I spoke that in oral exam. My professor was like what the fuck is that?
Unless it’s a YouTuber. Then they’re possibly pronouncing it wrong so people will comment about their pronunciation and fuel the algorithm.
Me as a small children: I’ll PRE-FACE this by saying…
Family: wait, what??
I did not feel honorable…
Me as a grown-ass Spaniard right now: wait, it’s not pre-face? Is it pre-fis?
Pref-is
Damn, thank you
Just make it clear that it’s a short e like in preference and a soft s.
It is. And yet, we’re both still correct. Somehow…
Same with pre-dator for me xD
An-tea-queues
And rather ironically:
Kway instead of Queue --8th grade substitute teacher caught me on that one while reading aloud.
Ha - and yet “quay” can be pronounced as “kway”, or “kay” or “key” - and mean the same thing - depending on context. Mostly if it’s part of a name, and who named it.
Also sometimes it’s spelled “key” instead.
Yo sa mite for Yosemite is my worst one.
My sister and I did this intentionally to be funny as kids. We took my son there last year and he did the same thing without hearing the story. Pretty funny for me.
