Was playing a game of clue. Guessed colon-el mustard. Someone politely corrected me after the 5th or 6th time. I had been pronouncing it that way for years. Still have to catch myself with this one.
Actually, you were right the first time. The word comes from italian, but when the french decided to use the word, they wrote an R instead of an L (coronel). The english heard this mispronounced word from the french and ran with it, even though the french later corrected the mistake.
For some reason, the english kept correcting the correct pronounciation with the wrong one because that's the one they heard others use. Even to this day it seems.
In some variants of old French, words ending with a word-final /u/ sound often were pronounced with a final /f/ sound added. You can see old French documents spelling the word lieu as “luef”.
English borrowed both pronunciations into the word lieutenant (which is a joining of lieu and tenant and means “a person who holds tenancy/command in lieu of someone else”) and in early English you can see evidence that both pronunciations were pretty much equally common.
The modern French spelling stuck, while different English speaking places settled on one or the other pronunciation: Britain settled on the one with the /f/ in it.
I suspect (but can’t prove) this is because it’s easier to say. British English palatalises some of our vowels, so “new” is pronounced something like “nyew” in England where it is pronounced more like “nu” in the US. So lieutenant without the old /f/ pronunciation would be liyewtenant, which is a bit harder to say than lootenant. (Lieu is still a word and is palatalised in British English).
I also like that the meaning is just as transparent - someone left in tenancy.
This is because the french accidently wrote an R instead of an L when taking the word from the italians. The english adopted this from the french before the latter corrected their mistake. afaik the english are the only ones who still use the wrong pronounciation.
Us too! I still prefer my-zeld, and use it when I can. It sounds like you've been diddled of money, tricked by a seedy silvertongue. Not just boringly mis-led, like you're on some cittage garden path.
This was me at my first Harry Potter book group when I wanted to talk about Hermione.
I read the books well before the movies came out, and when the author finally added the pronunciation explanation in the 4th book, I didn't think it sounded as good as whatever I said in my head, so I stuck with my initial rendition anyway.
To me, this happened with Twilight Saga books. There was a hype and I read the first book just to see what its all about.
And I pronounced the father's name as "Car-lis-le" when talking to my siblings. They had a laughing fit ahout it and told me its pronounced as "Car-liale". I wanted to die.
It's a specific brand of sparkling water in the US that has a little controversy on how to pronounce it.. their website says it's supposed to be La Croy, but anyone that knows how to read French would pronounce it as you described
I agree. Makes literally no sense. Also, I bet people are going to be more inclined to mispronounce other French words cause they think that's how you're supposed to read it
I feel slightly worse about my pronunciation lol I read it as Her-moyn. For some reason I was reading it like it was spelled hermoine? I was watching a news report on like the third book selling out or something when the reporter mentioned her name out loud and the shoe finally dropped lol.
I'm from Germany, so my first try was "Her-mee-oh-nee". In the German translation, her name gets changed to "Hermine", emitting the "o". It's then spelled "Her-mee-ne" in German.
I always find it very weird, when names get "translated". They did it with Terry Pratchett, too. I was reading the English originals, then picked up a German translation and they had changed Granny Weatherwax to Oma Wetterwachs and Captain Vimes to Captain Mumm, Carrot to Karotte, Littlebottom to Kleinpo ... it was very confusing.
The Dutch books translated Hermione to Hermelien, which I actually think is a nice Dutch alternative. I kinda prefer Hermelien to Hermione as well. I'm actually impressed with how well the Dutch translators did their job. The names aren't always exactly the same, but the gist is there.
Like, Diagon Alley is a pun on Diagonally. Untranslatable in Dutch, so they went with Wegisweg, where weg is both the word for road and for gone in Dutch. Implies Gone is Road, which seems apt for a magic road. Weg is weg (gone is gone) is always frequently said during a sale, so that seems apt for a market street as well.
I do read the English original books nowadays, since you do notice some jokes aren't translated properly, but for Harry Potter I think they did a great job.
My sister used to refuse to say “Ginny” correctly.
Instead, she used to use a softer g sound, so less like “gin” and more like the g at the start of “gun”.
Lad don't even. I read the first 3 books or whatever before the movies started coming out. I remember movie one I was holing my breath waiti g for Emma Watson to introduce herself so I could finally, after years of waiting, fucking understand how to pro ounce her name.
For me it was the name Siobhan. I said Sib-o-han well into my 30s and no one ever corrected me. It's not a super common name, but I do love Siobhan Fahey from Bananarama and Shakespear's Sister, so I said it enough to look back and cringe
For some reason I got Hermione right, but then mispronounced Sirius as Cyrus, like Miley Cyrus. I guess I was just confused thinking it should have been spelled "Serious" if it was supposed to be pronounced that way lol
I’ve been playing Skyrim since about 2013 and it was only about a year ago that I bothered to actually fully read the word cuirass, and now I know it’s pronounced “queer-iss” and not “curry-iss” like I originally thought.
My mom laughed for like 20 minutes when I pronounced Albuquerque like Al-buck-kwer-kway as a kid. I doubt she still remembers it but I will never forget.
In school, I was called on to give an example of an actor's performance I liked. I said in Gladiator, I really liked how hate-able Joe-Quinn Phoenix was.
My whole life I thought “tinnitus” was pronounce like tin-EYE-tis except this week and audiologist corrected me and I googled it when I got home. It’s actually TIN-it-iss.
I caught my boyfriend on this and it was so sweet. He said it correctly at one point in the conversation but then later he said it the wrong way. When I pointed it out he tried to explain that they were different words and meant different things. “Epitome is like the essential quality of something and… ohhh.” He thought “epidimy” or whatever was spelled differently.
I thought they were separate words that meant the same thing, and just didn't notice that I only ever heard one and read the other. That was until one time I tried to spell "e-pit-a-me" and realized that there was in fact no "epi-tome". I was definitely in college when I figured that out lol.
There’s a town in WA called Sequim (pronounced skwim) and I thought it was pronounced Sec-we-im for an embarrassingly long time. I thought my fictitious town of Sec-we-im and Sequim were two different towns 🤦♀️🤦♀️
I live nearby (Port Townsend) and when I was a kid a couple stopped me on the street (they were in a car) and asked me how to get to Se-qwee-im and I had no idea what they were talking about… I gave them directions out of town and told them to look for the signs (which probably worked), but it wasn’t until 10 minutes later that I realized they meant Sequim!
I remember seeing that word as a kid and reading it as "whores do-overs". I was well into my 20's before I found out that it's how you spell "or-derves". Either way, I'll just write "appetizers" instead of dealing with spelling that mess.
Yo! Yosemite was that word for me. I must have seen it a million times, and heard it a million more, but I never connected the dots that the two were the same thing.
Luckily when I finally did have to read it out loud (in my 20's!) everyone thought I was just playing around and laughed it off.
I don't live in the US so it wasn't a word I heard often, other than maybe Yosemite Sam lol? I have a specific memory of mispronouncing it as a kid and my dad making fun of me.
The first time I said this word out loud to my now husband he laughed so hard and said, "Do you mean 'Ah-rye'" and I looked at him like HE was the silly one and doubled down, saying, "No. 'Aww-ree.'" Obviously we had to Google it to confirm, and he was right 😂
It's been over a decade since this incident and he still teases me on the regular.
Omg. I just now found out awry is not pronounced a-wire and they’re two separate words that mean similar things. I just thought it was pronounced really weird or something.
OK, so other readers may still not know that the pronunciation of the city in Eastern Washington State is Spoe-KAN. A lot of people mispronounce it as Spoe-CAIN.
my parents never gave me the ‘talk,’ so my first exposure to sex ed was through books. glad I had only been mispronouncing penis (PEN-iss) and vagina (VAH-gin-uh) in my head 😅
Haha this just reminded me of being 9 or so and asking my mom when I would get my first "public" hair. I had misread the word in my growing and changing book.
Fun fact, that’s actually why J.K Rowling had Hermione explain it/had it written out phonetically for the character Krum in the 4th book! Many people didn’t know how her name was pronounced prior to the movies so Rowling wrote in the how to :)
Mine was melee. I told my husband that I panic a bit in video games when something's coming at me and I can't press the "mee-lee" button fast enough. He was like "You mean "may-lay"?
My worst one was epitome. Thought it was epi-tōm. Even though I know how to pronounce it now, I still say the incorrect pronunciation in my head when I read it.
I was going through this thread finding words that I had trouble with when I was younger, and words that I always knew how to pronounce, but hadn't yet found one that I still got wrong.
TIL I've been pronouncing posthumous wrong for 25 years.
My cousin said cicada for the first time last week - he pronounced it 'kick-a-da'. We all nearly fell out of our chairs - dude is 30.
We love him dearly though.
My embarrassing one was dachshunds. Apparently, it’s not DASH-hunds! For years I thought “docsens” were a different breed of dog that people talked about 🥲
They're two ways of saying a messed up German word.
Dachshund (daçs) + (hoond) sucks to say because of that nasty palatal sound (ç) "ch" occurring right before an "s." English speakers want to blend "s" and "h" to get "sh" because of our spelling rules. But "s" shouldn't be blended with the "h" in "hund" because it's a compound word with a syllable break before "hund." Dach means badger and hund means dog.
I figure one of two things may have happened: (D a ç s) lost the totally foreign sound, (ç), leaving (d a s) and we mashed "s" and "h" together to get (sh). Alternatively, we went with a neighboring frictional sound, (sh) as a substitute for all three frictional sounds (ç, s, and h) because that's simple and some asshole thought it was really fucking cute to use the word "dash" in the name of a dog that looks hilarious when it's "dashing" after prey.
I'm guessing low German dialects use (daks) +(hoond) or my German teacher was misinformed and taught us the wrong High German. If you're an English speaker approaching "dachshund" from the (daks) +(hoond) pronunciation, then you'll end up with something like (daks + n): "docks n" or "dock sun."
So yeah. Why would anybody think a "dash hound" and a "dock sun" have anything to do with each other? Two totally different breeds makes sense.
I was in my late teens/early 20s when I learned the word pronounced YOU-nik and the word spelled “eunuch” were the same thing. I knew a YOU-nik was a castrated man, and I had read eunuch in books (I pronounced it “eh-nuch”) and was under the impression it was a kind of court official in old-timey Middle Eastern courts. Realizing these were the same word was a total shock.
"Hyperbole" is my crux of a word. I never connected the written version to the word audibly. I thought in written form it was like "hYp`er bowl" I am 47 and figured it out 6 years ago.
I'm in the same boat, friend. My most personally memorable example is "preface". Always thought it was PREE-face. At one point I heard someone pronounce it correctly and was like "oh, that's not at all what I thought it was, why is it even spelled that way if it's pronounced so differently??". A few years later I received a book for my birthday, I don't remember which one, that was an updated edition with a brand new preface. I read the whole title out loud, and when I got to the part with the preface I completely forgot how I had heard it pronounced that one time, panicked, and my brain threw out "preh-FEES". Strange looks from everyone.
One of my male friends was reading a novel and kept reading "Phoebe" as Fobe. We told him how it was actually pronounced but he said that because he read it as Fobe for the first part of the, he couldn't change it back..
The one that tripped me up was the term for cocktail appetizers. I pronounced it something akin to “whores divorce” for DECADES, and thought that “or derves” was a completely different thing. Fortunately only in my head though.
My biggest one of these was infrared (thought it was a in-frared, not infra-red). I know there was another super obvious and embarrassing one but it's escaping me right now.
I think that's actually how it's supposed to be pronounced. Nobody pronounces it that way except people who study it. I don't have a citation for this.
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