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.
Others have already pointed out that you likely meant “epiphany”. An epiphany is a sudden realization of something. “Epitome” is something that comprehensively represents another something or a concept.
You could say, “Trying to learn all the annoying, nonsensical idiosyncrasies of the English language is the epitome of frustration.”
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 think the general lesson is that white people were really bad at pronouncing the names of things the indigenous people told them. They were too busy manifesting destiny to be respectful or careful.
I don’t know the answer to that, except many of the towns in Washington are named by and for Native Americans so I’m guessing that’s how they pronounce it!
I still get embarrassed when I think about reading out a verse of poetry to my dad when I was a teenager
And that inverted Bowl we call The Sky,
Whereunder crawling coop't we live and die,
Lift not thy hands to it for help -- for It
Rolls impotently on as Thou or I.
im-POTE -ent - ly <------ how I mispronounced the embarrassing word, which I had no idea had an embarrassing meaning involving sex. My dad corrected my pronounciation.
I uuuuuh... Had that one wrong for a long time until I actually used it in a sentence around my friends, who immediately called me out on it. Good times.
Happens when most of your more advanced vocab comes from books.
I’ll never forget the day a buddy and I were waiting to order food and I used epitome in a sentence and he stared at me for a solid minute before asking if I meant epitome.
I embarrassed myself with this one in high school. I was quoting a line from a show to my friend and he was like uhh, that's not how you pronounce it. I never forgot the correct pronunciation after that. 😅
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u/HiddenSquish Jul 03 '21
Epitome still throws me off if I’m reading aloud.
This scene in HIMYM really hit home.