4mo ago

Some things you can't live down

89 comments

One dnd session, the dm described the room as having flaming braziers. He pronounced them as "brassieres."
We never let him forget.
- Had a DM that did the same thing. A different dm pronounced chitin as chai-tin
  
  The DM for Critical Role did that in one of the early episodes. I think that if you're making a podcast, you should check your words for pronunciation.
  
  I learned chitin from playing Morrowind. Pronounced it like "chit in" (like in "chip"). But also my local dialect/accent tends to drop pronouncing t's so it came out more like "chi'in". To this day it's an active effort to pronounce it correctly if I ever have to say it out loud
- I still mispronounce those words from time to time, and I bloody well know how they're supposed to be said.
- Oh my DM really leaned into that one. Had us searching for a golden brassiere as part of a ritual we needed to perform. We ended up picking up a rumour that the captain of the guard wears one, so on to the seduction attempt to go find out what she's into and where she hangs out. Play through the whole bit, get the brassiere and then ask what we do next. Well, now we need to burn incense in the brassiere. Now everyone just looks at eachother completely confused. Then the guy sitting next to the DM suddenly perks up and asks to see the module we're running for a sec. Tells the table it says brazier. Confusion dispelled and everyone laughing for days.
- a friend of mine wants to know how to actually pronounce braziers. what a dumb friend, right?
  
  bray-zers
  
  The magic of the modern day means you can type "define" or "pronounce" then any word into Google and it'll tell you how to say it. There's also an absurd amount of YouTube pronunciation videos for basically every word that exists.
  Not that there's a problem asking, this is more advice for future words your friend doesn't know. So you can help them. The dummy.
- I did that once, but I'm pretty sure my group has long since forgotten

On the one hand ... “Never make fun of someone if they mispronounce a word. It means they learned it by reading.”
On the other hand.. what else are friends there for?
- We were playing some game (don't even remember what) back in 2005 and I read a card that said Lebron James as "Lee-bron James".
  My wife will not let this go. It's been almost a full 2 decades, but anytime Lebron is mentioned in any context whatsoever, my wife will give me that look like "haha Lee-bron. You moron."
  
  I’m ruined on “Lee-“ anything. , because I think of Leeroy Jenkins. Now I’m just imagining Lebron just charging into every play with no strategy, shouting “Leeee-bron James!”
  
  Stories like this make for lasting relationships.
  My wife accidentally bumped someone at a traffic light while sitting immediately in front of a cop like 10 years ago. No damage, no ticket, no problems but she's SO bad with that sort of thing.
  So naturally it occasionally comes up when she's driving.

- Jokes on them I mispronounce words I learned from reading in ways not supported by the spelling
  
  That’s just English though ;)
  
  I misinterpreted core concepts of the texts I'm reading so that irregardless of my pronunciation, I have a flawed understanding of the theses!

My friend once put the emphasis on the first syllable of pedantic, and correcting him was probably the single greatest joy I’ve ever felt
- So it was ped-antic? I wonder if it's antics by children or pedestrians
- pee-dantic puh-dantic?
  
  He called me PED-an-tic, with the least stress on the middle syllable. It gave me immense pleasure to be able to say “erm, it’s ped-AN-tic…”

My friend wants to know how you actually pronounce “fugue”. What a dumb friend, right?
- It's like... "fyoog"
  
  Don't be mean!
  It's actually pronounced more like fo-GOY. Really odd word if you ask me...
- Well, all this feels a bit weird to me as a european. Americans and british pronounce it as f-you-g, but it's a french loan word, in french /fyg/ (y as in the last letter in particularly). The word itself however comes from the latin fuga, and in german and a lot of other languages the word is fuga or fuge. Fuga is of course pronounced foo-gah (well, not exactly, but close enough) so...I wouldn't laugh that hard at someone mispronouncing the word in "English" if I were them is my point I guess.
  
  I could imagine somebody thinking of the word "segue" and thinking "Ah, so 'fugue' must be pronounced fug-way."
  
  Yes, a thousand times yes. I would much rather people pronounce it pretty than follow the English "language"

I was 12 and believed chaos was 'cha-os' because I'd only ever seen it written.
- That's probably closer to the original latin than the current English butchery.
  
  It's "kaos" in ("classic") latin bcs it's copypasta from Greek.
  wikipedia/Chaos.ogg
  
  Wait, what is the current English butchery? Non-native speaker here.
- Had a classmate that thought the same. 20 years later, still amused by how funny we thought that was.
- Similar to me, I used to believe chaos was pronounced 'caus'
- I still have the irrepressible urge to pronounce the s at the end of "chaos" because I more or less learnt the word through warhammer 40k. Except in French the s is silent. But now I've moved to the south where the locals have a habit of pronouncing many silent s !
  My poor brain is so confused...

A dear friend once said, "Let's go to the mall and get some of those Bavarian peck-ins
Chris, if you're reading this, I'm still loling, bro. 25 years, still loling.
- I can't even tell what it was supposed to be
  
  Malls by me had little kiosks that would sell Bavarian pecans.
- Not pee-cans. Not pick-ahns. Not puh-kahns. Peck-ins. I love that.
  
  Exactly! Chris is Filipino, so his slight accent made it that much more endearing. Cheers to you, friend!

At church, they read the part where Jesus heals the leapers.

"Never take your friends for granite."
"It's alright, Alex. I know you're not made of stone."

At university a college pronounced 'machine' a bit like 'ma-shayna' (almost a bit Slavic? but totally on accident whatever it was). I loved it so much it stuck with me all these years, basically became headcanon.
- I'm going to pronounce colleague as college now thank you.
  
  Fuck, lol, well now I have to as well, since I was so committed.
  Then again, I always pronounce whale-cum, cock-a-ccino, etc, what's one more ~~collage~~ college.

Phonetic transcription exists for a reason. The comments here are full of "this is pronounced as this". Which isn't very helpful.
- Well of course it's not very helpful, "this" is quite frankly wrong. Use "this" instead of "this".

My father had a terrific sense of humour and would deliberately mispronounce certain words to wind up his fancy-pants daughters. "Patio" became "pay-tio", that kind of thing. But one word in particular has entered the family lexicon: "gnome", pronounced "ganOmee". Not meaning a garden ornament, but a young man of dubious moral/intellectual qualities. Our boyfriends were almost always declared gnomes.
- I do this all the time. My son used to roll his eyes, but now he joins in, asking his grandmother for a "fork and ka-nife" or saying "I can do that, it's my pierogi-tive"

swim away fugu fish, swim away!
Omg it's from 2008. Half my lifetime ago.
- Look over there Charlie! It's a magical leoplurodon!
  
  holy shit, there's a part 5 and it's 40 minutes long and
  omg
  how did I not know about this??

I don’t overreact to things I can tell are regional dialects and whatnot. But I recently watched a movie review where the guy pronounced linear as “li-nEAR” and I was the personification of the double take white guy meme. Never heard that one before. And he kept using it throughout, so, somehow, this 30ish year old man has never been corrected. I think everyone that knows him might be playing a cruel joke.

We’ll always have the time we heard a podcaster pronounce the name of the town “Stroke-on-Tent”.
- Guy I watch on YouTube drives around the UK following a 100 year old Michelin guidebook, looking at historical things on the way. It's nice and fairly cosy.
  Last weekend's video was in my neck of the woods. He visited the town of Lymington (pronounced LIM-ington), and pronounced it Lie-mington the whole time.
  90% of the comments were locals pointing it out to him.

I misdispronounciate words as a hobby.
- Had to triple check the work

Pretty mainstream. When I was a kid most people struggled to learn how to laugh these things off. These days if you speak on any platform it's a good idea to have some mispronunciations because it catches peoples attention. Even if it's the only thing they'll talk about as long as you're good natured about it you've made progress.
- Perhaps an accidental positive of engagement bait

Just looking at the word I would definetly read ir as fugu.
Looking at the Wikipedia article, it says it's pronounced fjug. Like what happened to the u and e.
- Same as what happened to “league”. Forget it, Jack - it’s Englishtown.
  
  I'ma start saying leegu now, especially if it's of legends.
- It's usually an etymological thing.
  I know fugue in french is said similarly and I wouldn't be surprised if fugue is a french loanword.
  
  entomological
  Entomology is the scientific study of insects, a branch of zoology. source: Wikipedia

My mind still reads it 'foogoo'. Just because I correct it in speech doesn't mean my mind knows and yearns for a better way.

Fyoog is just so wrong
- Sad Fyoog noises*

What else are friends for!

I keep accidentally saying innuendo and having to apologize because they happen in inappropriate situations.
I just can't help when it pops up.

Funniest thing for me as a bilingual French is people ~~butchering~~pronouncing French words like hors d'oeuvre or whatever. I mean it's funny but okay, that's both no big deal and you can always educate someone and give them the real French pronunciation if they absolutely wanna sound posh.
But then I'm always so torn when somebody has a clearly French name but again, their pronunciation is atrocious. Like, I try to just ignore it, but sometimes I can just imagine myself jumping at them and screaming how they are pronouncing it wrooooooong, hahaha!

Haggis and fugu, that's food for cult eaters
Jim Jones, Father Yod, Charles Manson, they're cult leaders

I mean, there's Bababooey.

Mine was Pil-ates.
Hey, it's not our fault English just borrows and never adapts the spelling. Or updates spelling as pronunciations change.
English spelling is atrocious.

89 comments