OK, I'm from Boston, so I could make a list of words that we screw up... like the fact that we don't pronounce the letter R, but we add it to some words that don't have it.

drawer = draw
park = paak

yet we add it to words that don't have it

idea = idear

what pisses me off is the people who pronounce towel as tawl

No shit. That's some strange stuff.

omg i have a friend who says "liberry".
i just want to smack her everytime she says that word.
she also says "birfffday".
that makes me want to smack her, too.

Remind me not to mispronounce around bernie.

I say Soul-der instead of Saw-der Soldering gun.

There's one other that I mispronounce but I can't remember it right now...

I have heard people say
sermony instead of ceremony
restaurount (where the roun is pronounced like roun in round) instrad of restaurant.

Because the origins are all screwed up... Read on!

In the case of "aluminum" (as I will spell it because this is, after all, my column), we can pin the whole mess on Sir Humphry Davy, the English chemist who discovered the stuff back in 1807. Indulging in the perversity of which historical figures seem fond, Davy named his discovery not "aluminum," nor even "aluminium," but "alumium," basing the term on the Latin "alumen," meaning "alum," a substance drawn from the same mineral that had been used since ancient times for dyeing hides and the like. This is all a bit confusing, but we can take comfort in the fact that Davy was apparently a bit befuddled too. Around 1812 he decided that the proper name of his discovery was not "alumium," but actually "aluminum." Almost immediately Davy was besieged by other scientists who pointed out that if Davy would just add an "i" to make the term "aluminium," it would fall into line with such other substance names as "sodium" and "calcium" and, in their words, "sound more classical." So Davy named it yet again, this time to "aluminium," and the "ium" form became standard in both the U.S. and Great Britain.

Unfortunately, many people in the U.S. had evidently stopped listening by that point and continued to call the stuff "aluminum," and this spelling became so widespread that it was eventually adopted as the standard in the U.S. "Aluminium," however, is the official spelling used by international chemical societies. One hopes that Sir Humphry Davy, wherever he may be, is at last happy.

then there's gloucester, MA...

i know a few people who say:

bag as beg
or magazine as megazine
or wag as weg, etc.

i hate it when people say dontchoo instead of "dont you".

i say the word "interesting" funny.

This is just a case of my reading ahead in elementary school and not having anyone to tell me how to pronounce a new word, but I have to really concentrate to say "onomatopoeia" correctly. My version is more like "onomatOpia," rhyming with the "autopia" ride as Disneyland, or "utopia."

my dad says random words funny.
regular =reg-uh-lur
field goal =field go
they're a bunch more, but none i cant think of at the moment.

Man, I don't say any of those things. :eek:


I will occasionally say goverNment, though.

has anyone said "vanella" yet? The bugs me. I heard it at work tonight.

The Canadian way of pronouncing the letter A is EH. lol

Have you ever read Harry Potter (but you are not Brittish)

There is a character named Hermione.

After a new books of pronouncing it wrong I finally learnt how to pronounce it becuase the author actually wrote it out phonetically.

I read it as Hermi-own

Apparently the name is pronounced Her-my-o-knee

I have also head someone pronounce it as Hermi One (like Hermi One Kanobi)

I've heard most people pronounce it her-my-knee, which sounds much better than her-my-O-knee. I was thinking, what a stupid way to pronounce the name, when I first read it.

Also, how abour clerks, eh? Who decided that it'd be a great idea to pronounce it as "clarks"?

I just remembered another one: Horrible. (I think) Americans pronounce it like whore-rible. Cracked me up earlier today when a song had a line that went: She's a whore~~ (You can imagine my surprise,) ~rible liar.