Steve Blow, a columnist with The Dallas Morning News, covered frequently most pronounced words and followed up with reader input. I take this stuff seriously and appreciate anyone who corrects me.
Since I often don’t hear the exact pronunciation of words and learn most words by reading, I’ve gotten in habit of saying some words incorrectly. I try to rely on what I know about the root of the word (French, Greek, and so on), but I don’t always get it right.
One that I learned in speech therapy and now hate the word: asked. Many pronounce it axed instead of ask-t. That’s hard for me to do, so now I avoid tasked, masked, and all those nasty asked words. But just like I forget to be careful to watch my speech, I pop out one of these.
How about faux pas? It doesn’t sound anything like the animal that couldn’t catch the grapes. More like fo-paz. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve pronounced forte as for-tay. Wrong. It’s fort as in my native city of Fort Worth. For-tay is the right way to say it when talking about a music chord played loudly. But I like for-tay better. It just has a nice tone to it.
For most of my childhood, I said hors d’oeuvre completely wrong and still can’t spell it in spite of being a strong speller. How did I say it? Oh boy … I guess you could use a good laugh: whores divores. The right way: or durvz. Hey, I took French and usually the last word is silent. There isn’t even an s in the word. I’ll take appetizers instead.
Irregardless is not only mangled, but it’s also not the right word. Just regardless. What words do you often hear incorrectly pronounced? What bugs you?
My biggest pet-peeve? Merle instead of Meryl (two-syllables-and-rhymes with Cheryl), which sounds like meh-rill. Heck, I’d rather be “Hey you” than “Merle.” No offense, Merles out there.
You know something there Meryl, I think your ‘two-syllables-and-rhymes with Cheryl’ pronounciation has inadvertently given me an idea.
I’m pretty sure that it was phonetics, or same sounding words that helped me in the past to pronounce some foreign words.
Anyway, I was thinking that since these similar sounding words are helpful to people like me that maybe there ought to be a like-minded way of rhyming words in a way that would help you more with what you’re already familiar with.
I think it would be an idea to launch, or announce some kind of ‘rhyme for this weekend’ project.
Of course, it would have to be something that is more focused on one aspect of something or other. I mean, time is precious, and you wouldn’t want to be inundated with everything and anything that could possibly rhyme with words that you are or are not familiar with.
Mais oui. For-tay. Just has to be. Pronunciation by usage.
Now. I’m trying to figure out beta — beyond alpha, beta, omega…
In Ft. Worth that might mean “betta burrita”= beta.
Just kidding. Go frogs.
Cheers.