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The Tomato Nation advice column addresses your questions on etiquette, grammar, romance, and pet misbehavior. Ask The Readers about books or fashion today!
The word is not “preg-net.” The word is “preg-NANT.” “-NANT.” When you pronounce it “pregnet,” you sound like a five-year-old. Stop it.
The fact that it’s 90210 reruns of the Jackie-and-Mel-spawn era that drew my ire on this topic is rather pathetic, but I ain’t wrong.
I’ve (re-)discovered a few things over the course of the recent Days Of Rage. Some of them are great!
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a lonely girl in possession of a library card must be in want of a twin. The child who spends a lot of time in books also spends …
I had a roommate who would pronounce Chinese as “Chi-neice” instead of “Chi-neeze” and it made me so mad!
@Kerry – Oh my, a coworker always says “acrost.” At first I thought it was some kind of technical term — we work in IT, and often discuss sending messages between systems. But then I realized it was just some kind of regionalism I had never heard before. And it is like nails on a chalkboard.
Oh, and I’m incapable of pronouncing “schooner” correctly. It comes out “schoo-ner.” Fortunately I live inland and don’t have much to do with boats, so it doesn’t come up very often.
@Margaret: I looked it up. Hee!
Here in Dallas, one of the local NHL announcers always says lackSadaisical instead of lackadaisical when a player seems listless or lethargic. Drives me nuts.
@ryan and @smartyboots
I wasn’t in So Cal for more than six months before I’d picked up calling it “the 5” and “the 163,” mostly because coworkers would sneer and say “Nobody EVER calls it an ‘Interstate.'”
My Dad, however, loved how it sounded when he heard me mention it. He said that’s an almost British way of talking.
@krissa – “adamant” is definitely understandable, it’s not like we’re adding extra letters to pronounce it differently. My sister was guilty of the “upspur” thing though. It took hearing the word “usurper” on TV to clue her in:
Kthryn: Ooo, “usurpur,” that’s a cool word, I’ll go look it up in the dictionary. Huh, funny, it’s right there next to “upspur”…….Oh. Well crap.
After Katrina & Rita and all that, I was hungover in a hotel room, so I watched Headline News for about 5 hours – every time the talking-head lady talked about Galveston, she said “Gavel-ston”. Like, did anyone hear her say this 10 times & think about correcting her??
Hee hee – ‘terror alert’ reminds me of that 30 Rock – ‘The Rural Juror’.
One more. I’m not sure if this is a dialect thing or just a mistake, but when people pronounce the word ‘greasy’ as ‘greezy.’ Has anyone else heard this? I’ve heard it both from laypeople and media people.
I’m from the South, born and raised, and I would like it known that “ax” for “asked” is not a Southern thing. It’s a you’re-saying-it-wrong thing. I now live in NYC and people here say “ax” too. It’s just as annoying in the South as it is everywhere else.
“Respite” is not pronounced like “despite”? Like I said, I’m Southern, so I say them like “ri-spite” “di-spite”. I’m pretty sure it’s supposed to be “rEspite” like it’s spelled, but now I’m not sure. How are you supposed to say them?
@Margaret: Thanks for the laugh!
“My fellow Merkins”. Hee!
(I didn’t know such a thing even existed.)
@Margaret in CO: you should have warned us not to look up “merkins” on our work computers!!!
@Kari: My grandmother pronounced it “greezy.” Born and raised in Philly, lived in the area her whole life. I use it too, but only to refer to metaphorical greasiness (i.e. a person or his/her hygiene); a thing with literal grease on it is “gree-cee.”
I love these. You’re all cracking me up.
@Jen M & Irish: I say moo point on purpose just because it makes me laugh. My husband will concur, “you’re right, it’s moo.”
re: larynx and pharynx
i agree that it’s not NIX, it’s more like you’re swallowing the n and x together, hard to type out, sort of sounds like nnnks
My husband is from “Bawt-mer, Murruhlind”, and says “acrost” all the time, though I’ve finally broken him of pronouncing H2O as “wudder”. Thankfully, he has never asked me to “warsh” the dishes or asked me what I think of his latest “draw-ling”. After 12 years of marriage, I can give him a serious fit of heebie-jeebies by imitating his father. Even worse, I’m from Brooklyn, but I speak newscaster English, so his “toity-toid and toid” jokes just don’t work. Sorry, Honey.
Oh God…so many variations of local patois…and so many varieties of mispronunciation!! ditto to everyone else’s pet peeves, AND one of my own: you know that place in Pennsylvania where the Amish flourish? I can never remember whether it’s LANcaster, or Lan’c’ster. Every time I say it, whoever I’m with corrects me. Perhaps there is no universally correct pronunciation. Oh, and my SigOth pronounces Amish with a LONG A.
Gaaaack!!!! Also says foo-pah instead of faux (FOE) pas. Not sure whether this is inadvertant or an evil plan to drive me looney-tunes.
AND I had a roommate in college who, like me, hails from Jersey…BUT from mid-southern Jersey ( not the Passaic County north end, like me ). For her, sausage became “sossage” and orange was “ornj”. Go figure.
@mab:
Bleechk! SigOth also pronounces Chinese as chi-niece. I swear I can NOT be held accountable if he ever utters the sentence: “That Chi-niece dude just committed a foo-pah by taking a photo of that AAAmish guy.”
@Katie: You’re okay with “dee-spite” but my mom claims respite is pronounced “REH-spit.” Which doesn’t sound right at ALL.
Aaaand I just looked it up. And she’s right. Goshdarnit.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/respite
“Sussessful.” “Assessable.”
How hard is that x sound in the middle? I had a college professor who did that one!
The boyfriend, who has a charming southwestern Pennsylvania accent, occasionally calls the Microsoft computer operating system “WIN-ders.” It’d be cuter if he didn’t halfway work in IT and thus need to reference it all the time.
I love that I’m not the only person who freaks about stuff like this.
My roommate freshman year pronounced breakfast as bre-fixt. Bre. Fixt. My ears still bleed just thinking about it. (shudder) She also said “supposably” and spelled it suppozubly.
I moved out 2nd semester.
@Llyzabeth: Merriam-Webster lists the respite/despite rhyming as a British variant. I’m holding very tightly to that right now because res-pÉ™t just sounds ridiculous to me.
@Laura: “There’s a town down the road called Newark, which I’ve been told actually has two syllables and a W in it. Weird.”
There’s a Newark, Ohio not far from where I grew up where the slurred pronunciation is only used in the city. To the rest of the state: New-erk. To the residents of Newark: N’erk. It’s so pervasive that a friend of mine’s husband (who grew up there) actually has a t-shirt that says “Proud Resident of N’erk, Ahia”. This only came to my attention in high school when I became friends with a girl who’d just moved from there, and it took me weeks to connect the word she seemed to be saying with the city she was actually talking about. Heh.
Don’t get me started on the fact that Ohioans seem to believe that Lima, OH should be pronounced “Lye-mah” rather than “Lee-mahâ€, the opinion of 20 million or so residents of Peru and the judge who named it be damned. I spent my childhood being mocked for being unable to retain that, but for pete’s sake it’s a city not a butter bean.
@Kristin: Don’t you just love it when the supposably (see what I did there?) highly educated people around you butcher words like that?
The principal of my middle school (I’m a teacher, not a student) has some of the worst mispronunciations I have ever heard, and he’s the one running our school.
Example: “All staff, we have a meetin’ in the LIBERRY” “Take a look at the lellow papers in your hands…” I have a cousin who says “liberry” and “lellow”…he’s three. It’s cute when he does it. It’s not cute when Mr. Principal does it. And people wonder why our students don’t learn enough…
And, while I know this is not technically a pronunciation pet peeve, we also get treated to repetitions of “also, too” and “we need to be participatory” ALL THE TIME. Sometimes I want to jump up and say “No! Drop the ‘too’ and just say ‘we need to participate’! You don’t sound any smarter saying ‘participatory’! GAHHH!!” Then I remember that I don’t have tenure, and he was my principal when I was in high school, so I’m still a little scared of him; so I just sit there, praying my head doesn’t explode.
I have a friend I love dearly who says “pitchers”–and she’s an art historian so it comes out of her mouth a lot. This pronunciation seems so right to her that once I was talking about a Canadian pitcher who had pitched in the post-season, and she was confused, thinking I was referring to some Canadian photograph.
@Nicole: I had a friend in high school that pronounced breakfast as bre-fis. It drove me crazy every time he said it!
Where I was raised, most people pronounce sandwich as “sangwich”. Drives. Me. Nuts. Unfortunately, I used to pronounce it the same way. Thankfully, the first guy I dated in college corrected me. Everytime my mom says it I cringe.
@Jaybird – infrared? Two syllables? Really? Do they know the word’s parts? Infra=within; red, referring to the red wavelengths of the light spectrum? Maybe a little research or a kind informer would help that mispronuniciation.
One of my pet peeves: Thusly. It’s becoming more widely acceptable, even in formal situations, but I can’t stand it. THUS, folks; no -ly. Thanks muchly. ;)
@MaggieCat: There’s a small town in NE Oklahoma called “Miami,” which is pronounced MY-am-uh. Drives me nuts.
@Lori — I’m there now, and it’s definitely LANK-uh-ster. We have to indoctrinate new radio announcers and newscasters when they get here. And every anabaptist I’ve ever spoken to confirms — Aaahh-mish. And the small city to the north? LEB-nin (or LEP-nin). Leb-uh-nawn is in the Middle East, not Central PA.
My peeve? “Dissention.” I know it’s a word, but “dissent” is more accurate, elegant and means the same thing. Also, “societal.” Just say “social.”
A few years ago, I moved to central Ohio from the Philly area. It is extremely common for people around here to say “My car needs washed,” or “That cat needs brushed.” TO BE, people! Your car needs TO BE washed! Your cat needs TO BE brushed! I’m sure there is a fancy-pants name for that kind of construction – I don’t even know if it is technically incorrect. I never heard that phrasing until I moved here, and (probably because I’m not used to it) it drives me absolutely insane. It’s also extremely common – it’s certainly not something I only hear from the uneducated masses.
But back to the topic of mispronunciations, whenever I try to say the word “months,” it comes out as “monts.” Usually I catch myself and deliberately make a point to enunciate the “th,” but if I don’t check myself, it comes out wrong, every time. It’s my own pet peeve, and *I’M* the one doing it.
@Syng: Do you watch Runway? Because they FINALLY got Heidi to stop saying, “Models, this is also a competition for you as well.” Like, why stop there? Why not throw in a few other synonymous phrases? “In addition, models, this too is also a competition for you as well.” I love Heidi’s pronunciations and malapropisms, and I don’t think that one was necessarily her fault, but I was thrilled when that one finally went away.
And speaking of model hosts of Bravo shows…Niki Taylor just pronounced it “pitchers” last night. I think I may have only noticed it because of this comments thread, actually, and “pitcher” for “picture” doesn’t really bug me (plus I think she’s from Texas? Which might explain it?), but it did occur to me that a name model like Niki might have lost that pronunciation after working in high fashion long enough.
On the other hand, it’s not high linguistics.
I’m-a start another thread for place-name pronunciations.
(sorry Jill – never even thought about it! EESH!)
@Lori,
Eep, I found myself in your post!. I’m a native (Northern) Californian, and I say both “sossage” and “ornj”. In fact, I had a little game with a guy I used to date (he was from Long Island, and his pronunciation of ‘orange’ had two syllables, the first being “aw”) – we used to try to trick each other into saying (and then repeating) “orange” as a cue for accent mockery.
I had a friend who, some years back, spontaneously went semi-Brit and starting “shheduling” her “negoseeations”. I’m glad she eventually dropped it and I didn’t have to kill her. Happy ending!
In the capital of this fine nation, it is perfectly acceptable for well educated officials/professionals (as well as the many un or poorly educated) to say “AX or AXED.” It is like nails on a chalkboard for me.
After I left NJ for the wild west, I was mocked for years for saying “Haahrrible.” I actually gave up saying the word and used “terrible” in its place until my accent got weaker.
Dropped ‘t’s annoy me. So does ‘ax’. I think the worst, though, isn’t a specific word: it’s ending every sentence with an upward inflection? So that it sounds like a question? And it really isn’t at all? But I’m just too much of a wussypants to be definite? You know?
GOD. I had about five ineffectual child-woman TAs in college who did this, and I just wanted to slap them briskly with my Riverside Chaucer. I mean, as briskly as you could slap *anyone* with a Riverside Chaucer, but the weight would make up for it.
@Llyzabeth: I have the same problem; too much reading and not enough hearing. Thus, we have “draught” pronounced dr-ought (not draft). Confused the hell out of my parents the first time I said it.
I get made fun of for pronouncing the l in “walk” and the th in “clothes”, but I don’t “wok” and I don’t fold my “close”.
I have a friend who for years would say “I feel like a leopard”. At least the explanation (I feel like I have spots) made some sort of sense. She also says “mute point” and “on accident”. Drives me absolutely nuts.
Miffs.
They are MITH-s.
I annoy MYSELF with my inability to pronounce “alright” correctly. I HATE when I start to say “aw-right;” I’ll pause and say awl right, as if I’m about to stitch shoes, in order not to swallow the “l.”
New Jersey, where the “frawg” sits on a “lawg” – until it sees a “dawg” and hops away.
“L.H., I am under the (somewhat vague) impression that “primmer” is a starter book and “prymer” is a base coat – both spelled ‘primer’.”
No, NO, a thousand times no. They’re both spelled “primer” because they’re both the same word with the same general meaning- something that comes first. A primer coat goes on first to condition the wall, and you read a primer book first to give you an overview and get you ready for more in-depth info. Even if that weren’t true, it only has one M, so it can’t be pronounced “primmer”. And I hope that PBS voiceover guy gets Irritable Bowel Syndrome.
@Sars: I just got into Runway this season, which is porbably fortunate, because Heidi’s “also…as well” probably would have driven me nuttier than a fruitcake. As it stands, I still have to take a deep, calming breath whenever Christian says the word “fierce”. It was funny at first, but now it’s just annoying.
As a So. Cal. resident who lived in Utah for 5 years, I have to admit, I am one of those who will call “mail” “mell”, say “pole” when I mean “pull” and say things like “good dill” instead of “good deal”. In my defense, I notice it and I am trying to correct it, and whenever I don’t, my loving family points it out. And mocks me.
Every word of this is cracking me up. Sad story, though: In my first (and last) year of teaching high school English in rural NC, I asked the students to write on a notecard their names, parents’ names, contact info and any information, health-wise or otherwise, that I should know about them (in case of emergency, frequent bathroom trips, etc.). So I get a card back from one of my freshmen (14 years old, people), and it says, “I am pregnate.”
Like y’all said: If you can’t spell it, don’t do it.
@SyngPiBear — as a current Utah resident, I will forgive you as long as you can tell “sale” from “sell” in WRITTEN language. Nothing makes me facepalm like a sign that says “YARD SELL” or “MUST SALE.”
My Cache-Valley husband saying “haffing” when he means “having” is somehow endearing. Figure that out.
@krissa: Okay, so the “MY-am-uh” thing would drive me nuttier than the “Lee-mah” issue. But my inner five-year old is still bitter about not having been clued into the “Ports-muth” issue before I ended up mentioning it at school, so I think I’ll continue to be annoyed at my state.
@JR: Yeah, that construction is extremely common here in central OH. So much so that I had to re-read your comment to figure out what was wrong with it. Heh.
In a similar vein, I cannot explain how thrilled I am that this comment thread led to me stumbling across at least one source that doesn’t condemn ending sentences with a preposition outright, because even after years of trying I still haven’t been able to shake the “If you’re going to ______, I want to go with” type of construction. Which I have been led to believe is a Midwestern/Great Lakes thing by a friend who has a MAJOR pet peeve about it.
I regularly have to resist the urge to throttle people who pronounce the grade before first grade “kinneygarden” or “kinnagarden”. Kindergarten, people. Kindergarten. See the first ‘r’?
Because I’m an elementary school teacher, I have to hear this word mangled on a regular basis. Aaaah!
My sixth grade teacher used to say “poo-berty” for puberty, and I had a prof in college who pronounced neanderthal “neandertall.” Both technically correct pronounciations as far as I know, both drove me nuts.
“”If you’re going to ______, I want to go with” type of construction. Which I have been led to believe is a Midwestern/Great Lakes thing by a friend who has a MAJOR pet peeve about it.” (MaggieCat – cute name!)
I grew up in WI & never heard that until I married a guy from NE…drove me batty, and now I do it too. Damn that man!
Ooh, do start a place-name thread. Apparently I am 12, b/c I titter a little whenever anyone refers to Norfolk, VA (pronounced-Nah-fuck – hee!).
Margaret in CO: It’s really hard to stop doing it once you start, isn’t it?! I have no idea why, but since I grew up with it I have to consciously think about adding another word at the end of the sentence. (And thanks :-) )
OK, late to the party, but I love this kind of thing! On board with many of the previous posts – just had to add one that I can’t figure out. I have a friend who is very intelligent and well-educated, as well as very curvy – and she describes herself as “volumptuous” ??? Where did the “M” come from?
i work in a coffee shop, and every day i have to take orders for “expresso.” it’s re-diculous.
Okay, it’s been days, but… my ‘moun-an’ question wasn’t so much about people who gloss over the ‘t’, which isn’t new to me. It’s the very obvious break in the middle. Not moun’ain (which I probably say myself), more like ‘moun an’, as though they are two different words. That is what sets my teeth on edge.
I was an early reader, but the only obvious problem that caused was that I didn’t realize misled was mis-LED and not MY-zeld until I was in college. (How embarrassing!) I think I was first exposed to it in [i]Kidnapped[/i] by RLS, and MYzeld has a nice Scottish brogue ring to it.
In Philadelphia, in addition to wudder and cawfee we have shtreet. He lives on shtrunk shtreet (not Strunk Street). Makes my eyes cross.
Check out these Top 40 Pronunciation Pet Peeves, but warning… you may cringe on a few that you mispronounce.