You’re Saying It Wrong: A Pronunciation Guide to the 150 Most Commonly Mispronounced Words–and Their Tangled Histories of Misuse - Ross Petras , Kathryn Petras

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• 
  nylon
  December 8th, 2023
  

  Americans telling us how to pronounce words? Can’t wait…

  You're Saying It Wrong: A Pronunciation Guide to the 150 Most Commonly Mispronounced Words--and Their Tangled Histories of Misuse - Ross Petras , Kathryn Petras
• 
  apnea
  December 9th, 2023
  

  Kizz mi azz

  You're Saying It Wrong: A Pronunciation Guide to the 150 Most Commonly Mispronounced Words--and Their Tangled Histories of Misuse - Ross Petras , Kathryn Petras
• 
  BlueSun03
  December 23rd, 2023
  

  

  nylon - anybody who pronounces aluminum as al-you-min-ee-um or jaguar a jag-you-ar or puts up with every dialect form Geordie to Cockney to East-Ender to the Cotswalds to whatever the heck they speak in Plymouth, let alone Welsh or trying to communicate with a Scotsman from Glasgow who only speaks Glaswegian (even somebody from Aberdeen wouldn’t understand THAT dialect) shouldn’t be talking as if everybody in the UK speaks OxBridge or BBC English.

  Was it Oscar Wilde who said that “England and America are two countries separated by a common language?” English is a polyglot language constructed from a dozen languages from various conquerors over centuries. Old English, Middle English, Modern English - hell, the people who spoke these wouldn’t understand a word the others were saying. Even the letters used in original Shakespearean plays & sonnets would look strange to a modern Londoner (and that was just the late 1500’s up until about 1610 when he wrote his last sonnet. We in America have similar problems and a proper Bostonian would understand standard UK English better than he would understand somebody who comes from Bogalusa, Louisiana. For that matter, many today in America totally misread our Constitution because it was written in an older version of English (closer to British with a touch of Noah Webster thrown in) that was closer to Shakespeare’s time than to the 21st Century. Our Second Amendment would be rendered null - moot - if only modern Americans recognized the “conditional being” clause that comprises the first, subordinate clause that hasn’t been used in American English in over 150 years. It makes the second, main clause about the right to bear arms dependent on the truth of the first clause, which has been false ever since we formed a standing army.

  Heck, you just lost Queen Elizabeth II, who one of my friends when I lived in London used to call “Betty Saxe Coberg (sometimes throwing in Gotha) from Germany. Windsor, indeed! Most of your royalty originally descended from a half-dozen countries at least. Even Louis Mountbatten was originally Prince Louis of Battenberg, whose parents were from “Hesse and on the Rhine” in Germany - until he changed his name to something suitably British like “Mountbatten.”

  And, yes, I pronounce harrass as “harris,” not har-ras” like Americans do. Spent too much time in England, I fear. Bloody weather.

  You're Saying It Wrong: A Pronunciation Guide to the 150 Most Commonly Mispronounced Words--and Their Tangled Histories of Misuse - Ross Petras , Kathryn Petras
• 
  stopbeingwoke
  February 19th, 2024
  

  @BlueSun03 I do not know what you are on about Prince Louis of Battenberg changing his name to suit the British languange. Practically everybody did that. My great uncle who was of German ethnicity living in the Hungarian Kingdom used Andreas and András interchangebly. If your last name was Klein than you translated it into the Hungarian with Kiss. Both meaning small. Do you really believe that Cathrine the Great ever used the name Cathrine? NO! She used the Russian version Yekaterina or Ekaterina.

  You're Saying It Wrong: A Pronunciation Guide to the 150 Most Commonly Mispronounced Words--and Their Tangled Histories of Misuse - Ross Petras , Kathryn Petras

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