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Simple words, difficult pronouncement?

arthwollipot said:
Yeah, that's funny every single time I hear it. :rolleyes:

You know there's a reason why we send all that **** overseas, right?
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Some jokes never get old.

Side note, I drank a lot of it in the UAE, it cost the same as every other beer that came in smaller cans,$1 right on the pier. It never occurred to me to check the alcohol content. Didn't really matter, the other beer available also sucked.
 
TragicMonkey said:
I always wonder when people want to change place names to earlier versions why they don't translate them. "We're undoing colonial imperialism by restoring the name of Lake Whiteman to Yamotahominagashaw! Which means 'Deer Lake'." "So, why not name it 'Deer Lake'?" The people who named it were trying to convey it's a lake with deer, they weren't committing to a particular set of syllables regardless of whether anybody knew their meaning.
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If that were the case, many place names would revert to 'meeting place' or market place' (*Toronto, Turku, *Ontario, *or so our guide told us, but seems to mean 'beautiful lake').
 
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A lot of the Irish guys I knew in London found it impossible to say, 'film' or 'Euston', substituting 'filim' or 'Houston'.
 
wasapi said:
I don't know how common it is, but there are a few words that I always have difficulty saying. "Aluminum" is one. It always came out 'alumumnun'. It is feels as if my mouth jumbles the word, not allowing me to say it correctly.

There are other words, but that is the primary, life long, frustrating one I deal with. Anyone else have a word/words?
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A good friend of mine in high school had a speech impediment. He had problems with n's in combination with certain other letters. We teased him mercilessly over his pronunciation of aluminum. We lost touch after high school, and many years later we re-acquainted. He was IT manager at Kaiser Aluminum.
 
Vixen said:
A lot of the Irish guys I knew in London found it impossible to say, 'film' or 'Euston', substituting 'filim' or 'Houston'.
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In my experience(My father and Grandmother), the Irish have a really hard time with "H" and where it belongs.
 
TragicMonkey said:
"Materiel" is another military word that falls to false correction these days.
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I worked on a project once that involved the term insolation (the amount of solar radiation reaching a given area). Every time a document passed through me I first had to run a find/replace for "insulation", because either through spell check or some well meaning secretary that word would end up all over the damn place.
 
Dr. Keith said:
I worked on a project once that involved the term insolation (the amount of solar radiation reaching a given area). Every time a document passed through me I first had to run a find/replace for "insulation", because either through spell check or some well meaning secretary that word would end up all over the damn place.
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Medical words have issues too. We had a problem with software automatically "correcting" the word "dilatation" to "dilation". They're related terms but in medicine at least the distinction is relevant.
 
Kaffeeklatsch. That word has always interested me. I have heard the last part, the 'klatsch', pronounced different ways.
 
wasapi said:
Kaffeeklatsch. That word has always interested me. I have heard the last part, the 'klatsch', pronounced different ways.
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A common word among the German immigrant communities in Texas. I've never actually seen the word in print and it took me a moment to decipher.

It is an odd experience this late in life to read a familiar word for the first time!
 
Dr. Keith said:
A common word among the German immigrant communities in Texas. I've never actually seen the word in print and it took me a moment to decipher.

It is an odd experience this late in life to read a familiar word for the first time!
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It was commonly used back when I was growing up in Texas.
 
wasapi said:
Kaffeeklatsch. That word has always interested me. I have heard the last part, the 'klatsch', pronounced different ways.
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What's so difficult? Just learn German, then it's pronounced just as written (Klatsh, with the "a" as in "yacht"). :)
 
Dr. Keith said:
Central Texas, then?

I've never heard it in Houston, Dallas, the Valley or East Texas. Always in the heart of the old German communities.
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Dallas, as well as relatives in Grand Prairie, used it. My mother, who was French and Irish, used it frequently, and called it coffee-clutch.
 
wasapi said:
Dallas, as well as relatives in Grand Prairie, used it. My mother, who was French and Irish, used it frequently, and called it coffee-clutch.
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I was raised a farm town of less than 2000 people in California, I knew the term as coffee clatch, and it was pretty much any group of people spreading gossip at some regular meeting, usually morning coffee.
 
I'm sick of seeing Craigslist real estate ads announcing "house for sell". Do people really think that's the word?
 
wasapi said:
Dallas, as well as relatives in Grand Prairie, used it. My mother, who was French and Irish, used it frequently, and called it coffee-clutch.
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The pollution of the DFW area has changed a lot over the last few decades. Interesting that such words will still in use when you were here.

Either that, or I just hang out with more octogenarians in the hill country than I do in Dallas. Hmm . . .
 
Anyone been to Kauii?

The locals pronounce it about seventeen different ways, I have no clue how it's supposed to be pronounced.
 
TragicMonkey said:
I'm sick of seeing Craigslist real estate ads announcing "house for sell". Do people really think that's the word?
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arthwollipot said:
I think they just don't care.
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I'm far more sick of the Realtor(TM) industry always saying "home" instead of "house". It's not home until you live there, and sometimes not even then.

More on topic, there's Alec Douglas-Home, former PM of the UK. Whose last syallable was pronounced "Hyoom". Or some such.
 
Trebuchet said:
I'm far more sick of the Realtor(TM) industry always saying "home" instead of "house". It's not home until you live there, and sometimes not even then.
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I wonder if they do that in the UK? For a long time "house" vs "home" was one of the "U/non U" class indicator shibboleths. "Home" was lower class. A peasant would use a looking-glass and serviettes in their home while an aristocrat would use a mirror and napkins in their house. (Funny to American perspective: the fancier-looking terms are usually the lower class ones.)
 
One term that rankles me is the pet adoption center always stating an adoptee has found their "forever home". To me it sounds like a euphemism for "The animal died" instead of "It got adopted!"
 
alfaniner said:
One term that rankles me is the pet adoption center always stating an adoptee has found their "forever home". To me it sounds like a euphemism for "The animal died" instead of "It got adopted!"
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Not only that. The adopted pet will haunt the premises after it dies!
 
Meadmaker said:
Wednesday - It's actually fairly easy to pronounce, as long as you don't pronounce it the way it's spelled. At some point, it's fairly obvious that the entire English speaking world couldn't figure out how to pronounce Woden's Day, or spell it, but we kind of settled on how to spell it, and pretty much how to say it.

Although, when saying it, is there one d or two? I usually use one.


And then of course there is "nuclear". An awful lot of people apparently have a hard time with that one.


My wife, upon seeing somebody who didn't comb their hair or get their clothes on straight will declare that the person looks "disleveled". I'm pretty sure she would spell it out as "disheveled", but that's not how she says it.

ETA: Dictionary.com gives [wenz-dey, -dee] as the pronunciation. I sometimes say [wendz-day].
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We've had at least two presidents who pronounced "nuclear" as "nucyalar" (Ford and Bush II), and Carter pronounced it with the Georgia silent "l" (nuceeyar).
 
Finnish kids learn to read and write quicker than English speaking children as the language is written near phonetically - and we don't even try to teach them that eagerly as kindergartens are basically just for play and even the pre-school year at 6 is not very academically focused.
 
quadraginta said:
In Atlanta, were you?

Kidding aside, southern accents by actors always tickle me. To start off with there are quite a few more variants than most people realize, which is lucky for the actors, since most of them don't know any southern accent properly, and get by on some sort of generic version that only barely sounds much like any of the real ones.
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Worse is reviewers who don't know the differences in accents. When I was still acting, I got a bad review for my accent in a production of "Night Must Fall". The reviewer didn't realize there was more than one sort of English accent, and that a maid would sound quite different than the upper-class ladies she worked for. They sounded quite toffee-nosed, and I was more Bow bells :rolleyes:
 
It just occurred to me that "lisp" and "stutter" are difficult words to say for people who have those conditions.
 
Although it's usually not a problem, I have at times had a little bit of trouble getting "encephalopathy" out without a pause to concentrate.

It's definitely one of those words that can be kind of tough to say fives times fast.

Not that there is often a need to.
 
quadraginta said:
Although it's usually not a problem, I have at times had a little bit of trouble getting "encephalopathy" out without a pause to concentrate.

It's definitely one of those words that can be kind of tough to say fives times fast.

Not that there is often a need to.
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Or even once, for most people.
 
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