When I was a kid, I learned a lot of words and abbreviations entirely from reading, not from hearing the adults around me use them. (Or maybe they did, and I was just ignoring them.) So I understood what etc. meant from context, but I always pronounced it ee tee see. I didn't know about the phrase for which it's an abbreviation. Later, I studied Latin in school and felt rather silly about ee tee see. (But by that time I was around 12 or 13, so I could look back indulgently at my naive younger self.)
Two more were Yosemite and Thames. As a kid in South Africa, I was of course hooked on comics, but that meant English and American ones, so they were filled with place names I knew nothing about, so I pronounced them phonetically. I once referred to the river as the Thayms and was quickly and scornfully corrected by someone. I didn't have any occasion to mention the character Yosemite Sam, whose name I pronounced Yo-zmyte Sam. (I loved that character and still think he's kinda cool.) Some time after we moved to the U.S., someone mentioned Yosemite Park in my hearing, and a bright light dawned. "It's Yo-semmity Sam!" I said to myself. "That sounds so much niftier!" Or whatever word I used at that time.
There must be a lot of other examples that I've forgotten, and I bet such errors are common with children who learn a lot of their vocabulary from reading and not from hearing the words spoken by the adults around them. I wonder how often such mispronunciations persist into adulthood.
For a very long time, I pronounced "rhetoric" as re-TOR-ick. Which isn't that hard to understand, given that it IS pronounced that way when you stick an -al on the end of it. :)
ReplyDeleteI also used to talk a lot about resauraNteurs, and once I learned the correct way (no "n," boys and girls) it now annoys me when I hear anyone else repeat my mistake.
Of course, ee tee see, is silly. Every unix geek knows it's et-see.
Unix didn't exist at that time. I'm an old guy. Later, I would realize that it's the operating system of the gods.
ReplyDeleteI used to think the word was statellite. When I finally saw that it's satellite, I made up some distinction to save my pride. One kind was a satellite, and some other kind was a statellite. I can't remember what the two kinds were, though.
I've long suffered from this as well; I suspect the bookish always do. And for me, it's compounded by the fact that I'm now quite a fan of scotch, which means a whole new batch of confusing words and place names to mispronounce.
ReplyDeleteHolm is a Scottish name, isn't it? Is that the reason?
ReplyDelete(I manfully refrained from joking that being a fan of scotch will lead to many mispronunciations.)
If unix didn't exist yet, you ARE an old guy. :)
ReplyDeleteI kid, of course, Unix wasn't invented until the 60's or something, right?
chris's comment reminded me how I've never been able to figure out why "Smithwick's" (a beer) is pronounced SMIT-ick.
ReplyDeleteThe w seems to be omitted in a lot of those British place names that end in -wick. E.g., the classic sf novel is pronounced The Midich Cuckoos. I think.
ReplyDeleteUnix dates from right around 1970, I think. By that time, I was already working at NASA and wondering how to escape from the hellhole that is Houston. (I'll be 65 in October. Ooooold!)