Wed 17 Sep 2008
Language acquisition is an amazing, and amazingly complicated, process. We learn to speak essentially by accident, starting at an age when we’re not competent to feed ourselves or change our own clothes. Which is pretty awesome.
But it’s also a process prone to errors. We pick up phrases incompletely, or incorrectly, and then walk around for years saying this or that wrong. For all intensive purposes, it’s a doggy-dog world, and so on. Eggcorns, they’re called, and everybody’s had (and likely still has) some.
What’re yours? Any specific horrifying revelation memories?
Posted by Josh Millard20 answers so far!
Okay, let's hear it.
You must be logged in to post a comment.
For the longest time, I pronounced “chaos” as “ChaChos” Hey, it made sense as a kid!
Apparently I was absent from school the day we learned the word “annihilate.” I was aware of the word, understood what it meant and how to pronounce it, but had never actually written it and for some reason didn’t connect the spoken version to the written version. So whenever I’d see it in print I’d think it was another word pronounced “anna-hill-ate” (accent on ‘hill’) and never, I mean never, until a couple of years ago connected it to annihilate.
I’m a reasonably smart, though not well-educated, person. I read a lot, I’ve always been good at picking things up in context, but that word just eluded me. It wasn’t until a year or two ago (I’m 38!) that I finally started forcing myself to read it the proper way. I’m happy to say I’ve fixed this little part of me for the most part but every now and then when I’m reading I’ll have to read that word twice, because the first time I’m reading it as anna-hill-ate.
I’ve never mentioned this to anyone until just now.
bondcliff, I went with “ann HILL ee ate”. I managed to put the pieces together much earlier, but man do I hear you.
I can’t think of any of mine right now, but one of the managers where I work always says “nip it in the butt”.
I realized today that it’s “obfuscate”, not “obsfucate”.
As a kid, invincible was in-veenk-ible, and potpourri was pot-pour-ee.
I used to pronounce meme “may-may” thanks to a poly sci professor I had who also mispronounced that way. But I’ve also tried to convince a friend that the saying is “all that glitters is not gold” instead of “all that glitters is not glue.”
I used to pronounce Arkansas “Are-Kansas.” It just looks so natural!
Photography took me the longest time to properly learn. Used to be “photo-grophy”
Into my early 20s, I pronounced genitalia “jen-EESH-lee-ah”.
It’s rather telling that no one had cause to correct me until then…
So how *do* you pronounce meme? Is it meh-may? I’ve only read it, never heard it.
Actually, most of my eggcorns come from words that I’ve read, and understood in context, but didn’t use in conversation. The first and most memorable of these would have to be facade. Encountered it in first grade, whilst reading Little House on the Praire books, and pronounced it internally with a hard C – fah-KADE. Not a word that comes up in conversation much, so it wasn’t until I was in my early twenties that I discovered the error of my ways.
Perhaps the most embarassing, though, is paradigm. My young pup self was taking a Women’s Studies class, and decided to impress my (older, more political)newish friends with my knowledge of theory. Not really very impressive when you blurt out the word PAIR-uh-didg-um and everyone rolls on the floor in laughter. :(
I pronounce it “meem”. It was coined as an analogue to ‘gene’, so the phonetic analog makes sense to me.
ok, thanks but i’m not sure that I trust you 100%, since you also mispronounce MeFi and MeFite.
You should be reassured, actually, since I don’t pronounce meme “mehm”. Eh? Eh?
“Play it by year” had me for a while, but it was only to myself.
I have trouble with a few words that I have read and understand but which rarely or never come up in conversation.
Eh-pi-tome (epitome) was one. Fa-cade (façade) was another. Areola (this isn’t in FF’s dictionary? How come?) is another word, despite its seemingly straightforward pronunciation, that I would hesitate to use in conversation in case I got it wrong. Not sure what the conversation would be, but there you are.
PAWN OFF
(palm off)
I discovered the error of my ways two weeks ago and I’ve still DONE IT TWICE SINE THEN.
so ashamed.
First day of Senior Lit class. I was feeling pretty slick since I had already read most of the stuff we’d be reading. I raised by hand and announced by favorite play was “Anti-Gone.”
Mrs. Beaumont interrupted me and said. “You mean AN-TIG-ON-E?”
And then I wanted to die.
Oh man, I have one really close to the Whelk’s “anti-gone”. I gave a speech in a high school history class about Karl Marx and several times during the presentation I said the word ‘antithesis’ but pronounced it “anti-thesis.” No one corrected me. I got an A. Not until a year or two later did I realize I was mispronouncing that word. I wonder to this day whether my teacher just didn’t want to embarrass me, if he didn’t realize it was wrong or if he wasn’t paying attention.
Until about a year ago, I assumed felons were in-dick-ted for their crimes, and then in-dite-ment was a seperate thing entirely. I recently wondered why nobody ever said in-dick-ted out loud, and nobody ever wrote in-dite-ment. What followed was a moment of personal growth.
My problem has always been picking up new words through reading extensively and never bothering to look up the correct pronunciation. Usually though I’d make the connection at some point when hearing them spoken somewhere and register it to save myself from future embarassment. Paradigm is one word that slipped through the filter though and would be pronouned like it was spelled. Thankfully this wasn’t one of the more frequently spoken words in my vocabulary. Also thankfully, the first time I had opportunity to botch this one in casual conversation I was politely corrected by the other party working the word back into a response pronounced properly. It nonetheless still made me feel rather abash. Anyway, this is probably a word one could use among the general population correct or incorrect and they wouldn’t know the difference anyway. “Par-a-di-jim”, yeah OK.