# Most commonly mispronounced word even among smart people?



## cinderblock (Jul 26, 2018)

I have to go with "divisive."

It's pronounced, "dih-VYE-sive," but I often hear people say, "dih-VIH-sive."

Stephen A Smith, the most famous ESPN analyst pronounces it this way. Also heard the male partner of Ana Kasparian of The Youngturks pronounce it this way. Maybe this'll become accepted U.S. pronunciation over time, but it sounds cringeworthy to me. 

Another U.S. pronunciation that's cringeworthy is "chagrin." "Shuh-grin" sounds imbecilic to me. Much prefer the U.K. pronunciation, which pronounces the first syllable like "shag" without the "g," so "shaaa-grin."


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## luckyscars (Jul 27, 2018)

cinderblock said:


> I have to go with "divisive."
> 
> It's pronounced, "dih-VYE-sive," but I often hear people say, "dih-VIH-sive."
> 
> ...



This post should be re-titled "pronunciations that are wrong because I do not like them."

Divisive (rhymes with dismissive) is not an incorrect pronunciation, it is simply a different one. How do we know this? Because many people pronounce it that way with no significant problems in comprehension. I recall President Obama using it in a speech and not even Fox News made a fuss. Given these are the people who got upset when he wore a beige suit to a press conference if he had pronounced a word incorrectly you can bet it would have been nitpicked endlessly.

Chagrin is obviously French in origin and one suspects that neither the US nor UK pronunciation is particularly close to how it would be pronounced in that language. Again, zero problems reported in comprehension either way.

Other than in cases where establishing meaning becomes seriously difficult, I don't think anybody has any business dictating pronunciation. That and when it comes to proper nouns -- you are allowed to tell people how they should pronounce your name for instance. Other than that, it screams of pedantry.


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## QuixoteDelMar (Jul 27, 2018)

I'm with luckyscars on this one.

But having said that, it's the common words that kill me. Every time I hear someone drop the 'a' in mountain or stress the 'ie' in mischievous I die a little inside. Also fail to pronounce the difference between affect and effect. But that's because I'm awful, and petty. Can't speak for anyone else, but that's my takeaway.


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## meghanwithanH (Jul 28, 2018)

Oh, I like this thread! Okay, these may be very basic but... 

Hearing the T pronounced in "often" drives me batty.

A close relative says "supposively" instead of "supposedly."

I rarely hear the B in "obvious."

Not sure if any of these are regional but I love hearing the way words are pronounced in other areas, or if other words are used altogether (pop vs. soda, etc).


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## meghanwithanH (Jul 28, 2018)

I'm honestly not sure how to pronounce "mountain" with an A. Is it a long A like in "maintain"?


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## Phil Istine (Jul 28, 2018)

meghanwithanH said:


> Oh, I like this thread! Okay, these may be very basic but...
> 
> Hearing the T pronounced in "often" drives me batty.
> 
> ...



I'm not so sure about often.  I'm in south-east UK.  Dropping the t in often is fairly posh whereas pronouncing the t is what the rest of we plebs do.


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## Birb (Jul 28, 2018)

I havent ever heard anybody not pronounce the t in often. What I have heard, much to my dismay, is people pronounce LibRARY as "Liberry" it frustrates me to no end


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## QuixoteDelMar (Jul 28, 2018)

Not like maintain, no. Should sound more like moun-TAN, not moun-TIN. But around here, you're lucky if people pronounce the 'T'.

I second often and library. But that might be regional as well.

Edit - Nope, I'm wrong. Moun-TAN is the regional pronunciation. Everyone else is right. So case in point - I mispronounced words too.


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## Darren White (Jul 28, 2018)

About  mountain. The mount*AI*n sound is called a '*schwa*' in linguistics. It indicates a sound that is halfway between *ah* and *ay*. But I bet it's pronounced differently everywhere.


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## clark (Jul 28, 2018)

The original post is a delightful red herring. . .and LUCKYSCARS nailed it (aside: I assume the nickname comes from a fight with the bear.  Luckyscars won and gets to wear the bearskin avec head. . .but he got a few scars in the battle?).  There is no such thing as "proper" pronunciation.  There is only Communication, or lack thereof.  If you read the evening news for the BBC, you'd better perfect "received" English or you'll be unemployed in a hurry.  If you're going to work in a logging camp, you'd be well-advised to drop all your final "g"s, eschew polysyllabic words ("muthahfuckah" is ok) and pronounce "shit" in at least two syllable, even three.  Social context is everything in "acceptable" pronunciation.  The only other factor, as Luckyscars indicates, is UNDERSTANDING.  My late m-in-law once said to me: "but what he did flies in the teeth of pro-TOC-al".  In our rapid-speak conversation, I completely missed it.  Had no idea what she was saying.  A few more oral exchanges and it hit me--ah hah!--she meant PRO-tuh-call, but for those conversational moments, communication was lost.  And that is not a Good Thing, at all.  That defeats the whole purpose of language.

Having said that, every single one of us has certain mispronunciations in our REGIONAL USE that bug us to no end.  Pronouncing the "c" in Arctic, pronouncing "Canada" as "Cana-der" (which Queen Elizabeth does sometimes), pronouncing the "t" in "often". . .are just a few of mine.  And it's always good fun listening to my American friends get their tongues around "Saskatchewan" (a Canadian Province) and "Tsawwassen" (Indian word for an area in BC).  A major problem in all of this is the expectation of some native English speakers that there should be a logical correlation between spelling and pronunciation (as there is in, say, German).  Sometimes there is, but more often than not, there is NO such logical relationship. "tough", "relation", "pneumonia", "should", "whole", "heard". . .I could easily fill this page.


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## Bloggsworth (Jul 28, 2018)

Controversy - People, including the BBC, keep saying _Contr*a*-versy_, there is no* a* in controversy.


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## Bloggsworth (Jul 28, 2018)

Aristocrat, no syllables stressed, not A-*wrist*-o-crat.


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## PiP (Jul 28, 2018)

Hertfordshire is a county in England. Some people pronounce it as 'Hurtfordshire' while others say 'Hartfordshire'.


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## EmmaSohan (Jul 28, 2018)

If you're educated you can get it right, but . . . hard to get right without being told: Zoology.


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## luckyscars (Jul 28, 2018)

clark said:


> Having said that, every single one of us has certain mispronunciations in our REGIONAL USE that bug us to no end.  Pronouncing the "c" in Arctic, pronouncing "Canada" as "Cana-der" (which Queen Elizabeth does sometimes), pronouncing the "t" in "often". . .are just a few of mine.  And it's always good fun listening to my American friends get their tongues around "Saskatchewan" (a Canadian Province) and "Tsawwassen" (Indian word for an area in BC).  A major problem in all of this is the expectation of some native English speakers that there should be a logical correlation between spelling and pronunciation (as there is in, say, German).  Sometimes there is, but more often than not, there is NO such logical relationship. "tough", "relation", "pneumonia", "should", "whole", "heard". . .I could easily fill this page.



One of the worst things about living in the present time is the lack of differentiation among many (most?) people between "things which we don't like" and "things which are wrong". This the original poster, consciously or not, demonstrated perfectly. Rather _div-iss-ive_ of them, one might say.

Anyway, regional differences and pronunciation of proper nouns is definitely a complicated issue. One I personally feel evokes far too much passion among those involved, but regardless. Place names are probably the worst for that. It is spelled Lancaster, but is it Lan-car-ster (British RP), Lan-cass-tah (British regional), Lankster (some parts of US) or Lahn-cass-tuhh (other parts of US)? Depends, doesn't it, since a person may possess any of those pronounciations and potentially be "local" to a place named Lancaster. 

Plenty of snobbier Brits will say something like "well but it's originally a British town and the language is English so it should be pronounced in the British fashion", but these are the same people who think they have any logical basis for persistently calling a hamburger a "beefburger" and who routinely refer to going on vacations to "Madge-orca" and "Broo-jezz" instead of "Majorca" and "Bruges", so perhaps ought to worry more about their own linguistic tampering.

None of this stuff is wrong. None of it should be annoying. If anything one ought to stop worrying about how people are pronouncing their words and perhaps be grateful people are bothering to speak to them at all.


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## luckyscars (Jul 28, 2018)

EmmaSohan said:


> If you're educated you can get it right, but . . . hard to get right without being told: Zoology.



I hate to tell you this, but plenty of educated people pronounce it both ways, some of which are zoologists. 

If you're going to pick something as arbitrary as pronunciation to use as a litmus test for deciding on the worthiness of one's educational attainment, perhaps refrain from one that can be spelled via a YouTube search.


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## Birb (Jul 29, 2018)

Plenty of respectable people have weird speech quirks, whether the result of an accent or slang/evolution of language personal to that specific area. However, that doesn't stop there from being a correct or at least an original pronunciation. Just because an educated person says it one way, doesn't mean that it is meant to be pronounced that way.

But seriously, in the end, does it really matter how something is pronounced as long as the message remains intact? 


(The only exception to that rule is the library thing)


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## Darren White (Jul 29, 2018)

PiP said:


> Hertfordshire is a county in England. Some people pronounce it as 'Hurtfordshire' while others say 'Hartfordshire'.



Try to explain 'Southampton' I know my friends who live there say 'Sotton'. 
Or explain 'Edinburgh'. 'Hunstanton'. Need I go on? 

That aside, who cares on a writers site, the written word wins here. 

And another aside. I am not a native speaker, and I've always found it a little pedantic to hear speakers of English talk about the right pronunciation. Just sayin'


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## meghanwithanH (Jul 29, 2018)

See that, I had no idea! It's rare to hear the T here (northeast U.S.). I'm probably just used to it and that's why it stands out when I hear the T.


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## meghanwithanH (Jul 29, 2018)

Lancaster in Pennsylvania is procounced with a long A in the first syllable: laynk-uh-ster.

I prefer the lazy way: LAN-caster


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## bazz cargo (Jul 29, 2018)

Quay? 
And I don't like the word Quick. I can't write a sentence with it without it looking clunky. It can only be used in bad dialogue.


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## clark (Jul 29, 2018)

Well over a hundred years ago, the academic community developed the IPA (_International Phonetic Alphabet), _primarily because of the absurdities and inconsistencies in spoken English, and the great difficulties international scholars had in *writing *about spoken language.  The IPA enabled a Ugandan scholar co-preparing a paper with a French linguist on the Middle English Great Vowel Shift for presentation at a conference in Buenas Aires to do ALL pronunciation notations in the IPA, universally understood by all participants.  Here's what Wiki has to say about the IPA.  Worth the read ---

The *International Phonetic Alphabet* (*IPA*) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin alphabet. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standardized representation of the sounds of spoken language.[SUP][1][/SUP] The IPA is used by lexicographers, foreign language students and teachers, linguists, speech-language pathologists, singers, actors, constructed language creators and translators.[SUP][2][/SUP][SUP][3][/SUP]The IPA is designed to represent only those qualities of speech that are part of oral language: phones, phonemes, intonation and the separation of words and syllables.[SUP][1][/SUP] To represent additional qualities of speech, such as tooth gnashing, lisping, and sounds made with a cleft lip and cleft palate, an extended set of symbols, the extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet, may be used.[SUP][2][/SUP]IPA symbols are composed of one or more elements of two basic types, letters and diacritics. For example, the sound of the English letter ⟨t⟩ may be transcribed in IPA with a single letter, [t], or with a letter plus diacritics, [t̺ʰ], depending on how precise one wishes to be.[SUP][note 1][/SUP] Often, slashes are used to signal broad or phonemic transcription; thus, /t/ is less specific than, and could refer to, either [t̺ʰ] or [t], depending on the context and language.
Occasionally letters or diacritics are added, removed or modified by the International Phonetic Association. As of the most recent change in 2005,[SUP][4][/SUP] there are 107 letters, 52 diacritics and four prosodic marks in the IPA. These are shown in the current IPA chart, posted below in this article and at the website of the IPA.[SUP][

I suggest that none of you is a professional linguist interested in learning this highly specialized, difficult system of notation, but some of you might not have been aware of its existence.  Hence this post.
[/SUP]


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## Robbie (Jul 29, 2018)

Thanks Clark, appreciate the insight and this thread. One of my biggest bugaboos is to hear sherbet, pronounced sher_bert_. Where do they get that extra R?


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## Darren White (Jul 30, 2018)

Clark, I know and learned the alphabet. I mentioned only one 'letter' in it in a reply above. If you look up words on the internet, you get (when it's a good dictionary) also the stress and the IPA part included


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## clark (Jul 30, 2018)

darren -- True.  But in good references that DO use the IPA--and I commend them for their fastidiousness--few general readers can "read" it properly.


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## Outsider (Jul 30, 2018)

To state the obvious, it is useful to standardize pronunciation.  It aids comprehension.  But to standardize there would first need to be agreement on what pronunciation is to be the standard. 

Any language spoken over wide areas will naturally have differences in local pronunciation, and in these days of easy international travel those differences get thrust into your face with great regularity.  It think of how in Spain the "z" is lisped as a "th" sound making "zero" sound like "thero".  Latin Americans snicker at this.  However, if you're unprepared for that pronunciation, for instance as a foreigner learning the language, it is difficult to understand until somehow you learn the key to that pronunciation.  In fact, that's what makes non-native speakers of a language often hard to understand.  It's not that they are using the wrong words (although they/I do that too), but they pronounce them in an unfamiliar way.

English has always accommodated usage in written and spoken language and will surely continue to do so, so even purely invented words, spellings or pronunciations will gain consensus of the academics as being normal if they are adopted by enough people, worldwide or locally.  But many news organizations have pronunciation guides (which are to be strictly adhered to) so that the listener to radio or TV will not need to adapt to each announcer's quirks of pronunciation (for e.g. the CBC in Canada pronounces "finance" differently whether it is a noun or verb--the "i" is short when it is the noun and long where it is the verb).  Schools teach pronunciation, or at least did when I attended.  The goal is to facilitate understanding.  It's like utopia:  an idea to strive for but which can never be attained.


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## Tettsuo (Jul 30, 2018)

Axe instead of ask. Super common mispronunciation.


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## Gamer_2k4 (Jul 30, 2018)

My money's on "February."  Yes, it's physically hard to slip the first 'r' in there (at least for me), but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be there.

Of course, I checked the dictionary just now, and, wouldn't you know it, "feb-yoo-ary" is considered an acceptable pronunciation.  Ugh.



bazz cargo said:


> Quay?
> And I don't like the word Quick. I can't write a sentence with it without it looking clunky. It can only be used in bad dialogue.



For me that word is "big."  I don't mind if my characters use it, but in my narration, it looks childish and should be "large" instead.



PiP said:


> Hertfordshire is a county in England. Some people pronounce it as 'Hurtfordshire' while others say 'Hartfordshire'.



English names like that are easy to mush.  "Worchestershire" sauce, for example, is often pronounced "wish-tuh-shur."


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## bazz cargo (Jul 30, 2018)

One more. Iron, Only the Scots pronounce it correctly.
@ Gamer: I concur. Dialogue only.


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## LeeGlenwright (Jul 30, 2018)

This reminds me of a joke. Recently a friend of mine on Facebook had a bee in his bonnet (what a *quaint* phrase!) about 'pronunciation snobbery.' He shared a link to an article that discussed the correct pronunciation of the word 'scone,' with the comment "the correct answer is however the f**k you want." I replied with the following:

Q: What is the fastest item in a bakery?
A: Scone (s'gone - get it?)

I pointed out that the joke only works with one pronunciation. I don't think it went down too well...

Sent from my SM-T230 using Tapatalk


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## LeeGlenwright (Jul 30, 2018)

But one of my own bugbears is 'vulnerable,' or 'vunerable,' as a lot of UK news reporters prefer to say.

Sent from my D6603 using Tapatalk


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## Phil Istine (Jul 31, 2018)

Gamer_2k4 said:


> My money's on "February."  Yes, it's physically hard to slip the first 'r' in there (at least for me), but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be there.
> 
> Of course, I checked the dictionary just now, and, wouldn't you know it, "feb-yoo-ary" is considered an acceptable pronunciation.  Ugh.



Yes, February is a good one.
I tend to pronounce it Feb-yoo-werry.  Don't ask me where that 'w' appeared from  .
That's south-east England, working class.


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