They had dined on horse meat, horse cheese, horse black pudding, horse d’oeuvres, and a thin beer that Rincewind didn’t want to speculate about.
— Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic
Queue
Every letter after the first is completely unnecessary.
I read so many fantasy books growing up thinking “draught” rhymed with “aught”, instead of just being another spelling of “draft”.
…Up until now, I still thought that. That’s… significantly less fantastical, and I think a small part of me just died.
I’m so sorry. I assumed I was the last to know.
Fret not! Hang on to “draut” in your mind with the rest of us early readers. And when you need to say draft, just spell it draft. Meanwhile in the privacy of your own head, you can think, "I’m hot, so I’ll take a long refreshing draught of this draft beer whilst I stand in the cool draught from the door. " We’ll never tell.
"I’m hot, so I’ll take a long refreshing draught of this draft beer whilst I stand in the cool draught from the door. "
In this drought?
Even worse: dialects of English that use draught don’t use it for every sense of the word. A breeze getting into a room is a draught, but your first effort at writing something is still a draft
What about a draft beer?
Draught beer (at least in the UK). The board game chequers/checkers uses draughts too. I think the military calling people up would be a draft, but it would more commonly be referred to as conscription
Another good one: gaol = jail. I kept pronouncing it in my head like “gowl”.
Australian, I flat out refused to ever use ‘gaol’ from the moment I first encountered it in school.
Because prison colony, or …???
🤣
🤯
this language is bullshit
‘Epitome’ will forever be epi-tome in my head: ‘epi’ like in EpiPen and tome as in a big heavy book.
And the ‘c’ in ‘indictment’ also always gets pronounced when I read the word to myself.
Wait, what’s epitome supposed to be?
eh-PIT-oh-mee
I also said the other way growing up 🙂
What the fuck.
Interesting, I never had an issue with those but the one that got my growing up was awry. I still want to read it as “aw-ree” like “awful” despite knowing it’s actually “ah-rye”. I also knew the latter as a spoken word but I guess I didn’t question how it was spelled for a long time.
Fun, less useful fact in a similar vein: “Antipode” is pronounced “anti-pode” how you’d expect but the plural “Antipodes” is pronounced "an-ti-po-dees"like A Greek word. I still have no idea why that’s the case.
Um…it is aw-ree? It’s not like a hard W, but it’s there.
It’s definitely uh-rye
Nope, check the pronunciations here:
Thanks, as a non native english speaker, TIL that I also pronounced it wrong the whole time…
I knew that long ago, but it’ll remain drawt in my brain, just because…
Yup. First pronunciation to make it to long-term storage, wins forever!
Like hyperbole, it’s always “hyper-bowl” to me
Absolutey! It sounds way better, especially since that “should” be how it’s pronounced phonetically, anyhow!
I have one that changed on me in college, but it wasn’t a word I’d come across like, a ton?
Clerestory is not pronounced cle-rest-ory as I’d always thought, but is instead pronounced clear-story, because it’s typically windows and no full floor - clear story to let in light or air. Art history course corrected it and I felt so stupid the correction stuck.
So… that’s also how you say checkers in parts of Europe and both pronunciations are acceptable.
Tic Tack Toe is also called Naughts and Crosses.
What about “drouth”?
I call this being bookish (pronounced bawkish or boo-kish)
Niche drives me nuts as a French speaker. It is not Nitch. It is Knee-shh. I will die on this hill
Could y’all please stop dieing on hills all the time?! I love hiking, but all the corpses are really disturbing.
As a non-French speaker, I completely agree with you. If I use a borrowed word, I do my best to pronounce it like a native speaker would.
As a colonizer, I consider it my duty to butcher borrowed/foreign words. You should hear me say bolognese.
Baloneys?
Buh-LOG-nees.
It’s an Italian sauce. Actually pronounced like bolonays
Ouch.
Nietzsche
Here you go, now nobody’s happy
That K is unnecessary in Knee-shh
It’s actually “Hors d’œuvre”…
What the hell is going on with french keyboards anyway?
See you just type the o and e really really fast. That way the o doesn’t have the time to get out of the way of the e and they sorta get smooshed together. It takes some practice but you’ll get there.
Wait have you never seen long press?
Compose-O-E
Easy.
horse doovrey
You might as well just have said ‘French’ and be done with it.
Make it just a little bit worse, that œ hits the spot:
d’œuvreAny word with three consecutive vowels should be recalled
Škrt plch z mlh Brd pln skvrn z mrv prv hrd scvrnkl z brzd skrz trs chrp v krs vrb mls mrch srn čtvrthrst zrn.
Most normal czech/polish type sentence
From Google Translate: “A scythe of the nightingale from the mist A bridle full of carrion stains, the first pride shrivelled from the bridle through a cornflower cluster in the willow bush, a carrion deer quarter of a handful of grain.”
This is a fine Slavic wedding vow.
Cool! Now do “w Szczebrzeszynie chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie”
Lol… Okay: “In Szczebrzeszyn a beetle sounds in the reeds”
Good name for an equine cleaner.
People will complain about that but not look twice at “rendezvous”.
I don’t think that I’ve ever heard anybody pronounce “chaise longue” correctly. It’s “shay long”.
Actually (pronounced acktschually) it’s ‘shayz long’ The ‘s’ is usually only silent when it’s the last letter of the word.
You should hear how the French pronounce it. Can’t even recognise it as English anymore.
Why do you say that? It’s just chez long. At worst it’s like chez long-uh. So it’s really just a different accent more than anything. Also, the word is french not english so…
I think you got whooshed on that last english part.
Hah… yeah, you’re right xD. My bad
Shez Long
It literally means long chair. Not lounge chair.
Nobody pronounces “bruschetta” correctly; it’s “broo-SKET-ta”
An Italian told me off through the TV set and I promised never to say “broo-SHET-ta” again.
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chez ≠ chaise
Wet Leg did a song about it
The word ok expecting me to spell it out instead of pronouncing it like oak.
I mean…okay, that’s fair.
Not oak, just ok.
Capicola
Gabagool
or derv
There, fixed it.
All the homonyms with different pronunciations.
Read / Read
Lead / Lead
Compound / Compound
Bass / Bass
Content / Content
etc.
Dearest creature in Creation, Studying English pronunciation, I will teach you in my verse Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse.
It will keep you, Susy, busy, Make your head with heat grow dizzy; Tear in eye your dress you’ll tear. So shall I! Oh, hear my prayer,
Pray, console your loving poet, Make my coat look new, dear, sew it? Just compare heart, beard and heard, Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain, (Mind the latter, how it’s written!) Made has not the sound of bade, Say—said, pay—paid, laid, but plaid.
Now I surely will not plague you With such words as vague and ague, But be careful how you speak, Say break, steak, but bleak and streak,
Previous, precious; fuchsia, via; Pipe, snipe, recipe and choir, Cloven, oven; how and low; Script, receipt; shoe, poem, toe,
Hear me say devoid of trickery, daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore, Branch, ranch, measles, topsails, aisles, Missiles, similes, reviles,
Finally: which rhymes with “enough,” Though, through, plough, cough, hough, or tough? Hiccough has the sound of “cup”… My advice is—give it up!
- A shortened version of The Chaos by Dutch poet Gerard Nolst Trenité
Mostly the opposite situation to your comment since they’re spelled the same but pronounced differently, but it feels relevant
It could be a brain fart, but ‘compound’…?
At least in my dialect of English and some others I know, the noun and adjective have the stress on the first syllable while the verb has it on the second
Thank you. It was Greek to me, but since English is a French dialect sprinkled with Germanic Romantic Latin seasonings, and acrimonious acronyms and euphemisms, I got confused. Somehow.
Hey now, it’s a German dialect with French Romantic seasonings! Much clearer, of course
The chemicals join together forming a new COMpound.
If you don’t correct a problem early on then the damage will comPOUND over time.
For me when it’s a noun (visited the compound/mixed the compound), its COM-pound, and when it’s a verb (compound the problem), its com-POUND. I guess that’s it?
Horse Divorce
Of course, of course.
Of course it’s coarse
