A few days ago I admitted on threads that I have been mispronouncing the word “calamity” for my entire life and I only found out that I’d been mispronouncing it when I used it incorrectly on a conference call because of course I did. And then people on threads were like, “Wait, how do you pronounce it?” and I was like, “Lamè, llama, Lamar…cuh-LOM-uh-tee” to explain why I thought it was pronounced that way but then a bunch of people were like, “Wait, have I been pronouncing it wrong my whole life too??” and I felt a little better that I wasn’t the only one fucking it up, but then I realized that quite a few people were thinking that I was giving the corrected pronunciation (rather than explaining why I’d always mispronounced it) and then they thought that they were wrong for rhyming “calamity” with “manatee” even though that’s (apparently) the correct way and so now I think I’ve accidentally convinced a lot of people who were pronouncing it correctly to now mispronounce it and this seems like a very good example of a calamity even though I’m still not entirely sure how to pronounce it.
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I fucking love these people & not just because they support my wine-slushee habit:
Now I want to know how you pronounce “catastrophe?”
Wait, how WERE you pronouncing it? I wanna know which is which now.
(I was pronouncing it like cuh-LOM-uh-tee. Apparently it’s LAMB instead of LOM. I’m an idiot. ~ Jenny)
I think your brain was subconsciously replaying SNL’s Kamala, dramala, falalalalamala.
The FRIENDS episode where Ross pronounced “chameleon” like “chamma-LEon” rocked me to my core. I learned so many words by reading them, not hearing them.
I was dead when I heard Hermione in the audio book.
(Same. ~ Jenny)
Don’t even ask how long I pronounced cacophony wrong
I pronounce ‘Manaco’ as mo.NAH.co and ‘Subaru’ as
su.BAR.u. And everyone looks at me like I’m insane. That’s what happens when you take years of French and live with a Japanese family (in Hawaii!). I once said ‘alibi’ as a.lee.bee.
Ask me about “segue”.
So, you ARE to blom.
I learned about “epitome” from Calvin and Hobbes:
Tigers are perfect, the e-pit-o-me
Of good looks and grace, and quiet dignity
Also used to pronounce Arkansas like I was a pirate, because I’d never heard anyone say it. “Arrr Kansas”
Hey, Jenny!
I’m thinking maybe your Brain swirled together Calamity and Colostomy to produce cuh-LOM-uh-tee…like Colostomy Jane The Musical, starring Doris Day!🤣
My wife had a teammate on a Master’s project who recorded a 2 minute presentation during which she pronounced “rendezvous” as “ren-dez-vus” at least 10 times, and she submitted her segment too late to re-record it.
As a child, I thought “Neufchâtel” was pronounced “neo-functial” 😉
I found out the hard way (of course) that you don’t pronounce the breed of those little yappy dogs as “Chi hooey-hooey”
Sue . . . please tell us about ‘segue’
It’s prononce calamités like cal.la.mi.ti the American way but because of course it’s a french word you could pronounce it the way you always did and tell naysayers with a very posh voice oh dear you are so very wrong it’s a french word cherie and that its the way it’s pronounced since the middle age !!!! So there trust me I know since I am french.
Never change Jenny. Pronunciation is in the ear of the beholder.
Haha! When I was 10 years old, I found out that “bedraggled” was pronounced “beDRAGgled”. OMG. I had always thought it was “BEDraggled”, i.e. the way you look when you first crawl out of bed. Deep embarrassment.
This reminds me of a conversation I had with an Austrian friend who asked me about “letoose” and growing it in the garden. I was all sorts of confused. I said I didn’t know what “letoose” was. Maybe that was just an Austrian vegetable? And he was like “huh? no. you have it here in America. you know. salad.” and it took me a minute to realize he meant “lettuce”. He’d only ever read it and quick frankly based on its spelling was actually pronouncing it logically. I had zero explanation why we pronounce it so wildly different than it’s spelled.
As a kid, I remember asking a friend if she liked a book I lent her. She said she loved the main character, Fobe. I was confused until I figured out she was mispronouncing Phoebe (fee-bee).
I’m so thankful for the internet audio pronunciation tool available now. I have been mispronouncing LOTS of words because like many readers you only see it written and not pronounced the majority of the time. I will often look up how to pronounce a word while I’m reading now.
Hors d’oeuvres
Amongst other things I never heard spoken and I only read in books and had no idea how to pronounce them, until I finally try to say them out loud and everyone looks at me like I’m crazy.
And my grandmother was French-American but we never had an occasion to use that word and the word appetizers was never used in her house either, but at least everyone in America knows how to pronounce appetizers. But I like to call them app-eat-teasers, because they tease your appetite.
And flutterbys instead of butterflies, because they flutter by. Which is what I called them when I was a kid.
I say we invent our own language with weird pronunciations for words and then only your fans will know what we are talking about.
Because I had ear infections as a young child, I pronounced things wrong and had problems with multi-syllable words like condominium.
As a child, I pronounced chores as kores for a long time, until I realized it’s pronounced as chawz.
There should be a name for the common phenomenon of mispronouncing a word you’ve read but never heard.
I’ve never found such a word so I created one: Sophaudia.
English is an impossible language. And remember, the fact that you know how to spell it and use it means you are well-read. Nothing more; nothing less.
I think it was in Junior High that I learned the correct pronunciation for “horizon”. I’d been saying “whore-i-zon”, with a short i & emphasis on the first syllable instead of the second. It’s always something!
Have you not seen the dude calling chamomile his “favorite crop” while pronouncing it “cha-MOM-a-lay”? I can no longer say it correctly
Persona. Jungian. Moscow. Tertiary.
Per-SOW-nuh. YOONG-ee-en. MOSS-ko. TERSH-ee-airy.
…is how those are *supposed* to be pronounced, and I did not guess any of those correctly on the first try. 😂 If you read and write a lot, but you’re an introvert who doesn’t talk to people, you end up running into this a lot.
Listen, this isn’t our fault. None of this shit is intuitive. Did you know that countries where English isn’t dominant don’t really do spelling bees, because their orthography isn’t so fucked that they can make a national competition out of spelling words correctly? Most languages are pretty phonetically consistent. (Yeah, even French. Even Welsh.)
But English? Apart from the fact that this frickin’ language just steals shit from whoever England historically decided to colonize or fight this week, it’s also hellbent on not actually pronouncing most of its loanwords correctly. I once got mocked for pronouncing “hors d’œuvres” as (roughly) “orh D’EUV-ruh.” Basically, I couldn’t remember how it’s pronounced in English, so I aimed for French and crossed my fingers that it wouldn’t come across as ridiculously pretentious. Then the person I was talking to went like “uhhh, it’s *oar derves.* C’mon. We’re not serving horsey-dervies here.”
Anyway. It’s okay, Jenny, you’re not dumb, English is dumb. This is just a perennial problem for English speakers who read a lot 😆
(On the topic of linguistics, you’d LOVE Gretchen McCulloch’s book Because Internet, which is 336 pages of an actual professional linguist being delighted by Internet grammar, staunchly defending a lot of its adaptations, and examining the unspoken conventions and how/why they came to be. —I’ll rein in my ADHD and stop typing now. 😂)
I listened to a podcast recently where a woman pronounced libido as “libby-doo”. Couldn’t be wronger but also couldn’t be perfecter!
I pronounced verbatim as VERB-a-tim. My friend and I still laugh about it. It sounds like something sold by an MLM. “Verb-a-tim, for longer life!”
Is Threads a new social media? I have unplugged from every other space because it’s awful. But I might be interested in a kind one.
And this is why English is the hardest language to learn.
Penelope … my grade-school self thought that PENNY-lope was a perfectly valid attempt at reading a “weird” book character’s name out loud. Pretty sure none of my classmates had a clue either, but the teacher cracked up.
My mother discovered she was mispronouncing “Cheyenne” when she said it out loud as “shinny!”
Wait wait are you telling me that lamé rhymes with llama and Lamar????
Words I have embarrassed myself with – egregious, monastery, abyss, chasm, chaise longue (still not sure of that one, and I maybe misspelled it), exacerbate, oh, the list could go on and on. It just means we spent quality time with books instead of, oh, maybe socializing?
Annnd, now I’m confused about how you actually pronounce it 🤣
Those of us who read a lot tend to have large vocabularies with questionable pronunciations.
Indictment. Don’t get me wrong, I knew there was a word pronounced in-DIGHT-ment… I just thought it was a totally separate word from this one, in-DICKED-ment. Don’t ask me how I thought the other one was spelled, or what the difference in definition was between the two… 🙄
Heard a story from a guy who didn’t know how “quiche” was pronounced until he went out to a bakery café with his girlfriend and her mom… and he politely asked the young woman behind the register for a “quickie.”
I love all of your blog posts but honestly, the comments are so amazing. You have the BEST followers! To add to the list…. I have a sewing friend who pronounces iron as arn. Yes, she’s southern.
I have a friend who say Tynelol when she needs a pain reliever and it’s super adorable.
i recently realized i’ve been mispronouncing (AND misreading) the word amplitheater. turns out its actually amphitheater! no L! its got an F sound instead.
my mom pronounces puree as purr-REE instead of PYUR-ray. i’ve given up correcting her.
English doesn’t just steal from other languages–it follows them into dark alleys, hits them over the head, and rifles through their pockets while they’re unconscious. It’s an absolute bitch of a language, and it’s amazing that anyone who doesn’t grow up speaking it is able to learn it! I don’t even want to think about the words I’ve fucked up–in fact, I’m probably blocking them from my memory as I type this!
The only reason I know how to spell calamity is because of Calamity Jane.
But for years I thought naivete was pronounce “nigh-YEV-it-tee.”
Moscow is only pronounced MOS-ko if you’re not from the northern Idaho region, in which case it’s pronounced Mos-KOW.
At least that’s how we said it across the Washington state border in Pullman…
Yosemite was my downfall. It’s still Yose-mite in my head.
We all have words like this. Mine is the name Penelope. I always thought it was PEN-eh-loap. I also don’t know how to write out pronunciations.
We’re not going to talk about Nigella Lawson pronouncing it Me crow wah vey? 🤣
My mom pronounced mammogram as MOM o gram, and it was so good I never corrected her.
Mine was facade. Didn’t know what the little thingy under the c meant so I pronounced it “fay-Kade” on my head for far too long. Finally heard fah-sahd and realized! Duh.
Dachshund as “dah-shund”. Publicly. Oh, the laughter.
It’s a dialect from the region of brain.
You have just validated my life. I’ve never met a word I couldn’t mispronounce because if you always have your nose in a book you don’t have to actually talk to people. Bless you!
Many of your posts remind meof Bilbo Baggins birthday speech. I remain faithfully confused,, yet still entertained and reassured. Confused because one, one side of my brain says, “Damn, I HAVE been doing that wrong my whole life!”, whilst the other goes, “Nah Bro, you’re good.” Then the third side chimes in with a need for slurpees, and nothing else matters anyway. I love you.
I thought lascivious was lash-vicious. So many words I’ve learned from reading…
Segue. Pronounced Segway but I pronounced it seg-you until my thirties lol
Tulle. I said ‘TULL’. Bridesmaids are mean.
I love your conference call people! It is the best people who question their own way of doing things, instead of assuming they are always in the right. And why the hell can’t it be cuh-LOM-uh-tee? Language is so much fun.
This is why I love your books and this blog. You are all my people! One of mine was the name Beatrice. My grade school self thought it was pronounced the way it looks: beat- rice. I still think that would be a better name. And even though I know better now, the word “picturesque” still looks like pictures-q to me.
my favorites book (fool on the hill), has a character named Calliope. I was saying cal-ee-oh-p. a friend laughed and corrected me. cah-lie-uh-pee
live & learn baby!
A college-educated colleague of my dad’s was talking to him about a character in a book he was reading. The character had been “M-EYE-zld.” My dad was confused until his colleague spelled the word for him. “Oh, you mean ‘miss-led!'” Misled. Yep. MEYEzld.
I struggle with faux. I sound things out phonetically but at least my brain knows the x is silent. So I pronounce it “faw” instead of “fow.”
My childhood self thought lingerie was pronounced linger-ee.
Oh, Jenny! This is hilarious! I can totally relate to mispronouncing words and then realizing everyone else has been saying it differently. It’s a classic blunder. Thank you for sharing your humorous and relatable experience. It’s a great reminder to always be open to learning and to laugh at ourselves. Keep up the great writing!
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