Is there a word you've discovered you've been mispronouncing all your life?

[Oldddudders]

A colleague had worked in Burntisland Control. Burnt Island is is. 

[RichardT]

On 02/06/2023 at 11:39, Oldddudders said:

His Scots successor as DM did not fall into any such traps, and finished his career as GM at York.

Going OT - or perhaps not if we consider Aberdonian pronunciation - would that have been Frank Paterson? 
 

RichardT

[Ozexpatriate]

On the topic of island / isle, when quite young I struggled with Islington (it being on a Monopoly board and never having heard it). We wrongly guessed the Isl- prefix was like "aisle-ing-ton". 

[Hroth]

1 hour ago, Ozexpatriate said:

On the topic of island / isle, when quite young I struggled with Islington (it being on a Monopoly board and never having heard it). We wrongly guessed the Isl- prefix was like "aisle-ing-ton". 

 

Sounds very posh.....  🤪

[Ozexpatriate]

9 minutes ago, Hroth said:

Sounds very posh.....  🤪

And the Monopoly property is "The Angel, Islington" - which sounds more posh from very far away.

[Oldddudders]

1 hour ago, RichardT said:

Going OT - or perhaps not if we consider Aberdonian pronunciation - would that have been Frank Paterson? 
 

RichardT

Very much so. I got to know him a little in subsequent years, despite our disparity in grade. 

[MJI]

On 02/06/2023 at 08:27, Enterprisingwestern said:

 

 

That's cos you is posh, I bet you visit Barth as well!

 

Mike.

Had that argument west country Bath

 

Residents of it bath, pretend posh person barth.

 

The people correcting included student who studied there.

[Bernard Lamb]

12 hours ago, Ozexpatriate said:

And the Monopoly property is "The Angel, Islington" - which sounds more posh from very far away.

it's a 'Spoons' pub these days. One on the list of places that they want to sell off. No takers so far, which says something about the area.

Bernard

[Hroth]

42 minutes ago, Bernard Lamb said:

it's a 'Spoons' pub these days. One on the list of places that they want to sell off. No takers so far, which says something about the area.

Bernard

 

The real Angel is the rather fine building on the corner (now a Co op bank and misc offices), the 'spoons masquerading as the Angel is built on the former stables, or something similar!

 

 

[MJI]

On 01/06/2023 at 17:27, TerryD1471 said:

I quite agree; back in the day, the phrases "U" and "non-U" were invented to distinguish between the folks who had been taught the "correct" pronunciation and those who had simply read the word phonetically off the page. It's just another way of establishing your "superiority" and the English language is full of such examples. The names Worcester, Leicester, Leominster, Woolfardisworthy etc. come to mind.

Cester is done s-ter

 

Wors-ter Glos-ter

[The Lurker]

Cirencester?

[MJI]

1 hour ago, The Lurker said:

Cirencester?

The odd one out

[Oldddudders]

1 hour ago, The Lurker said:

Cirencester?

I was told the locals just call it Siren.

[Steamport Southport]

One that popped up in another thread.

 

Matelot

 

I always thought it was slang for a sailor and was short for "mate a lot" so pronounced mate lot!

 

Even though many of my family were seafarers, I never heard them use the term so I only saw it in books.

[kevinlms]

On 02/06/2023 at 21:38, jjb1970 said:

Marylebone, most people call it marleybone, I was always told it should be pronounced pretty much as per how it is written, perhaps with the 'bone' shortened to 'bun'.

Yet most people should be familiar with it as one of 4 stations!

[45156]

When I lived up North, I had a chimney to my stove, but at least two of my neighbours had chimbleys.

[Nearholmer]

They have chimbleys in Norfolk, all over the place.

 

Dialect mispronunciations, if that’s what they amount to, are another thing altogether though. When I was a kid, some of the real oldsters out in the country were still speaking bits of Sussex dialect, which seemed to involve adding extra syllables to words for no obvious reason. A few words of it just about survive, like ‘twitten’ meaning footpath, and ‘metty’ which I think might derive from the French metiers, for a craftsman, rather than ‘mate’, but like lots of things in Sussex it’s always preceded by ‘ole’ which sometimes implies old, but is sometimes there just because it is …. It’s an extra word, like the extra syllables.

 

PS: I’ve also just remembered they used to say ‘sure-lie’, that is surely, a lot too, and from what I could work out it expressed anything from absolute certainty or assurance, to complete doubt and denial according to subtle variations in emphasis. Likewise ‘dreckly’, which meant anything from immediately to never. That’s supposedly a Cornish thing, so how it came to be there one can only guess. And, the word ‘’owsomever’, which I never did understand, it was like a sort of punctuation.

 

 

Edited June 4, 2023 by Nearholmer

[Hroth]

3 hours ago, The Lurker said:

Cirencester?

 

Bless you!

 

[Flying Pig]

17 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

which seemed to involve adding extra syllables to words for no obvious reason

 

Could be random additions, or just possibly surviving fragments of inflections (word endings) long abandoned in standard English.

[Enterprisingwestern]

17 hours ago, 45156 said:

When I lived up North, I had a chimney to my stove, but at least two of my neighbours had chimbleys.

 

Did they have skellingtons too?

 

Mike.

[Stubby47]

I only mispronounced it once...

 

 

 

 

 

I said 'I do' instead of 'I don't '.

[Hroth]

2 hours ago, Enterprisingwestern said:

 

Did they have skellingtons too?

 

Mike.

 

I've still got mine....  🤪

 

[Steamport Southport]

You rang?

 

[kevinlms]

Most of them!