words and phrases that people often get wrong in awkward ways

my friend did contracting work for Puget Sound Energy and he had to keep retraining his employees to not say "Pungent Sound" as it was pissing off employees of the company

what other words or phrases are just always destined to be fucked up in an awkward way, no matter how many times you correct someone?

"Six of one, half dozen of the other" is a classic conference-room bungler.

The proof is in the pudding, argh

People seem to often use enervate/enervating to mean the reverse, perhaps because the word begins like energy or energetic

Once a term I have to teach a class where I talk about quantitative vs qualitative research and I cannot get my mouth to pronounce either of those words without some effort

I always want to add an extra syllable to “edited” - ediditted or something

When I was 16yo I pronounced hyperbole as Hyper-bowl as I'd never heard it pronounced before and 13 years later it still gets brought up. Impossible to win an argument with any of them when they've got that little gem in their backpocket

My brother pronounced minestrone "myne-strohn" for years. Dad almost disowned him

mute point instead of MOOT point aaaargh

I hear a lot of people saying that something "segged" into something else, when you know they are seeing the word "segue" in their head.

Guess I wouldn't call that awkward, but it still bothers me.

It took me a long time to realise it was pronounced "segway" and not "seegged", as in vague, vogue etc

yeah i had heard that word spoken on the radio for years and didn't quite know what it was before i eventually discovered they were saying "segue".

which, likewise, i had previously assumed was pronounced "seeg".

knew a kid in high school who had trouble pronouncing certain contractions, like instead of *wouldn't* he would say *wunt*

his struggles with *couldn't* were more notable

I've drawn mockery for apparently saying "was" as "wuz" but tbh i think everyone else is doing it wrong

Maybe the high school kid was just Australian

Listening to a post last week about the films of Charlie Kaufman, I came as close as I've come to "and then I fell of my bike" when I realised that synecdoche is pronounced in a similar way to the town of Schenectady (and indeed that's the joke) rather than sin-ec-dough-sh that I'd been mentally pronouncing it as. In conclusion, burn the Greek language to the ground.

Similarly, I'd always pronounced Eurydice as 'you-ruh-deese' as that's how they say it in Cocteau's Orphee, which is the only place I'd heard anyone actually speak the name out loud. Imagine my surprise when etc

not really an 'always get wrong' but I knew someone from IRC years ago that thought 'might as well' was 'minds a well' and said we were wrong when we gently corrected her. she also called tennis shoes "tenor shoes", and thought the lyric in Positive K's "I Got a Man" was "I got a man/what's your man got to do with me?/I got a man/I'm not trying to head out sea", claiming 'head out sea' was a metaphor.

this was also the person who thought World War I was fought between the North and South over slavery

I know someone who says "undoubtably" for "undoubtedly" and, apparently, this is quite common.

One that's very common but inexplicable to me is writing "thank you" as one word.

see also, "you're bias" instead of "you're biased"

unless you are this guy

https://i.ibb.co/vsWZnYN/LenBias.jpg

On more than one occasion I've heard somebody say that they had experienced something surreal, akin to an "outer body experience."

Every time I see somebody type the word 'noone" on the socials I have to snarkily reply "Really? What was Peter Noone doing there? Was there a Hermits reunion gig going on?"

I might be wrong about this, but I don't think "enormity" refers just to large size.

I haven't scrolled back through this thread, but the "absurd" vs "absurdist" thing *drives me up a wall*, and so many people do it.

my parents straight-up laughed at me when, at like age seven, i pronounced socrates the way any little anglophone kid would

i have never forgiven them

years later, Bill and Ted stole that pronunciation from you

it's not a word or phrase, but it's humorous that a completely unimportant thing like "what is the answer to this math problem" always results in wrong answers and huge knockdown drag out arguments online, mostly because everybody forgot PEMDAS after they left school and just do the problem left to right.

awkwardly wrong to say PEMDAS when it's BODMAS

HERE WE GO FOLKS, THREAD IS ABOUT TO TAKE OFFFFFFFFFFFF

due diligence

genuinely when I first heard people talking about FODMAP I was trying to remember what the hell maths operations that stood for

FUBAR

SNAFU

I actually taught some youthful coworkers what a snafu is and they were eager to employ this useful acronym

my parents straight-up laughed at me when, at like age seven, i pronounced socrates the way any little anglophone kid would

i have never forgiven them

― mookieproof, Monday, February 19, 2024 3:45 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

check out 13:41 for one of my favorite jokes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyOvrEuXHCw

I feel like people use 'ersatz' a lot when they really mean 'de facto'

I would love it if people used the term "fait accompli" more often, though I'm sure they would typically bungle it, as no doubt would I.

Toni Halliday to thread

That was actually the first time I had even heard that term!

for all intensive purposes, you're correct

… in this day in age

pacifically

I first encountered 'ersatz' in old dirty magazine ads for 'spanish fly' pills... along with 'spurious'

Right there in the ad they're admitting they're fake, but I guess if you use fancy scrabble words, you'll still get some orders