#fun with words

doublism:

creep themed blowjob call that radio head

nails-teeth-neck:

it’s mementing absolute mori

thranduilland:

whateverhumans:

siesiegirl:

professorsparklepants:

tuesdayisfordancing:

ozymandias271:

“our teeth and ambitions are bared” is a zeugma

and it’s a zeugma where one of the words is literal and one is metaphorical which is the BEST KIND

I didn’t know about zeugmas until just now! That is so awesome, everybody: 

zeug·ma ˈzo͞oɡmə/

noun

1. a figure of speech in which a word applies to two others in different senses (e.g.,John and his license expired last week ) or to two others of which it semantically suits only one (e.g., with weeping eyes and hearts ).

ISN’T THAT AWESOME??

#in english class in high school my teacher had us write our own zeugmas in class#and one guy came up with ‘he fell from her favor… and the window’#i am forever looking for opportunities to use that one

She dropped her dress and inhibitions at the door.

What’s this? My favorite rhetorical device showing up on my dashboard?

IT HAS A NAMEEEE!! OH MY GOD!!!

petermorwood:

tokenmwm:

the-haiku-bot:

onemuseleft:

squeeful:

dreamcatchersdaughter:

finleycannotdraw:

sergeant-angels-trashcan:

surely-you-jess:

mikkeneko:

randomslasher:

the-inverted-langblr:

geschiedenis-en-talen:

You will not believe the amount of times I’ve read an English word and thought of a pronunciation and then continued to pronounce the word that way in my head for years only to discover that it has a completely different pronunciation and I would’ve made a fool of myself if I had ever pronounced that word out loud

it’s okay native speakers have exactly the same experience

It’s a phenomenon unofficially known as “reader’s accent” and it’s very common! Because English has so many words (in fact considered to be the language with the greatest number of words) lots of people, and in particular those who read a lot as children, will encounter a word in writing long before they hear it spoken. They’ll develop the idea of what the word will sound like in their head, and only realize when they hear it spoken that their idea was different than the common pronunciation. 

I’ve even had it where I’ve known words as spoken words, and I’ve known words as written words, and it’s taken me a significant amount of time to realize that they were the same word. One example I can think of is the word indictment. I always thought “indictment” was pronounced “in-dict-ment,” and it was only when all these police indictments started happening on the news (with the news crawls below the words being spoken) that I realized it was “in-DITE-ment.” 

So yeah, never feel bad for discovering that a word in English is pronounced differently than you would’ve expected. English has had influence from SO many other languages over the centuries as it developed, and as a result, many of our pronunciation “guidelines” are borrowed from the languages the words originally came from. It’s massively inconsistent, and it’s one of the reasons that learning English as a second language is so difficult. 

As my favorite poster in the campus writing center used to proclaim: 

“English: A language that lurks in dark alleyways, beats up other languages, and rifles through their pockets for spare vocabulary.” 

it wasn’t until an adult that I realized that colonel and spoken word “kernal” were the same word

Me @ me pronouncing “hemorrhage” and “hors d’ouerves”

“soldering” as “sautering”

I used to pronounce “epitome” (e-pit-oh-me) as “epitome” (epi-tom) and only learned that it was wrong when my mom said it out loud

“cordial” was definitely for a long time for me (cor-dial) and not (cor-gial).

the peeved look on my face when i realized segue and Segway are pronounced the same

You don’t want to know how I pronounced “chaos” for most of my childhood

You don’t want to know

how I pronounced “chaos” for

most of my childhood

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

Silhouette and segue for me

And the dumb thing is, i actually knew of the correct pronunciation of segue, i just thought it was spelt like the mobility device and that ‘segway’ and ‘segg’ were just interchangeable…

I learned to read long before starting school, didn’t know anyone with this name, and so for a long time thought Steven and Stephen were pronounced differently - Stee-Ven and (blush) Step-Hen.

In my family up North, the day after Christmas was Boxing Day, not St Stephen’s Day, so I didn’t have that help in correction.

Here’s another: until we got The Big Dictionary with its diacritical marks…

…I thought Japanese rice wine was pronounced the same way as “be good for goodness’ sake“.

There were so many others, a lot of them revealed by The Dictionary, but that step-hen one lingers longest in the memory of mild embarrassment… :-P

*****

Here’s an Irish road sign with the helpful English translation underneath.

Dunleery would have been better, but why spoil a joke with accuracy? :->

Andhere’s a post which includes a full version of that notorious pronunciation poem “The Chaos”.

Its title is self-explanatory.

I have an Aunt Jeanne (pronounced Jee-nie) so I know how to say it, right? Well, in 10th grade, my English teacher asked me to do a reading in front of the class and one of the characters was called Jeanne.

How did I pronounce it? Jee-ann.