also im so sorry for anyone that ever compliments me on here, I know I very stale with the same “I’m glad you like …!” “I’m happy you like …!” over and over again I’m just really bad at taking compliments I promise I’m not icing over at you. I promise I reread them and think about them at night giddily kicking my feet in the air like a lovesick teenager
Doing research for a thing everyone reblog or reply and tell me what you would do with your time if you didn’t have to work. Like if you suddenly got enough passive income to live a comfortable middle class life and you didn’t have to do a single thing to get it, what would you do all day?
If you think your answer is embaraseing anon it to me.
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
it’s not macabre it’s macabre or macabre
i was convinced dachshund and “doxen” were different breeds of dog
“chaste” (chast), “naivete” (nah-ee-veht), and “catholicism” (catholic-ism) are some of my favorites
i said “intrigue” (in-treeg) as in-treh-goo in front of my history class once and my souls hasn’t known peace since
Working on sticker designs between commissions and want to do some Hannibal stickers. gonna do some more of the cast and sell the set but had to do the murderhusbands first.
