Eggcorn Forum

My grandfather grew up speaking French in New York State, which makes this a little harder to understand. He apparently hated his father, and I believe partly for that reason changed his name when he was a very young man. Only my grandmother knew the details because he kept his “past name” completely hidden, even his children didn’t know his birth name until Grandma told them after he died.
He chose the name Maurice Lyon Xavier. I think I was told he got the name, or part of it anyway, from choosing words from magazines he read.

Anyway, he pronounced his name “Morris,” and since all adults called him that it was some time before I realized that it was spelled Maurice. I’m not sure why he read the word Maurice as Morris, given that he grew up speaking French, that’s the part I don’t understand.

For me, it was “rapport.” I had read this word for many years, and heard it in my head as rap’-port. I had heard the word spoken for as many years, but imagined it to be spelled much differently. “Repoor,” or something. I never quite figured it out. I think I was in my mid or late twenties before I connected the “two” words.

I thought of two more:
1) beribboned (which I think I read in A Christmas Carol, perhaps describing Fezziwig’s daughters, and in a kid’s picture book I had). I pronounced it as “berry-boned.” I didn’t connect it to being festooned with ribbons until much later.
2) facade, which I read as “fay-KAID” (I associated it with “fake-”). I knew it was a false front on a building, which was the first definition that I drew from reading it, but I had no idea it was French, with the C sounding like an S or that the A was pronounced as it is….

Last edited by JonW719 (2007-10-17 18:03:36)

Here’s another one in the recent New Yorker (Oct. 15 issue, page 44, 2008 campaign quiz):

“At a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, Joseph Biden referred to the queue of senators wating to speak. How did he pronounce ‘queue’?
(A) “Kwa-you”
(B) “Kway”
(C) “Cue-you-ee”

The answer listed at the bottom is B.

Then there are words that are pronounced differently in different regions, such as ‘plait’ which in America, I believe, is pronounced ‘plate’ but in Britain is ‘platt’. Or Houston, which is one thing when it’s a city in Texas, and another when it’s a street in NYC.

I was an adult before I realized that the word “heady” had anything to do with “head.” I always supposed it was pronounced “heedy.” It was only rather recently that I realized that “Pleistocene,” a word I’ve known since I was a child reading about extinct animals, is not pronounced “Plee-is-to-cene,” as I assumed when I was eight or so. There is a famous example in the novel “How Green Was My Valley,” of a Welsh-speaking boy, being educated in English, pronouncing “misled” as “mizzled” and being mocked for it by his teacher.

Gilibug, when I lived in Israel many years ago, I several times heard Israelis refer to “Abraham Lincolin,” pronouncing the second “L.”

Of course, proper names, of both people and places, are constantly pronounced as they are spelled by people not in the know. The Boston area provides an endless array of shibboleths by which the natives can distinguish the foreigners—not just obvious ones like “Worcester,” but places like “Medford” (roughly, “Meffid”), “Waltham” (curiously pronounced “WALL-thAm” rather than “Wallth’m”), “Peabody” (Pibbidy), etc. I assumed that the last syllable in “Spokane” was pronounced “cane,” not “can” until I visited the area, and that “Yakima” was stressed on the second syllable, not the first. (Have I even got this right?) The British laugh at those who don’t know that “Ralph” is pronounced “Rafe,” “Davies,” “Davis” and “Talliaferro” “Tolliver.”

Thanks to everyone for the great responses. I was thinking about this and came to the conclusion that the way we learned to read probably has a lot to do with whether we had words that we mispronounced in this way. My parents were big proponents of teaching us to “sound out” words. My dad and I would sit in the car at the grocery store while my mom shopped, and he would help me sound out words on signs, etc. around us. So with the English language being what it is, and so many letters having multiple possibilities for the sounds they make, it is easy to mispronounce a word we came across in text. I think in most people our reading vocabulary is greater than our spoken (or heard) vocabulary. But if a person learned to read primarily from sight words instead of phonics this situation may not have come up as frequently.

Sparky,

The pronunciation of “vagina” with a long “i” and the stress on the second syllable does not reflect “pseudo-educated confusion” but the traditional (i.e., public school and university) English pronunciation of Latin from the 16h century through at least the first half of the 20th, when English schools began to adopt a more classicizing pronunciation (cf. the ordinary pronunciation of “Caesar” with “Kaisar,” as students are now taught to say.) Similarly, British lawyers still say “re-GI-na,” with a long “i”, as in “Re-GI-na v. Smith.” One of my law school professors actually said “ra-shun-ALE-ee” for “rationale,” on the same principle.

I’ve always thought this was very interesting, because it means that the 15th and 16th century Great Vowel Shift in English was applied equally to Latin, so that a long “i” went from “EE” to the dipthong “AI,” etc. The same thing happened in Ashkenaz (the Yiddish-speaking world), where different realizations of the same vowel in Yiddish were applied in the local pronunciation of Hebrew. To give an example, my father, who spoke Lithuanian Yiddish and therefore said “breit:” for “bread” where YIddish speakers from other regions would say “broyt,” would similarly say “cheidesh” and “cheilem” for the more usual Ashkenazi Hebrew “choydesh” and “choylem” [“month” and “dream,” respectively.]

Mudhoney esoteric? Well, Knave, I can assure you that there’s at least one Mudhoney fan on the forum. But I probably heard the name before I ever saw it written.

In response to blandford’s comment—yeah, I think the way you treat new words might be related to reading speed. I’m a painfully slow reader, so stopping and guessing at the sound of an unfamiliar word—which I usually do—doesn’t seem like a big deal to me.

I remember that the unhyphenated version of “infra-red” tripped me up from time to time in college textbooks. It looks like a participial adjective, and I’d sit there thinking, “What does ‘to infrare’ mean?”

Oh, this discussion is so BAY-nal! Can’t you con-JURE up better examples? To Blandford: Maybe, when we are young, we know spoken words better than written words. So that, when we run into a big written word, we seek the sound of it, because we already might know it as a spoken word. Then, if we get no familiar spoken word sound, we go back to the “skip-over” visual word.

Finally, how many people insist on saying, “misCHEEveeous,” even when their eyes could tell them how the word is supposed to be pronounced? This is a big example of a skip-over visual word that turns into a spoken mistake.

I easily deduced the meaning of “misled” from its context, but for a very long time, I assumed it was pronounced MY-ZULD i.e. the past tense of “misle”.

When I was a kid, I thought Life magazine was called Live (rhyme with hive).

Best one I had for years was the same as Clint above: misled – totally thought it was my-zeld.

I actually heard a segment on this on NPR’s This American Life. (not Live – ha. my joke).

I’m including a link which references the show and includes a few other interesting mis-understood / interpreted things:

http://tenser.typepad.com/tenser_said_t … nowle.html

“Dower” in Iowa? I’m not surprised, Toots. Just a suburb of Nebraska, isn’t it?

Speaking of which (Nebraska), my Mom’s family used to visit the CHOIR-prak-ter when they had a twinge in their bones. Never knew if that was a local misreading of the word KI-roh-prak-ter or detritus of an older tradition.

Last edited by kem (2007-12-05 23:44:48)