Do you mispronounce the words you read?

knowledge-dictionary

My father is an avid reader (which is presumably where I got it from). And my grandma loves to tell stories about how he was always mispronouncing words he’d read in books.

“I’d like some soo-ed (suede) shoes for Christmas.”

“Lisa was in my room and now it’s in chay-ose (chaos)!”

We always laugh at these stories. But then a few weeks ago, I was talking about this place I used to visit in college, called Purgatory Chasm. And yes, I pronounced it with the “ch”. Everyone laughed. I swore never to do it again.

Then yesterday I said something about a myriad of choices. And I pronounced it “my-rade”.

I’ve been reading that word for years. And apparently never paid attention to the fact that the i comes before the a (I’m not dyslexic, either).

I don’t think it makes me stupid, just in possession of such a large vocabulary some trivial things (such as pronunciation) tend to slip from time to time.

Do you ever mispronounce words you read in books?

2 thoughts on “Do you mispronounce the words you read?

  1. My dad is also a notorious mis-pronouncer [ie facist comes out “face-ist”]. Biopic is one I bungled several times – without correction – until I heard it on NPR. Oops!

    Like

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s