Some 20 or so years ago, when I was still a late teenager, I found myself amongst a group of well-read friends who laughed at me. Why were they amused? I referred to the subject of “coitus,” and I pronounced it “COY-tus.” Although I have since found that modern dictionaries now accept this pronunciation, the commonly accepted pronunciation at the time, and the preferred one still, is “co-EYE-tus.” Coital activities are preferentially referred to as “co-EYE-tal,” and your joyful acts of coition are best pronounced as “co-ISH-un.”
Some years later I dated a lovely lady–who I rather regret losing track of as a friend, even though I am quite happily married today–who once mispronounced a word in my presence. When that happened, I instinctively corrected her. Then I immediately apologized for being so didactic. To my surprise she said, “Oh no, not at all. When you correct someone’s pronunciation you’re just giving them a compliment.”
“Oh?”
“Sure. If you laugh at them you’re being a jerk, but if you correct them all you’re doing is offering a minor favor–and noticing that they are well-read.”
She was right you know. Almost invariably, if a person uses a word in a sentence, and she mispronounces it, it means that she has 1) read the word at least once, and probably more than once, 2) correctly teased out the meaning from context, and 3) absorbed it well enough that she can properly use it in a sentence.
Given that the English language has hundreds of thousands of words–which is far more than most languages–should it not be considered a sign of erudition if someone occasionally uses a word and doesn’t pronounce it right? Indeed, what else could it possibly mean, except that the person is well-read and is familiar with words she has never heard pronounced aloud?
Here are some great English words that I’ll bet a lot of people recognize but might not pronounce right:
bivouac
mischievous
assuage
exiguity
plethora
coitus
lissom
scion
verdant
avarice
raucous
insouciant
puerile
winsome
polyglot
umbrage
facile
intransigent
paucity
fatuous
inchoate
chimera
Maybe you recognize half of those words. Hell, maybe you recognize all of them. They’re all worth looking up. But can you say with confidence that you are exactly certain how to pronounce every single one of them? I can, but only because I picked them out of my head and looked them up. I’m sure you could come up with a list I might pronounce wrong. And so here’s the important question:
If someone you knew said, “That seems like a FACE-ile argument,” or said “your opinion seems rather in-CHOTE,” or “my friend from Europe is a “pole-EE-gloat,” or referred to “my LISS-some” friend, would you assume that whoever uttered those words was stupid? Or just that he had never heard those words pronounced aloud?
(For the record, the proper pronunciation of those words is “FASS-iyle,” “in-KO-it,” “PALL-ee-glott,” and “LIE-some.”)
{ 56 comments }
Of course, depending on the European’s (or anyone else’s) assumptions regarding number of languages spoken fluently vs intelligence, they may very well be a poly-gloat. :P
And in assuming that the speaker is in error, one also assumes that the speaker is as limited in international travel as the listener!
British pronunciations of many of those words differ from American pronunciations (e.g., UK liss-sum and fac-ul; and equally dyook for duke and tiss-yoo for tissue).
There are clear mispronunciations, but there are also pronunciations, 100% correct, that differ from one’s own. Judging people by their pronunciations makes about as much sense as judging them by oh, their skin color!
Of the four you elaborated on, I only had lissome wrong. I think I have most of the list right. Anyway, excellent point. One I think I grasped innately but had never thought out and expressed.
I got inchoate wrong, durn it. And to my chagrin (shu-GRIN, Amercian pronunciation) I discovered just the other day that I’ve been mispronouncing KHY-mera as CHIM-era for years. Those hard C’s will get you every time.
Of course, your headline presumes that “well read” equals “intelligence”. While the correlation is high, it’s not 100%. [Insert pundit or politician of your choice as a counterexample here.]
But you raise a good point. I’m an avid reader from a family of avid readers; but my brother-in-law puts me to shame, having read easily five times as many books as me, in more genres and topics. And yet it’s amazing the words he knows but mispronounces. The one that made us all laugh was “PE-des-tren” (pedestrian).
As a gamemaster for role-playing games, I find him incredibly frustrating, because it seems like he can read my mind. But it’s really as simple as this: no matter what plot I can dream up, no matter how outrageous, he has read at least three variations on it. Add in the fact that he has known me nearly three decades, and he can see where my mind is heading almost as fast as I can.
I have at some point in my life pronounced some of these wrong, but they are:
bivouac: “BIV-wack”
mischievous – “MIS-che-vus” (VERY commonly mispronounced. It’s so commonly mispronounced it might deserve having dictionaries re-spell it, since the vast majority of speakers say “mis-CHEE-vee-us,” which doesn’t even look like how it’s spelled)
assuage — “uh-SWAGE”
exiguity – “ecks-i-JEW-it-ee”
plethora – “PLEH-thuh-ruh”
coitus – “co-EYE-tus”
lissom – “LIE-some”
scion – “SCI-uhn”
verdant – “VER-dunt.”
avarice – “Aa-vuh-russ”
raucous -”RAW-cuss”
insouciant – “in-SOO-shunt”
puerile – “PYEW-rull” or “pew-RILE”
winsome – “WIN-sum”
polyglot – “PALL-ee-glott”
umbrage – “UHM-bridge”
facile – “FAS-sull”
intransigent – “in-TRAN-si-junt”
paucity – “PAW-city”
fatuous – “FAT-chew-us”
inchoate – “in-KO-it”
chimera – “KYM-er-uh”
Note: I only sound smart here because I’m getting to pick some of my own favorite obscure words. I’m quite certain that if you tried you could trip me up on a few I wasn’t so sure about (although yeah, I double-checked with a dictionary).
Bryan: I mispronounced “chagrin” as “CHAY-grin” for some time before I finally learned that it was “shuh-GRIN.” Heh.
Having recently completed a (by the way, totally kick-ass and destined to be a bestseller) novel, I’d have to say your brother-in-law is right: it is astounding, once you get into the depths of storytelling, to realize just how few plotlines there really are. In one sense, as a storyteller it’s a huge letdown–but in another, it’s a major challenge. Indeed, the ultimately question isn’t “how original is your story?” (it probably isn’t), but rather, “how well do you rise to the challenge of putting your own unique spin on it?”
I write more than I talk, so I don’t allow myself as much opportunity to mispronouce words.
Like being an observant Mormon. You don’t have to much worry about either getting drunk from alcohol or high blood pressure from coffee.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
And then there was the socialist character in “Ladies Who Do” who hated the “ca-PIT-uh-lists”.
Avarice?
Thanks, I’d love to ‘ave one.
Also add CLI-to-ris, which may rhyme with Dolores on Seinfeld, but doesn’t in the preferred pronunciation.
And then there’s the words you can intentionally mispronounce just to be a smartass. Those are legion; my favorite being to pronounce the name Penelope as it’s written (“PEE-nuh-lope”). Then again, those mispronunciations only measure one’s “rectal IQ,” not one’s overall intelligence.
Dean,
Wonderful subject, and I agree absolutely with your take on it! There are any number of words I’ve read but never heard pronounced.
Re “coitus,” the first time I heard it pronounced, it was by an 8th-grade sex ed teacher who favored “COY-tus.” I thought that was improbable, but who was I to argue?
As for the list, I’d assumed “lissom” had a short “i,” and I’d never been quite sure about “chimera.” (When I first met that word, in some juvenile retelling of the myth of Perseus, I sounded it out “kim-EER-ah,” and never quite unlearned it.) The rest I’m pretty confident about.
Here’s one to add, Dean: “banal.” I really don’t know what’s the going pronunciation these days. I’ve heard “buh-NAL” (the one I heard first &assumed was right); I’ve also heard “BAY-nal.”
Oh, one last: I think “FACE-ile” is the English pronunciation of “facile.”
There was a great show about chimerae on Discovery Health Channel this past week. “I Am My Own Twin.”
My classic one was “ennui.” My father heard me pronounce it “en-you-eye” once in my early twenties and he asked me “what word is that?” I spelled it out, and we got a good laugh out of it after he told me the correct pronunciation.
The popularity of D&D and other similar games has undoubtedly led to the widespread mangled pronunciation of any number of names from classic literature. Some were intentional–it was the common practice in my gaming group to refer to a certain Great Old One from the works of H.P. Lovecraft as “Chuck.”
Nah, Dean’s right – it’s “FAS-sull.” I usually say “FAS-aisle” myself, though.
I guess it’s the French classes I took, but I always pronounce ‘facile’ as ‘fa-SEEL’. I probably won’t change. :)
As a kid, I first read “bedraggled” as bed-raggled and “misled” as MIZE-uld. I still have a sneaking preferemce for both. Certainly, Bush the Malaprop has MIZE-uld the dems more than once, and I wish him every success at doing so in future.
John Van Laer,
MIZE-uld: I did that too. And I still remember coming across one of those exhortations to recycle in Ranger Rick magazine as a kid — “Reuse that paper bag!” — and thinking, “Roose? What’s that?”
I always thught it was “cli-TOR-iss” (rhymes with “Doris”) until the moment I heard “CLI-ter-iss.” The moment I heard the latter, however, I knew it was right.
On “banal,” for whatever reason, I like to say “bay-nahl.” Even though “buh-NAHL” is more correct, I like the former better.
“FASS-isle” still works for me, even though I know it’s not quite right.
I must say, “MIZE-uld” for “misled” is a work of art. Sometimes malapropisms are wonderful things. Indeed, I think I may just start using “MIZE-uld” in everyday conversation, just for the kick of it.
“I was mizuld.” Let them wonder what the heck I’m talking about.
“I was mizuld.”
“He mizuld me.”
“I hate being mizuld.”
I’m not making fun, I’m actually getting a kick out of this. Ha!
Here is one. ‘Err’
It is pronounced ‘Ur’, not ‘air’.
And is ‘debacle’ de-BAK-ul or DEB-ak-ull ??
Ugh. Me have same problem. Read and know definition of lots of words. Me not actually pronounce them. Me sound like neandertal when trying. ;-)
(Truly, I read a lot and understand what quite a few words mean and how they are used. Never actually pronounced them in conversation and I get ambushed by the proper pronounciation from time to time. And people wonder why I don’t think Bush is a moron because he can’t pronounce nuclear correctly.)
Dean, many years back I remember reading the science-fiction story “In Hiding,” by Wilmar Shiras. It was about a 13-year-old boy who was a super-genius— more intelligent, in fact, than most adult geniuses. He hid his identity, operating through the mail— of course in today’s world that would be “operating over the Internet,” but Shiras’ story was written in the 1940s.
One of the points in the story that sticks with me is that, although the boy had a huge English vocabulary and could write at a highly talented adult level, there were many words he used which he didn’t know how to pronounce, because he had never encountered them except in written form.
BTW, you mean it ain’t COY-tus??! Gee, I learn something new every day. Next thing, you’ll be telling me that human reproduction actually occurs when a man sticks his elbow in a woman’s ear…
Paul,
Your last point makes it abundantly clear that we aren’t related! John Burgess
John:
Not unless you happen to be either from Wisconsin (in particular, the Fond du Lac or Ripon area), or else descended from the architect Carlton Burgess, who I believe lived in California and designed Jack Benny’s house.
I always thught it was “cli-TOR-iss” (rhymes with “Doris”) until the moment I heard “CLI-ter-iss.” The moment I heard the latter, however, I knew it was right.
You know what? We don’t care HOW you pronounce it, as long as you all can FIND it. :-)
I had quite an argument with my Sociology professor (born in Africa) when he pronounced caste as in “haste” (long a, instead of short a sound).
It was a rather startling argument because this person obviously has more education than I, but his understanding of the language held such a huge flaw.
He applied our English phonics rules, forgetting that caste is not even an English word.
It was not surprising that I barely passed that class.
Extremely interesting this all is. And very true.
Here’s one for you, a favorite of a good friend of mine: Synecdoche.
And, yes, I love those holy words: Coitus. Clitoris. Tribadism.
Polytheism. I’ve always pronounced it “Pah-lee-THEE-ism”. And yet a cousin of mine pronounced it “Pah-LEE-thee-ism”.
I have heard “Ca-PIT-alists”. I have also heard “EX-truh-mism”. I love “La-BOR-atory”.
Dean,
Re: the book. Got a publisher and publication date yet? We at Blog o’RAM are starting to do more book reviews. We’d love to showcase it.
Steven,
You learn something new every day, even when you’d rather not. “Tribadism” made me go to dictionaru.com. Now I’m going to have to wash that image from my mind.
No. Everything we’ve read says that we should finish before shopping for an agent or publisher.
Well we’re finished. Now we have to figure out who’ll look at the thing.
Steven,
“La-BOR-atory” really is standard English pronunciation. It’s only we Yanks who say “LAB’ratory.”
Rosemary – how about “I don’t care how you pronounce it as long as you get your tongue around it…”
If at first you don’t succeed, tribadism.
There’s no mistaking the word, ‘fookin’ when appropriately applied.
As in:
Fookin brilliant.
Dean: I referred to the subject of “coitus,” and I pronounced it “COY-tus.” Although I have since found that modern dictionaries now accept this pronunciation, the commonly accepted pronunciation at the time, and the preferred one still, is “co-EYE-tus.”
The preferred pronounciation is
CO-i-təs
Accent on first syllable, second syllable is short “i” (like “in”, not “eye”). Take another look at the dictionary entry you linked.
CO-i-təs kinda sounds like someone from Georgia saying COYtus.
Rosemary, it was always the first thing I’ve ever looked for. And the last thing I’ve ever ignored.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Sorry about the block character. The schwa looked fine in preview.
Michelle Dulak Thomson wrote:
“La-BOR-atory” really is standard English pronunciation. It’s only we Yanks who say “LAB’ratory.”
Yes, I did know that. And I have always preferred the English pronunciation of it.
I get the feeling that many Englishmen would also say “La-BOR-at’ry”.
McKiernan wrote:
“There’s no mistaking the word, ‘fookin’ when appropriately applied.
As in:
Fookin brilliant.”
Reminds me of the Scotsman who said “Aboot the Aztec hymns, me laddie….”
Endytophilia….
John Van Laer:
“As a kid, I first read ‘bedraggled’ as bed-raggled and ‘misled’ as MIZE-uld.”
Wasn’t the mislead/misled problem the solution to an Encyclopedia Brown story?
I have been aware of this problem ever since I learned that the pronunciation arch-ee-puh-LAY-go for archipelago, imparted to me by one of my high school teachers, made me sound like a complete idiot. He was Italian and should have steered clear of Greek entirely. It’s better for smart people to shut up. Speaking only invites trouble.
Good enough then, Dean. Let us know when we can promote it.
I would offer my contacts, but they’re all for software development books. When I dropped fiction hints near my agent, he politely ignored them.
How about heinous, sometimes pronounced hy-ee-nus, or erudite, which I’ve heard pronounced any number of ways: er-oo-dit, er-dyt, etc. One that has annoyed me lately is harassment, which seems to have taken an annoying PC mispronounciation as “harrisment” as opposed to the correct “har-ASS-ment”.
And has anyone mentioned the Boston Selticks as a rather venerable off-pronounciation?
As for foreign words, I recall getting into an odd debate with a guy as to whether Hyundai should be pronounced “Hunday” or the closer-to-Korean “Hyoon-die”. Fortunately that very week, Hyundai started up its “Hunday, Yes, Hunday!” ad campaign.
One word that I find odd is the British pronounciation of “pattern”, pronouncing it identical to the pronunciation for “Patton”, with a bit of a little hitch between the last ‘t’ and ‘n’. Of course, my California accent insists that little and written have soft D’s in them instead of hard, almost spat, T’s.
I recently learned that “upholster” is not pronounced u-FOL-ster. Rather embarrassing (embarassing?)
It doesn’t show that I’m well read as much as that I live in a non-English speaking country.
I never say la-BOR-atory, but it’s useful to help remember how to spell the word.
Slightly OT, but does anyone know why the English are so inconsistent in the handling of foreign names and words? The year I lived in London and got pretty much all my news from the BBC, I was struck by the care with which Italian, German, and (especially) French names and words were pronounced. Spanish, though, was another story entirely. Nicaragua was rather a lot in the news just then (this was 1988-89), and I never did get used to “Nicar-AG-you-uh.” (Nor, in other contexts, to those two notables, Don JEW-un and Don KWIK-sote.) “Jaguar” (JAG-you-are) is the same. Weird.
I prefer the English sensibility on this myself, Michelle. Read The Onomastic Cringe, which is still a classic.
A couple that tripped me up: “causal” (thought it was “casual”) and “subsidiary” (thought it had to do with cows).
Got tripped up by epitome (“epp-it-tome”, ha!) when I was younger. I’d heard it, and read it, but never connected “e-pit-o-me” with the written word. Annihilation gave me the same problem, but that one I can partially lay the blame at the feet of a Bloom County cartoon where a group of schoolkids mispornounced it “annilission.”
Oh, and at a tie for the longest word in the English language, floccinauccinihilipilification is a lot of fun to say. “Flock-sih-noss-si-ny-hill-ih-pill-ih-fih-CAY-shun.”
And while we’re on the subject of pronunciation, please note that there *is* a sort of consistency when a word that is spelled the same way for a verb and for a noun is pronounced differently. What I mean is that all of the verbs have something in common, and all of the nouns have a different thing in common.
Try it. You’ll notice the accented syllable changes. (And, of course, now that I’m pressed to come up with an example, I’m only thinking of single-syllable verbs. Not helpful.)
Dean,
I prefer the English sensibility on this myself, Michelle. Read The Onomastic Cringe, which is still a classic.
Oh, I remember “The Onomastic Cringe,” and it indeed a classic. But that’s not “the English sensibility,” which is what I was trying to say. To my ears, the BBC announcers were almost exaggeratedly “accurate” about most of the major European languages, but lackadaisically Anglified their Spanish, and I wondered why.
Believe me, I’m not of the pronounce-it-as-we-do-or-die school, which is a good thing, because in many, many cases I couldn’t pronounce a word or a name “properly” to save my life. (FWIW, I always kind of liked the hearty way Löwenbräu cheerfully called itself “LOW-en-brow” in its American TV advertising. As though to say, “hey, we’re just selling beer here, and we really don’t give a flying f’ how it’s pronounced it in Munich.”)
” . . . indeed is a classic.” And “As though as to say . . .” Sorry. And to think I’d just previewed it to make sure the umlauts were OK.
As a kid, despite knowing and using the word “facetious”, I always read it as “facet-us”.
I was probably 15 before I realized they were the same word.
My father, who was an English teacher, taught me the term for mispronouncing a word because you’d only seen it in print, not heard it said aloud: orthographic pronunciation. He said it was an honorable flaw, a trait of people who read a lot and were intellectually upwardly mobile.
Nope: lissom has a short (breve) i, as per the i in ‘hit’. British pronunciation of facile is short a, long i (a as in ‘cat’, i as in ‘pie’). A number of your other pronunciations sound odd to my ears. This is of course a problem with any pronunciation guide. More accurate rendering can be achived with Unicode encodings of IPA phonetic symbols. For example, in the US, the word ‘garage’ has a sort of faux-French pronunciation: gəräzh, whereas in British English it’s gărĭj. Further, RP British English (my accent) is non-rhotic, US English is (in general) rhotic. We distinguish ‘t’ and ‘d’ more strongly, so that ‘coating’ and ‘coding’ sound quite different in RP.
To read this you’ll need a browser with UTF-8 support.
David Gillies,
I’ve actually seen “garage” spelled (er, spelt) in England as “garridge,” which is pronounced pretty well as it looks, with the first syllable accented.
Re ‘d’ vs. ‘t,’ I came back from a year in London with “an accent,” of which the one vestige people still notice 16 years later is that I emphasize my ‘t’s, especially at the ends of words, but also internally.
>(For the record, the proper pronunciation of those words is “FASS-iyle,” “in-KO-it,” “PALL-ee-glott,” and “LIE-some.”)
uh… no. facile is correct, the others are not.
using your syntax:
in-KO-ate
POLL-ee-glott
LISS-um (or LISS-some)
but i must wholeheartedly applaud Richard Cohen’s father’s words (previous commenter)
but it’s a fluid constantly changing language. and if you want to REALLY amuse yourself, read books from the 17th and 18th centuries, and discover that words don’t mean the same thing now as they did then. like “discover”- which meant something closer to “show” (uncover). and words like though and through and bough, were all pronounced thuff, thruff, and buff.
cheers
Sal
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