Caveat is absolutely mangled by people I work with.
I thought you were a busker?
I aspire to be a boomer bus boy like you.
Is a bus boy like a concierge but with less pay and an ill fitting uniform?
In the last two days I heard different people pronounce “awry” and even “awrier” the funny way ("like “oar-ie”).
I like the way the Americans pronounce era as error, especially when they talk about ‘the great American error’.
But it is disconcerting to hear Australians talking with an American accent and how so many of us now pronounce riva as riverrr.
Most of my uni mates in the 80s insisted on pronouncing Elle McPherson’s first name “Ellie”.
Including one Essendon supporter who had completed a Batchelor of letters, and once wrote in a job application that his command of the English language was, and I quote: “total”.
He also used to add an acute accent (that never belonged) to the final e of the surname of Jean-Michel Jarre (Gallipoli soundtrack, Oxygene, etc).
But we all get things wrong. I remember reading a mysterious word when I was a kid (probably in Emil and the Detectives or some such): ‘misled’. For quite a while - although I understood the meaning from context - I assumed it would rhyme with the first two syllables of mistletoe! I don’t think I ever said it out loud (luckily) before hearing someone use ‘mis-led’, and going ‘ohhhh’.
One last one, a girl I knew who was pretty clever went into a year 12 debate trying to savage the other side by accusing them of being “pseudo-intellectuals”. Only problem was that she pronounced it ‘puh-suedo’. Oh dear. On the plus side, her utter embarrassment on being corrected only made her more attractive.
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I always thought it was…hmmm how to do this phonetically…jshar-ay.
Well, not always.
For the first six months of knowing about him, as a twelve year-old, I pronounced it Gene Michael Jar.
Yeah, just ‘jshar’, no ‘ay’ required.
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Aye, no ay required.
Nothing to do with pronunciation, but this reminds me of George Carlin’s ‘occupation: foole’.
In which Carlin described how he liked to write on forms asking you to list occupation ‘foole’, adding the final ‘e’ as he said: “just to pi55 'em off”!
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Remember watching ‘It’s Academic’ and grappling with the odd name conferred on one boy whose name plate indicated he was what I thought was pronounced Lan. Dad helpfully pointed it was pronounced Ee-an.
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You do get people adding foreign accent marks onto words wrongly.
A common one is turning the n in habanero into an ñ. It’s ar-ba-nairo not ar-ba-niairo. Probably because there’s a correct ñ in jalapeño.
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Just reminded me back in the 90s I had a boss who was from Arizona but once described some annual chilli roasting festival in nearby New Mexico -?Albuquerque(I think it was). I knew nothing about American chillies and demonstrated this when I said something like “what are those chillies called, is it j.ap-a-lean-ohs or something?” He just burst out laughing.
Filter finds j.ap offensive without the full stop!
Sounds like you’d struggle with Oaxaca then…wah-har-ka.
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Thanks for that one.
I’ve never said it aloud, but always thought of it as ‘Osaka’.
Filter is farking stupid.
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Many discussions amongst my friends around the brand “Nike”.
I don’t particularly likey the way it’s pronounced.
I don’t like that when you Google Nike, it’s about a hundred posts about farking shoes before someone would actually find out where that name actually originates from,… let alone how it is & should be pronounced.
Google should really operate more like Wikipedia I reckon,… give you a list of possibilities you may be enquiring about, and let you choose the one you mean. Imagine how much more informed kids would be about things such as in this example.
C’mon Google, … “Just DO IT!”
Google ‘origin of the word Nike’… like ummm a normal person would 
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