Up until recently, I thought that the US national park was pronounced "yo-semite", as if it was some sort of ghetto-slang used for greeting a Jewish person.

Doesn't mean it isn't cute/funny when it does happen, though. Just this week my SO pronounced chihuahua as "CHA-HOO-A-HOO-A" so I told them "you know this word, it's the taco bell dog" lol

Or... or you read it in the 3 word title of a meme. Doesn't matter, learned word.

Pour one out for all my epi-tome homies

It was embarrassingly recently that I realized segue and "segway" were the same word which I apparently didn't know how to spell.

Edit: BTW - the weird way that English words are spelled or pronounced - and why - is one of my favorrite nerd subjects. I love this thread so freaking much. And how RIGHT nearly everyone here SHOULD have been.

"Facade" caught me in high school.

Interestingly (to me), I have the opposite problem in Spanish. I've learned mostly through immersion, so when I see a Spanish word written down sometimes I'm like "Holy heck THAT'S how you spell carrot??" Spanish is a language where the spelling/pronounciation rules are really consistent, but it's still surprising to see some of these words without having ever thought of how they might be spelled. Toallas (towels) got me too.

As a kid I used to pronounce amoeba as “a-MO-ba” instead of “a-MEE-ba”.

This was me with a number of words over the years, but most memorable "paradigm."

You should never mock someone who pronounces a word strangely: They might be from Reading.

As a homeschooled kid with a big vocabulary I was largely not able to pronounce (more reading than talking), this is a sentiment I wish I'd heard earlier in life.

Also dialects are a thing. The way a lot of words come out of my mouth has been culturally labeled as ignorant. I go out of my way to change my pronunciations at work so I get taken seriously, but I've been doing it less now that I'm accepted in that world. Maybe that caps how much farther I can go, but maybe I don't want to go further if it means continuing to act like people who sound like how I sound are less than

Gif

I thought I was mispronouncing "duodenum" so I changed it, then I heard doctors on youtube saying it the way I thought was wrong. I had gone from right to wrong back to right. lol

I wonder if by the same criteria the opposite also holds true. Are misspelled words dishonorable? And if yes does it matter if they're nouns or other functional words like there/they're/their ?

Me as a small children: I'll PRE-FACE this by saying...

Family: wait, what??

I did not feel honorable...

I pronounced entrée as "entry" until I was in my 30s. 😭

This happens to me a lot in the medical field. "Parenchymal" has been my most recent, and I have to think about it every time I hear it or try to say it

I read it in my head as PAIR-EN-KIME-AL, but it's pronounced PA-RINKA-MAL... though how I read it does help me to spell it

Some words I still can't pronounce, but I know how to "read", such as "klebsiella aerogenes"

While we're on the subject: "Tachypneic" is pronounced like "TA-KIP-NIK", but I never hear anyone try and pronounce "Bradypneic". One would assume that it's pronounced like "BRA-DIP-NIK" (or maybe "BRAY-DIP-NIK"), but I can't confirm. I think saying "bradypneic" intimidates people

I used to think "chaos" had the same "ch" as "church" when I was a kid. Don't know why I never heard it spoken aloud by someone earlier than I did.

But the one that I find inexcusable is Southern US people who pronounce "jalapeno" with a "j" and "n" instead of an "ha" and "ñ" even though they know better. Sounds so willfully ignorant