XKCD: It's more than a comic

I always thought "misled" was pronounced like "missled", or had the "mistle" of "mistletoe" with a D on the end. Then I was told it was the past tense of "mislead" and had an "OOOHH!" moment.

For the longest time I pronounced cache "cash-shay". That's the most notorious example from my life and one my irl friends just won't let go.

My pet mispronunciation - one that I don't recall ever doing myself, but I hear it a lot - is "niche" pronounced as "nitch". That one kills me.

I suppose "nucular" (instread of "nuclear") also gets me, but I think I've been exposed to "nitch" more often recently so I thought of it immediately after reading the comic.

For Finns, a very common one - again, fortunately one I don't think I ever did myself - is "ice land" instead of "island". It's hard to know, just from seeing the word, that the s is silent; but since there actually is a place called Iceland, it's just jarring to hear someone say something like "Great Britain is an Iceland".

As a non-native speaker, it's sometimes kind of nice and/or funny to see a native speaker struggle with a word that I never found too difficult. (Everyone will have words that are not intuitive to them, or that combine a series of sounds that one doesn't like putting together; it's just that the categories of tricky words are non-overlapping between different people.)

For instance, Joshua Malina, who used to be a regular on The West Wing, is the co-host of The West Wing Weekly, a podcast about - you guessed it - The West Wing. He always mentions when the episode they're discussing was originally broadcast, and if the episode was released in February, Malina will have trouble pronouncing it. Like me, he pronounces it with 4 syllables, both r's included. That means there has to be a bit of a break just before the first r, or your tongue will just stop cooperating with you. The other host, Hrishi Hirway, suggested that Molina should pronounce it as "feb-uary" - without the first r. That's easier, and a lot more common (at least in US English), but Molina said it just doesn't sound right to him. That's not a mispronunciation, of course, since both versions are accepted - it's just nice to know that English isn't always an easy language, even for native speakers. (It's much easier than Finnish, though, so there's that.)

edited 27th Mar '17 7:26:00 PM by BestOf

I don't care much about alternate pronunciations, like "nucular," "nitch," and "aks." Those ones are just representative of different regional dialects. I think a lot of people fuss way too much over "proper English," especially given the clear racial and socioeconomic distinctions when it comes to dialects. As long as I can understand you, I'm not going to get all up and arms because you speak a different dialect than me.

edited 27th Mar '17 7:30:58 PM by Cailleach

I like how this thread has basically turned into the Ever Pronounce A Word Wrong For A Long Time thread.

(Is there a way to link to forums without cheating and using the external links?)

edited 27th Mar '17 7:39:23 PM by Incognitoburrito

The best part of this thread is that we discuss each new comic for a handful of posts, then go way off-topic until the next comic comes out. Sometimes the off-topic topic even transcends multiple comics, like just happened with the disney discussion.

Every word in the comic (mispronunciation, epitome, misspell) show up in that thread. It's interesting that the mispronunciations generally follow patterns

edited 27th Mar '17 10:00:00 PM by frosty

My guess is that's probably because these words are ones that:

• has a pronunciation that is not completely intutitve, and
• are uncommon enough that most people encounter it firs time as written instead of spoken.

As a foreigner, my biggest problem with English is that there is no universal rule between spelling and pronunciation (my favorite example is the read, read, red trio). In most other European languages there are pretty clear rules (even if they are very complicated, e.g. French). There are always a few exceptions, but that can be lived with. Hungarian is very good in this term (but in turn very difficult in grammar), as is German.

It's not necessarily about dialects. ("Aks" for "ask" is, but the others aren't, as far as I can tell.) I, too, am happy to hear different dialects, and if a given pronunciation is the rule in a dialect, it is an accepted pronunciation in that dialect, and I wouldn't call it a mispronunciation. The examples I game ("nucular" and "nitch") are just mispronunciations - they're not standard anywhere, but obviously they're spreading because people speak the words without having ever heard them spoken, and others assume it must be an accepted pronunciation. That pronunciation, then, can become accepted as the new norm. Perhaps "nuclear", pronounced as the spelling would suggest, will become a mispronunciation eventually. (I hope not.)

As a non-native speaker, the variety of mispronunciations that become very common is one of the things that make English a difficult language to learn and use properly. "Nitch", for instance, is a word I had to look up the first time I heard it because I didn't understand, or guess from context, that it was supposed to mean "niche". It would have been the same with "nucular", but of course that one is usually clear from context. (I tend to be pretty thorough about these things, though, so it's plausible that the first time I heard that one I also looked it up, just to see if it was supposed to mean "nuclear", and wasn't a different word altogether. I can't recall.)

That gets to the understanding part. It's easy enough for native speakers to guess, when encountering a strange version of a familiar word, to figure out that it was that word, especially if they know, on some level, how that particular accent tends to treat particular sounds.

For non-native speakers, this is much harder. In academic conversations about English dialects, it is a fairly common observation that as the proportion of non-native speakers increases, natives will have to adjust to fit in to conversations that are in English, but where the majority of participants are non-native speakers. Usually this sort of adjustment just means shifting slightly to a more common version of your dialect (say, speaking a more RP-ish variety of British English instead of scouse) or speaking more slowly. Regional pronunciations will still exist and spread, of course - you just have to be prepared to stop and define the words you use when asked.

Mispronunciations, from natives and non-natives, will add difficulty to this. As a non-native speaker, I care a lot about spelling, grammar, and pronunciation because I want to make understanding me as easy as possible, for native and non-native speakers alike, and regardless of each participant's dialect. That's not a goal that can ever be fully reached, of course, but I think it's polite to at least make the effort, when you're not talking among people who speak your dialect. I, for one, will always have a Finnish accent; and I'll probably always have difficulty understanding certain dialects (such as certain varieties of Scottish English and some of the dialects spoken in the South of the US). I'll try to keep up, of course, but when I've talked to natives I have sometimes had to ask them to speak a bit more slowly, and repeat some words if they want me to understand what they're saying. (My English is decent enough that native speakers sometimes forget I'm not a native speaker, so they'll forget to pay attention to how fast they speak to me.)

As a side note, "Nitch" and "nucular", in particular, are mispronunciations that tend to be fairly common, at least from my exposure to those words, among people who are white and pretty wealthy and educated - so if it's a socioeconomic thing, it's more a marker of privilege than lack of privilege. Of course, it doesn't matter what category adopts a particular pronunciation - if it's widely used and understood, it will become accepted - so this comment is just an idle observation.

edited 28th Mar '17 4:20:05 AM by BestOf

A struggle I often have is, when a word is clearly borrowed from French, to guess if it kept (roughly) its French pronunciation (e.g. niche, filet mignon) or if it's pronounced like an English word (e.g. bandage, genre). Silent "T" at the end of words are especially traitorous.

Oy, and it doesn't help that we get words like "forte" (pronounced for-TAY), Versailles (pronounced Ver-SALES), Notre Dame (NOTE-er DAYM), Louisville (LUHL-vuhll), etc.

Of course, I'm not a huge fan of French pronunciation overall despite (or perhaps because of) having studied it for years in high school. A language where you don't pronounce pluralization most of the time is a confusing one to me, even before you get into all of the seemingly arbritrary gender agreement.

If it helps (or makes it more complicated?), forte is actually Italian. Most musical terms are. If it were French, it'd have to be forté (or fortet, or some other thing beside an unaccented e) to have that pronunciation

edited 28th Mar '17 5:49:51 AM by Cailleach

Ah. Not the musical bit, but people saying "That's my forte" when describing something they're good at.

Of course, that might also be a matter of cross-contamination, the same reason why people will mis-pronounce "just deserts", or modify the spelling, since one "desert" (and "dessert") comes from French and another from Latin.

edited 28th Mar '17 6:13:33 AM by FuzzyBoots

Note that Notre Dame is only pronounced like that if it's about the US university. If it's the cathedral in Paris, I've never heard it pronounced the same as the American university. It's always something approaching the French pronunciation.

edited 28th Mar '17 6:09:07 AM by BestOf

In "that's my forte", it's supposed to be pronounced the French way. "fort", not "for-tay".

To be honest I think I've heard "for-te" more often than "fort" in that context. According to a quick Google search I did just now, both pronunciations are accepted.

Yeah. But the "standard" way to pronounce it is as if it were the Italian word.

I really miss Evan Morris. His Word Detective columns were a treasure trove of this sort of thing, how various homophones are what they are often because they're two different words from different languages where the pronunciation and/or spelling merged.

edited 28th Mar '17 6:17:25 AM by FuzzyBoots

Wait, Fuzzy Boots, Versailles is pronounced "ver-sales"? I always said it "ver-sigh".

Pretty sure it should be "ver-SIGH", and Google Translate's audio function backs me up on this.

^ It is, but in America it's often pronounced wrong just like all the other words he said.

Yup. It's a town name in Kentucky and in Pennsylvania.

Versailles, Indiana is pronounced Ver-sails.

And Russiaville is "ROOSH uh ville".

There's a building called Marquis (mark-us) Hall at my university and you can tell that someone is a new student if they say "maw-kee"

There's a city in Alabama called "Arab". It's pronounced "Ay-rab". It sounds like they're starting to say "A Rabbit" but get cut off.

To this day, I don't know if people pronounce Knob Noster correctly (they pretty much do it phonetically, but it's Latin for "our hills").