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Wednesday, February 29, 2012

A Little Miscommunication

This is going to be a random post, but I thought I'd let y'all in on a little secret.  Apparently, I don't always pronounce words correctly.  They often sound similar to how they're supposed to, but they have my own little slant.  I'm not the only one who pronounces the words this way, but people have commented on it before.  Anyway, I thought I'd share a list of some problem words.

Milk: Correct pronunciation: mIlk (Just as it looks).  My pronunciation: mElk.  Like Elk with an m.

Vanilla: Correct pronunciation: vah nIl lah.  My pronunciation: vah nEl lah.  Yeah pretty much the same issue as milk.

Train (really anything that begins with "tr."): Correct pronunciation: T-Rain.  You should hear a very distinct "t" followed by an "r."  My pronunciation: Chrain.  I tend to slur the t and r together to get a "ch" sound.  This drove my voice teacher nuts, and it was very frustrating for me because I didn't understand what I was doing wrong.

Crayon: I say that crayon should rhyme with crown.  This is the correct pronunciation.  I refuse to say otherwise, because my husband will never let me live that one down.  Some less-informed people prefer to say cray-on, while some others tend to pronounce this word as cray-an (almost like drawing out the cran in cranberry).  I still say my way is the right way.

Horror / Orange: My "mispronunciation" here is really just a symptom of being raised in the south.  It's not really a mispronunciation, but rather a different pronunciation from that of my husband who was raised in MN.  His pronunciation: Hor-ror / ORange (like saying "or" with some letters attached).  My pronunciation: Har-rer / Arange.  I open the o and relax it a little.  Hans and his roommate, Dan, used to make fun of me when I said I wanted to see a horror movie.  They'd ask which pirate comedy I wanted to see since I seemed to like Har-Arghs so much.  Jerks!  :P

Of course, there are plenty of other words that I say differently from the hubby, and these are generally due to cultural differences.  Although, the only one I really seem to have trouble with still in nightmare.  As a kid, I thought the word was nightmirror.  While I know that's not right any more, I sometimes stumble over the word.  Ah, youth!

So, there you have it.  Some funny miscommunications!

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