Chaos, or as young me assumed, cha - os

For me it was ‘segue.’

Rhetoric and communique…

I remember the dorm room at Hopkins where I learned the pronunciation of both.

Macabre

I'm a huge fan of the maca-bray

I grew up bilingual French so that one was always easy.

How would that tell you to pronounce the final two letters, though?

Well until this moment I thought it was a French word. Turns out it comes from Italian.

Me too! Pronounced saig in my head

I was more ‘seeg.’

Autocorrect REALLY did not want to let me write that.

I’d heard people say “segway” and I knew what it meant, so I suppose I non-occurently knew two similar words for the same phenomenon.

Hebrew has no present tense of ‘to be’. I spent the better part of a year believing it had no past tense of ‘to be’ either, while using its past tense consistently.

I didn’t figure it out until the novelty transportation device came out. Nobody says that word regularly, you just read it!

And yet one of my friends in grad school used it in conversation, and I was stunned.

I would have been so confused!

Yes! Didn't realize this was common. I knew "segway" from spoken language but thought the written segue was "seeg".

I thought archie-pel-AW-go (my pronunciation of the word meaning island chain) and (Gulag) arka-PEL-ago were two different words until college. Still mispronounce many words and names because I don’t usually watch or listen to the news.

Same!

"Suh-gyoo" always made more sense to me.

Apropos. Messed me up until I was in college

“Lingerie” (pronounced “linger-y”) and “lahn-zher-ay” was one of mine.

Not one of mine, but apparently a great many people thought misled is pronounced mizzled.

Didn’t know awry wasn’t “aww-ree” until I was in my 20s.

Not my story, but a high school classmate of my husband’s missed a question on a standardized test and apparently asked the group, what’s a “plaiz-boo?” Placebo.

They had some great songs in the aughts

there was a time in my life a long time ago where I read, out loud, facetious as "face-uh-tee-us"?

When I was a little kid I thought "morgue" was pronounced "morgoo" because I thought "Murders in the Rue Morgue" was supposed to rhyme at the end

that is incredible. and a little adorable.

When you die from squirrel-vector Creutzfeld-Jacob disease, you get sent to the burgoo morgue

That's actually better & way more fun to say

LOL

My cousin thought it was MY-zuld. Which somehow sounds right when you say it: You MY-zuld me!

I read @juddlegum.bsky.social as juddle gum for like a year on Twitter. Thought it was a quirky handle, nothing more.

I can’t unsee it

Mispronounced "anxiety" for years because I was trying to make it fit somehow with the same sounds as "anxious"

I can’t remember (read: probably repressing) any of mine right now but a college roommate of mine said “epih-TOME” for the word epitome.

I mean micro-TOME is correct so understandable.