Things are not always as they appear at first glance...

[MineralMan]

A joke on myself and a misunderstanding:

I learned to read by reading, and I read a lot as soon as I could read anything. A lot of the vocabulary I learned, I learned from the context in the books I was reading as a youngster. While that was a good way accumulate a vocabulary, it led to a couple of embarrassing incidents. From my father, I learned to "sound things out," in an sort of phonics sort of way, so that's what I did as I learned to read.

In the first and second grade, my teachers pretty much ignored me and focused on the other students, since I was reading quite nicely on my own. They just gave me books and turned me loose with them.

Well, a lot of the words I learned were words I never had occasion to actually say aloud. In the fifth grade, that method of learning new vocabulary finally caught up to me. I was asked to read aloud in class, like everyone else. No problem, really, so I stood next to my desk and began reading from the book.

Shortly after I began, I read the word "misled." Gales of laughter emerged from the class, and even the teacher had difficulty suppressing her laughter. I knew exactly what the word meant, of course, but I pronounced it as myzeld, instead of missled. I'd heard the word pronounced correctly, of course...many times, but had never associated the pronunciation with the word as written.

Well, the teacher corrected my pronunciation and everything went on, but I realized something. Not everything was as it appeared. My pronunciation made perfect sense, using other examples, but I had learned that word without associating it with the same word as spoken. I quickly learned to look up ambiguous pronunciations in the dictionary, and went on with my life.

Lots of things are like that word, I think. They appear to be one thing, but if they're not associated with common reality, you can easily get them wrong and embarrass yourself a little. That little incident taught me to be very careful to double-check things before acting on them. The lesson has served me well, I think.

So, don't be myzeld. Things aren't always as they appear at first glance. :rofl:

[RUMMYisFROSTED]

1. Is this a veiled expression of your opinion of DU'ers?

/

[MineralMan]

3. Huh? How did you get that from my post?

Nope. Not at all. Way off. It's about me learning to double-check stuff so I don't sound stupid.

[RUMMYisFROSTED]

45. Don't

be myzeld.

[dionysus]

2. when i was very little, i remember the word teenager sounded like teen-ah-ger in my head.

i also thought the singer for Rush was a female and that John Fogerty was black...

:rofl:

[MineralMan]

5. Yah...we all have those stories, don't we.

As my father says, "It's good to laugh at yourself, because if you don't, others will do it for you." :rofl:

[MineralMan]

8. Sure, like tanager.

Another one for me was beribboned, which I thought for years was pronounced bear-uh-boned. I don't think I ever spoke it, but finally got it correctly from another context.

[Whisp]

27. conscience.

came across that word in a book and pronounced it con-science to myself.
I'm sure I embarassed myself with that somewhere along the line but blocked it out.

;)

[MineralMan]

35. Very good. A great example of a word that is confusing.

[leftstreet]

4. Your knot making any scents n/t

[MineralMan]

6. There's no there in their reality. They're confused.

[Jackpine Radical]

18. There, there.

[MineralMan]

7. There's nothing wrong with homonyms or homophones.

We should be tolerant of them.

[Jackpine Radical]

19. It's the homophobes that create the problems.

[MineralMan]

32. That is most certainly true.

Now, any Lutheran may step in and identify the source of that pithy sentence.

[Jackpine Radical]

40. Hier stehe ich.

Ich kann nichts anders.

[MineralMan]

41. Exactly.

In English, that is my line for holding in a poker game. "Here I stand. I can do no other."

Usually, nobody gets it. BTW, I'm not a Lutheran, but my mother-in-law is, so I read the Lutheran catechism, just for grins. I also read pretty much everything Luther wrote. He was not a very nice man, in some ways. No sir.

[Jackpine Radical]

42. Ich auch bin kein Lutheraner.

Ja, ich bin eher ein heidnischer oder Buddhist.

[csziggy]

9. For me the word that was my downfall was sophisticated

Ironic, huh? I pronounced it SOP-si-cated the first time I used it in a sentence. I was luckier than you - I did it while talking to my father rather than in front of peers. And Dad was sensitive enough that he did not make an issue of it, just corrected me, and never brought it up again. He knew that my older sisters would have given me hell for it.

After that I tried to learn to pronounce words correctly from the dictionary, but never used a word out loud that I had not heard someone else pronounce first. And even then I had to be careful - with Grandmother's Northern friends and with watching a lot of old British movies, many of the words I heard from those sources were pronounced very differently than by the people I lived among in the South!

[MineralMan]

10. That's a good one.

[elocs]

11. When I was a kid my mother was shocked when I told her I was going to a whore movie.

I was also embarrassed by the word peanut.

[MineralMan]

13. Great example!

[LiberalEsto]

12. Something like that happened when I learned English

My multilingual parents raised me speaking only in Estonian, even though I was born in the U.S.and they spoke English very well. I also learned to read Estonian very early. It is a phonetic language, with every letter of the alphabet having only one possible pronunciation, unlike English.

As my parents thought, I picked up English quickly in kindergarten and learned how to read in English pretty fast too. What stymied me was the word "laugh". I couldn't figure out how to say it aloud, never having heard the word before. So when it was my turn to read aloud, I said la-oo-gah. The teacher, probably trying not to crack up, explained about silent letters in English, but it took a little longer for me to deal with them.

Just don't la-oo-gah.
:D

[MineralMan]

14. That's a wonderful one. Sounds like an old car horn.

La-oo-gah. Perfect!

[LiberalEsto]

15. Oh, no, I've created a monster! nt

[mmonk]

16. What about mysled?

[LiberalEsto]

17. Things also aren't what they sound like

For many, many years, I was convinced that the song "Groovin'" (on a sunny afternoon) was a bit kinky, because I misheard one of the lines as "You and me and Leslie, groovin".

I was in my 50s before it finally dawned on me that it was "You and me endlessly groovin."



:hide:

[Jackpine Radical]

20. Blessed art thou,

a monk swimming. (Stolen, I confess.)

[notadmblnd]

21. quick spell this word correctly YERP

Thats how my son spelled it when he was 7. I knew exactly what he meant though. From the earliest age, I understood words. Reading and spelling, I was just a natural at. My son however, inherited dyslexia from my husband and really wasn't reading well until his first year in middle school. But waaay back when I was in school they still taught phonics (no snickering abut my age now) so I totally got it when my son began spelling words.

on edit: the word that I didn't not connect until I was in my 30's was- viola with the grave accent, which I don't have a key for (pronounced vwa-la or wal-la) but it's French. I still see many people spell it wrong.

[MineralMan]

39. In Russian, it's pronounced yev-ROPE-a.

Don't even get me started with other languages and the silliness of international pronunciation. Some day, I still hope to get to Moskv-A.

[On the Road]

22. Well, You Certainly Followed Will Strunk's Advice

at least as recounted by EB White:

It is encouraging to see how perfectly a book, even a dusty rule book, perpetuates and extends the spirit of a man. Will Strunk loved the clear, the brief, the bold, and his book is clear, brief, bold. Boldness is perhaps its chief distinguishing mark.

On page 26, explaining one of his parallels, he says, "The lefthand version gives the impression that the writer is undecided or timid, apparently unable or afraid to choose one form of expression and hold to it." And his original Rule 11 was "Make definite assertions." That was Will all over. He scorned the vague, the tame, the colorless, the irresolute. He felt it was worse to be irresolute than to be wrong.

I remember a day in class when he leaned far forward, in his characteristic pose — the pose of a man about to impart a secret — and croaked, "If you don't know how to pronounce a word, say it loud! If you don't know how to pronounce a word, say it loud!" This comical piece of advice struck me as sound at the time, and I still respect it. Why compound ignorance with inaudibility? Why run and hide?

http://orwell.ru/library/others/style/english/e_fore

[MineralMan]

31. Great story. E. B. White is my hero, with Will Strunk close behind.

Both helped me a great deal in my career.

[BillyJack]

23. My "word" was Macabre......

I had grown up with 'Elvira' and the world of the strange & macabre....but Elvira only SAID the word. I never saw it spelled & said together. So when I READ the word macabre in books I always thought MACK-A-BREIGH.

I was well into my 30's before a discussion with a neighbor, who loved words as much/more than I do, revealed to me that macabre was pronounced MA-COB.....and that the word that I read as Mack-a-breigh was the same word as Elvira's Ma-cob.

:rofl:

[MineralMan]

33. Perfect example!

[lunatica]

24. I still have trouble with gauge

I keep wanting to pronounce it gouge. I've learned to stop and think about it so I can pronounce it gaje.

[MineralMan]

34. That word is misspelled. No question about it.

It's one word that still plagues me when I'm writing quickly. Someone made a mistake in some dictionary somewhere, I'm very sure.

[Whisp]

25. good one, MM :)

actually I'm not really sure what you are getting at, but I have my own idea, and it fits really well whether it's what you had in mind or not. but I think it is.

people are very easily myzeld, it's what the media does so well.

:D

[MineralMan]

36. I'm always getting at something. Sometimes I even know what it

is. :shrug:

[KittyWampus]

26. Fra- gEE- lee

[JuniperLea]

28. Hey!

You speak Italian!

:rofl:

Good one;)

[mmonk]

29. Pfffft! A classic indeed.

:spray:

My sons watch the movie for that in anticipation every Christmas.

[MineralMan]

37. LOL!

Mercy Bocup.

[madmom]

30. My problem was moving to Ohio when I was young (12) and trying to pronounce the names of

some of the towns around here...Ash-TUBE-ula...Bucy-rus...luckily I was on the shy side and didn't talk a lot, I soon heard how they were pronounced.

[MineralMan]

38. That's a big stumbling block for new news anchors here in

Minnesota, too. Mahtomedi is one of the place names they always get wrong the first time. Wayzata is another. I won't provide the proper pronunciations. It's more fun to see people try to figure them out.

Then, there's Pierre, South Dakota and other such weird pronunciations of common words that are spoken differently in certain localities.

[Morning Dew]

44. You can always tell when they've outsourced the talent for commercials

'cuz the big ground floor opportunity conference is taking place at a hotel in New Hope rather than New Hope.

[lunatica]

43. Yosemite

If you don't know how to pronounce it you will never guess how it's pronounced. Not in a million years.