Worcestershire sauce 🤦🏻
Warder instead of water
They can’t say my name “Gareth” ffs it’s not that hard! At a family gathering in VA I was introduced to some people who called me DARETH, DARREN? And each attempt had a question mark 🙄
Just to add I live in Wales and have married an American immigrant and she can say all of the above because she fucking tries!
"Valentimes". My wife (among plenty of others) does it. It does my head in. 🤯 And by the end of February I've forgotten. But then come mid January, fucking Valentimes comes around again. 🤦🏼♂️
Creg for Craig.
Buf it only really annoys me when it's used to label something that isn't theirs. I don't give a fuck how Craig's List is pronounced, but nobody called Daniel Creg played Bond.
Pronouncing 'thorough' as 'furrow' instead of 'furra'.
Also the tendency to pronounce 'Birmingham' as 'Birming-HAM' rather than 'BIR-mingem'. But I suppose they do have their own version.
It would seem rude to use the British pronunciation about the Alabama city. Like the British character who calls the American Bernard 'BER-nad' in >!Lost!<.
Joe Lycett did a documentary last year, where his mission was to go to all the Birminghams in the world, a lot of which are in the USA. They seemed baffled by our pronunciation of it here.
The silent H in herb is actually correct.
The word comes from Latin, where the H was already silent, and transitioned through old French where it stayed that way.
When it reached English we also pronounced it without the H in the same way we don’t pronounce it in honour, or hour.
It wasn’t until the 1800s when dropping an H in words was seen as a marker of low social class that a “hyper correction” occurred and people started using the H in error, in the same way that some people say “haitch” instead of “aitch” for the letter H. It was an attempt to sound more educated and for whatever reason it became the common usage.
As recently as the early 1900s written examples of “an herb” exist.
An arrogant, myopic statement.
It's not mispronounciation but linguistic drift.
Americans don't drive on the wrong side of the road, but the different side - it's the same with language. Ditto English spoken in Ireland, Australia, South Africa, etc.
The **English** chemist who named it used multiple spellings and initially decided aluminum. Four years after that (and being bullied by a *French* scientific journal) he published a textbook using aluminium.
? Where I'm from in the states (Colorado, most people have a pretty "standard" American accent) everyone says neesh. never heard anyone say nitch. I'm sure people must say it in some region, but I wouldn't say Americans "usually" say nitch
Alexa drives me mad with that
Alexa add aluminium foil to my shopping list
And in a nice English accent she says
Aluminum foil added to your shopping list
Bezos has programmed that deliberately to irk me
Oh yes
Water
Yoghurt
Route
- on an army exercise we were planning a withdrawal and an American Liaison Officer asked
'do you have a rout'
'no, it's not a rout, it's a withdrawal, we're working out a route'
When they say FOOTBALL as S\*cc\*r. Does my head in.
Seriously though, it's not actually an English word but the way Americans say Italy sounds like a chicken being strangled.
I couldn't care less about them pronouncing ordinary words differently but I think with proper nouns like names and placenames its a bit different. Like if you emphasise the "ham" in birmingham or nottingham that's just flat out wrong. Although, if it's out of ignorance you can't really blame them. The only two that actually annoy me off the top of my head are Graham and Craig.
Also seems to be a trend of inappropriately abbreviating foreign-to-them place names (at least on the reddit travel subs aha). Like I would only abbreviate a name if I knew that was a locally-done thing. But there seems a commonly made assumption it's fine.
Skedule instead of schedule with a ‘sh’, and anyways for anyway. Also not pronunciations using the worlds normalcy, obligated and conversate, instead of normality, oblige and converse.
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