Things you were shockingly old when you learned

I *knew* Russia couldn't be that big!!
tiny losers

they are taking the piss tbf!

I don't mind Greenland doing it.

Bob Grant got his dick cast by Cynthia Plaster (????????)

THis Bob Grant?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Grant_(actor)

No the conservative talk radio host

I finally remembered to look up what double parking means today (parking beside a parked car in a traffic lane, not taking up two parking spots)

THis Bob Grant?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Grant_(actor)

https://c2.staticflickr.com/4/3229/2451075678_5edbe06e95_z.jpg

Jefferson Airplane was the US West Coast Fairport Convention
Fairport Convention was the English Jefferson Airplane

Bob Grant got his dick cast by Cynthia Plaster (????????)

I went to an exhibition of her collection of casts many years ago, and Bob Grant's was there.

The pronunciation of the word "gazebo," which I thought was pronounced "gays-bow" until at least the 8th grade.

Sympathetic lol. If I had a nickel for every word in my vocabulary whose pronunciation I had to learn the hard way...

I read 'determined' as 'deter-minded' when I was a kid.

Found out yesterday that Cartesian geometry was named after Descartes...

recently I had the blinding insight that Pekinese dogs were named for Peking/Beijing

oh i thought that said "weren't named for" for a second and had a heart flutter

i was shockingly old when i really thought about why people mispronounce words. it’s because they learned them by reading, and that is cool, not dumb. if you grow up in a place with no gazebos or people talking about gazebos then of course you pronounce it gaze-bo, because the actual pronunciation makes no sense.

still kinda bitter about my parents laughing when a wee me brought up the ancient greek philosopher So Crates

that is otm

xp So Crates, the mentor of Play-Doh

Aris-Toddles

Epic Wheatus?

I think I was lucky enough to never have to say the words epi-tome and hyper-bowl before learning how they were actually pronounced, but I did think they were pronounced that way

lol

This is the thread we tend to use for youthful misreadings of words not heard aloud, yes? I was thinking the other day about how when I was a kid I always used to read the word bedraggled as “bed-raggled”, which made sense to me as it meant looking like you’d just got out of bed

I surely mentioned 'froot-eye-on' (aka 'fruition') itt. Surely I did.

When I was a kid I would get puzzled by the use of the past participle of the unfamiliar verb “infrare”

Neneh (Cherry) is pronounced Neh-neh not Nayner.

Barfly was my favorite of this particular type of misunderstanding

I would go to the video store and wonder would you call a movie Barfly? Is it about barf?

it's a syllable boundary mistake more often than not

I just realised that the cover of Bowie's Tonight is a nod to Gilbert & George, duh x infnity

I don't know if this is actually true, but it recently occurred to me that the Elton John "Empty Garden" John Lennon tribute song ("Won't you come out to play in your empty garden") is a reference to Lennon's last stage appearance with Elton at Madison Square Garden.

a couple of days ago i encountered the word "misled" and after many years of knowing otherwise my brain still automatically reads this as "miss-eld".

me too

the "never make fun of someone for mispronouncing a word because that means they learned it through reading" is a semi-new greeting card / social media thing... I don't know what to make of it... because yes, on the one hand, I grew up near a park with a gazebo, so I knew how to pronounce gazebo at a very early age. at the same time, should we really be congratulating people... on knowing how to read

The only thing I disagree with is the idea that the correct pronunciation of gazebo “makes no sense”, I feel like as pronunciations of words go it makes an unusual amount of sense. Just three syllables doing exactly what they should imo

it could just as easily be pronounced ga-zeb-o.

That’s true

years ago, someone i didn't know well was telling me about a writer i should check out, whose name i heard as "ka-moo". i had no idea who they were talking about. only afterwards did i realise they were talking about albert camus, which was embarrassing as i'd read several of his books but had never thought of his name in its correct french pronunciation.

same here with Gerter
I also thought determined was deter-minded!

lol yeah once when i worked in a bookstore a customer got annoyed with me when they asked if we had any "gerter" and i didn't get who they were talking about.

What's the excuse for people who pronounce "turmeric" like "tumour-ic" or, worse, like it rhymes with "numeric". (I heard both this week.) They clearly weren't reading closely.

Builder at a job interview asked if he could explain the difference between a joist and a girder: "Easy. Joist wrote Ulysses, and Girder wrote Faust"

although that's really more for a "disgusting savages" thread xp

Jealous, I’ve never heard the word turmeric twice in one week

I've been cooking with the fresh stuff for the last few years. Turns your fingers orange when you chop it.
Good for anti-inflammatopry purposes too.

& I thought a Gerder was more gerd than normal.
Young Werther would be proud

I work for Hare Krsnas. Someone was cooking while I was on my dinner break and mentioned something about the spice without pronouncing the "r". I asked if that was the correct pronunciation, since I was actually questioning myself, as my Mum has been pronouncing it (correctly, it turns out) my whole life but she often mispronounces things. A 17yo dude jumped in and said with great confidence that it was pronounced like "numeric". He sounded convincing until I checked a dictionary at home.

I've definitely been saying it to rhyme with 'numeric'

I knew an otherwise intelligent guy who said 'epi-tome' but he always (mis)used the word in the most hilariously cranky sentences (at a hipster cupcake stand: "this is the epi-tome of why everyone should be killed," etc) that I never bothered to correct him

I used to pronounce Jan Garbarek's last name wrong (fwiw it's yar-BAR-ekk, not YAR-ba-rek)

what % below intelligent is he as a result one wonders

a film professor in university pronounced Jim Jarmusch's name "yarmusch" and he was usually right about everything else but i have never heard anyone else say it this way, ever

Yim Yarmusch

Is it pronounced Jar-mush, or Jar-moosh? Cause I heard someone pronounce it the latter way and it seemed wrong to me.

punchuin
givjabunchafivesin

JIm Jar-moosh's 2 violent brothers..

his band the Del Byzanteens were quite great in places. A Girl's Imagination for one.