“Veterinary” - always missed out the second syllable and thought it was just vetinary. Still feels wrong for it to have that many letters.
“Mantelpiece” - el not le??? Still freaks my nut out to this day
“Ricochet” for some reason I thought it was just ‘riochet’ for a really long time
My dad still makes fun of me for thinking when I was 10 that vinyl (which I’d only ever seen written down) was pronounced ‘vinnel’
Biopic - thought it was pronounced as one word. biuhpic not bi oh pic
Segue.
The amount of people that call chimeys chimleys in north manchester weirds me out
February is just an nonsense as well
Convent Garden
Used to assume bergamot was a French word or something. Never said it out loud until someone at work gave me some extra Earl Grey tea they didn’t want and someone else asked me what’s in it, and I said bergamot the way i’ve always said it in my head, like ‘berjamo’.
Then I had some self doubt and looked it up and realised it’s just pronounced how it’s written. I feel like inventing a fancy pronunciation for a completely phonetic word is more embarrassing than the other way around.
I swear they only added the first C in Connecticut recently
Hyperbole
Connecicut?
Oh ermm…shush!!!
Onnecticut?
A word I’d only ever read and never heard or said until probably my 30s was “banal” which I did not realise rhymed with canal.
I had that from an actual chimney sweep the other day, it’s your job dude, get it right! Imagine going to a dentist and they kept talking to you about your jeeth
Oh FORGET IT
Idk. Pretty sure they know its not the right way to say it. It’s just one of them things innit, preserving their identity/class/roots through language.
I hadn’t really thought about it like that, obviously there’s dialect/slang and different pronunciations everywhere, but using a slightly different version of a word as part of an accent wasn’t something I’d considered. Guess it’s a little bit like people from Worcester where I grew up saying ‘where ams you’ rather than ‘where are you’? The sort of stuff my mum would constantly harangue me about not saying so that I wouldn’t sound ‘common’
epitome