Courtesy Pixabay
Hello, Gang. If no one said it to you, Happy 2020. After a bit of much-needed R & R (well, sleeping late, Netflix, and family, not in any particular order), I can resume speed.
Some of you may know that I enjoy words and the English language, at large. So when I ran across this article, I began reading, with great interest: ’40 Hard-to-Pronounce Words You’re Probably Getting Wrong’. This comes from ThoughtCo, a group that explores English and Humanities.
We all know the embarrassing feeling of discovering we’ve been mispronouncing a word for years. On the other hand, some words are so commonly mispronounced that the “correct” pronunciation sounds downright strange.Don’t feel bad if you’ve been mispronouncing some of these tricky words. A living language like English evolves and thrives precisely because it’s spoken every day. As long as people understand you, you’re successfully using language for its primary purpose—communication.
The very first word on the list, I have been mispronouncing all of this time. The word is Accede. Now, I have been calling this a-SEED. Doesn’t that look correct? Nope! The right way to say it is ak-SEED. Yes. Throw a K in there, please and thank you. Accede means: to consent, give approval; yield to another’s wishes. And no, I don’t use this word on a daily basis, any more than you do.
Another word had me going to the kitchen to make a cup of coffee: Espresso. That lovely Italian, strong coffee in a teeny cup, that packs a big caffeine punch. I sounded the word out loud. ‘Ex-PRESS-o’! I exclaimed. Nope again. There is NO ‘x’ in Espresso. This one is actually pronounced just the way it is written: es-PRESS-o. So where do I get off putting the ‘x’ in Espresso? You can’t give me the answer, because about half of you are doing the same thing. Note to Self: Stop saying Expresso.
And one more word to consider: Quinoa. This word we’ve seen most everywhere within the last couple of years. Just looking at this one initially threw me off. I had absolutely no idea, when I saw this small, protein-rich seed on the store shelf. For awhile, I just called it ‘That Stuff That Looks Like Little-Bitty Planet Saturns”, because there are tiny rings around the seeds. Then I finally looked up how to pronounce the word, so I wouldn’t be entirely ridiculous attempting to say it…KEEN-wah. You know, I didn’t even come close to the most common wrong pronunciation of Quinoa, which is KEEN-oh-ah. Just had NO clue whatsoever.
If you’d like to see the other 37 words, here is the link to the article. https://www.thoughtco.com/hard-to-pronounce-words
Maybe you will be as entertained as I was. Or also you will ask yourself, “What in heck ARE these words, anyway?” Because…I did, too.
