Funniest thing for me as a bilingual French is people butcheringpronouncing French words like hors d’oeuvre or whatever. I mean it’s funny but okay, that’s both no big deal and you can always educate someone and give them the real French pronunciation if they absolutely wanna sound posh.
But then I’m always so torn when somebody has a clearly French name but again, their pronunciation is atrocious. Like, I try to just ignore it, but sometimes I can just imagine myself jumping at them and screaming how they are pronouncing it wrooooooong, hahaha!
My father had a terrific sense of humour and would deliberately mispronounce certain words to wind up his fancy-pants daughters. “Patio” became “pay-tio”, that kind of thing. But one word in particular has entered the family lexicon: “gnome”, pronounced “ganOmee”. Not meaning a garden ornament, but a young man of dubious moral/intellectual qualities. Our boyfriends were almost always declared gnomes.
Phonetic transcription exists for a reason. The comments here are full of “this is pronounced as this”. Which isn’t very helpful.
On the one hand … “Never make fun of someone if they mispronounce a word. It means they learned it by reading.”
On the other hand… what else are friends there for?
We were playing some game (don’t even remember what) back in 2005 and I read a card that said Lebron James as “Lee-bron James”.
My wife will not let this go. It’s been almost a full 2 decades, but anytime Lebron is mentioned in any context whatsoever, my wife will give me that look like “haha Lee-bron. You moron.”
Stories like this make for lasting relationships.
My wife accidentally bumped someone at a traffic light while sitting immediately in front of a cop like 10 years ago. No damage, no ticket, no problems but she’s SO bad with that sort of thing.
So naturally it occasionally comes up when she’s driving.
