Please don't say 'Hit the Fat'

[Willie the Duck]

Minor pet peeve about Coup de Grâce prononciation.

I'm 95% sure those who think they are saying 'coup de grâce' correctly are not. To my French-speaking ear, you are saying 'Hit the Fat'. You are saying Gras = Fat. Not Grâce = Mercy. You must pronounce the second syllable, the 'ce'.

What is this "MUST" you speak of?

I believe the "must" refers to the the 'saying correctly' statement, not demands behavior from others. We "MUST" do something TO pronounce 'coup de grâce' correctly.

The Minnesotan town of New Prague… rhymes with “vague.”

Don't forget Montevideo, which rhymes with, er, "aunt uh video" (using the American pronunciation of 'video').

 

[A2Z]

I grew up near Quebec and I remember visiting Windsor Ontario, looking for a particular bar and we asked some people who told us it was located on Orally street. (this was pre-cell phones so no google maps)

We wandered for almost an hour until we realized they were talking about Oreille Street.

Oreille means 'ear' in french and sounds nothing like Orally. (Oh-rrray is probably the closest way to write the pronunciation) For some reason half the streets in Windsor have french names and nobody there actually speaks french, I guess?

Edit: to be fair, Oreille is super hard to pronounce if you're anglophone so I guess it makes sense to change it.

I live in Windsor, it gets worse than that. We pronounce Pierre St. here as Peer-ee, Drouillard as Drew-lard, Grand Marais as Grand Mare-is. So many french streets here too. Detroit's just as bad though.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/windsor/windsor-french-street-names-mispronunciation-1.7062532