Wait, that's how you say that?

[kenobi65]

...and Terpsichore (terp-SICK-o-ree) was "TERP-si-core."

It's been a very long time since I've seen that silly movie, but, in "Xanadu", Olivia Newton-John's character was Terpsichore (though she didn't generally go by that name). I seem to recall that, the one time that the movie refers to her real name, it gets prounounced TERP-si-core.

That said, my home town (Green Bay) butchers the French names of some of its streetswns, possibly because the city's original population was Belgians, who tend to pronounce French words differently. I dated a girl who lived on Grignon Street -- which you might expect to be pronounced something like GREE-nyo...but, no, it's GRIG-nun. The next street over was Beaupre -- not BO-pre, but BOO-pree.

 

[DaveyJones]

ask her to say aluminium. note the extra i. the brits actually pronounce and spell it differently.

 

[Ambrus]

For a long time I would pronounce the word epitome as "Ep-i-tome" instead of the proper "Ep-i-TO-mee". Eventually someone corrected me in between fits of laughing.

 

[nerfherder]

Now, leaving aside the Great Drow Debate, have you ever been suprised to hear people pronouncing something differently than the way it was in your head? Was that revelation exacerabated by finding out that this was fairly normal and you just hadn't picked up on it?

Yes - several things. None of which I can think of right now, but I'm sure some of them were "Gygaxian" terms from the AD&D PHB or DMG....

 

[kenobi65]

I joined a D&D group about 15 years ago, and discovered that, to a person, the group pronouned "paladin" as "puh-LAD-in" (rhymes with "Aladdin"). At first, I thought it was just a running joke with them, but then I discovered that that's how all of them thought it was really pronounced.

 

[Nyaricus]

And other questions.


Over the holiday season I was with my wife's family and the word "advertisement" came up in a game we were playing. My mother-in-law (who grew up in Birmingham, England the daughter of a Scot and a Brit but has lived in the Southeastern US for about 40 years), upon hearing us said "Wait, that's how you say that here?" In all these years she just never picked up on the difference in pronunciation, and seemed a bit taken aback to realize she hadn't thought about it.

Personally there are any number of words that in my younger years only encountered in print that I was suprised to hear pronounced. Galactus, for some reason, always had an extra syllable in my head (Gal-lac-ti-cus), which I reconize as wrong now but thats just the way I always read it.

Now, leaving aside the Great Drow Debate, have you ever been suprised to hear people pronouncing something differently than the way it was in your head? Was that revelation exacerabated by finding out that this was fairly normal and you just hadn't picked up on it?

ad-VERT-tis-ment is how I say it No one else says it like that that I know, however. I think that's the more archaic/British way of saying it, IIRC.

cheers,
--N

 

[Thunderfoot]

Of course no one has mentioned warsh as in "I have to warsh my face before my date, else my sweetie think of me as piggish..."

I have a guy I co-DM with that pronounces Arch-mage as /ARK-Mahj/, Alcove as /AY-klohv/, and Necromancy as /nek-ROHM-en-cee/

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

My current GM pronounces "writhing" (rye-thing) as "rith-ing" (IOW, with a short i).

 

[Ranger REG]

During my Star Fleet Battles days, I heard a few of my fellow gamers pronounced "phaser capacitor" with "phaser capaci-tay-tor."

 

[Piratecat]

I joined a D&D group about 15 years ago, and discovered that, to a person, the group pronouned "paladin" as "puh-LAD-in" (rhymes with "Aladdin"). At first, I thought it was just a running joke with them, but then I discovered that that's how all of them thought it was really pronounced.

Bet they got it from an Australian. We had great fun prodding Capellan about that.