“Facade” caught me in high school.
Interestingly (to me), I have the opposite problem in Spanish. I’ve learned mostly through immersion, so when I see a Spanish word written down sometimes I’m like “Holy heck THAT’S how you spell carrot??” Spanish is a language where the spelling/pronounciation rules are really consistent, but it’s still surprising to see some of these words without having ever thought of how they might be spelled. Toallas (towels) got me too.
As a homeschooled kid with a big vocabulary I was largely not able to pronounce (more reading than talking), this is a sentiment I wish I’d heard earlier in life.
I’m sorry. I hate that the stereotype that stuck for homeschool kids wasn’t that they’re often very well read and advanced, because that has been my experience encountering them over the years.
In fairness, that stereotype is largely due to capital H Homeschooled kids like me. as in, the subculture as opposed to simply the method of schooling at home.
If you meet someone who was in the subculture, you need to navigate through a few levels of weird damage before our vocabulary is even close to the most notable thing about us.
This was me with a number of words over the years, but most memorable “paradigm.”
The one that wakes me up in the middle of the night is albeït. I thought it was fancy foreign speak pronounced “all bait”, but it is just a short form of “all be it”, is pronounced exactly like that, and is a synonym for “all though it be”.
It was embarrassingly recently that I realized segue and “segway” were the same word which I apparently didn’t know how to spell.
Edit: BTW - the weird way that English words are spelled or pronounced - and why - is one of my favorrite nerd subjects. I love this thread so freaking much. And how RIGHT nearly everyone here SHOULD have been.
Yeah, that’s very much an English thing. Many other languages use reasonably consistent spelling and pronunciation, so memorizing the handful of exceptions isn’t really a problem.
However, with English it’s the other way around. You need to memorize the handful of words that are actually pronounced the way they are written. Everything else is just pure chaos. If you read a word, you can’t pronounce it. If you hear a word, you can’t find it in a dictionary.
segue puts me straight into a fugue state
Pronounced “foog-way”.
master ugue
I used to think “chaos” had the same “ch” as “church” when I was a kid. Don’t know why I never heard it spoken aloud by someone earlier than I did.
But the one that I find inexcusable is Southern US people who pronounce “jalapeno” with a “j” and “n” instead of an “ha” and “ñ” even though they know better. Sounds so willfully ignorant
