Caution: Angry and Hilarious Rant ahead. Beware. Take offense. Adjust your approach to your language.
I have been reeling recently about the amount of words that people say incorrectly, let alone use incorrectly (that’s another blog post). I say that the usage of these words makes you “sound dumb” because when I say that, the people who are guilty look up like prairie dogs from their cubicles to make sure no one is pointing fingers at them. Hopefully, this means they will pay attention to the words falling out from between their sandwich munchers.
Some examples (note: I am not a phonetics Guru, partially because I was rejected from “hookt on Fonix“, and copy/pasting them from Websters would be plagiarism):
The United States President who would say “nuke-u-lar” weapons. It is pronounced “new-clear”, and spelled N-U-C-L-E-A-R. Do you see the words “new” and “clear” in the spelling? Weird how “president” and “precedent” (yes those are two different words that mean different things) came from the same root, maybe that’s why I feel the need to write this post.
The barista who says “Expresso”, not because my local Coffee dive is doing clever marketing about “Fast espresso” but because she probably never stopped to think about it. It is pronounced “Es-press-oh” and spelled E-S-P-R-E-S-S-O, there is no “X” in that word.
Along the same vein as “expresso” you will find people who says “expecially” instead of E-S-P-E-C-I-A-L-L-Y, pronounced “E-special-lee”.
Irregardless of the words above…wait…WTF!? Irregardless? You mean “not-regardless” or “not in spite of everything” or “including everything”? The prefix “ir” means “not” as in “irresponsible use of prefixes”.
Supposebly, it is copacetic to mispronounce “supposedly”. It was cute when your 7yr old figured out how to use this word in a sentence and couldn’t pronounce it because their two front teeth were missing, but it is not cute for you as a grown-ass-adult to keep repeating it. S-U-P-P-O-S-E-D-L-Y is pronounced “Sup-pose-ed-lee”.
This next one I have not noticed before, but I am positive I have heard: “All intensive purposes”. When you use this, do you mean to say that for every intense reason behind whatever you are talking about? Or is this more like that time when you couldn’t figure out the easy level Sudoku puzzle and tuned out the world and showers for a weekend until you got it or cheated?
Speaking of Sudoku, it drives me crazy when people say “Soduko”. S-U-D-O-K-O, pronounced “Sue-dough-koo” – Come on, most of you Americans have done the first part of the phonetic spelling (For the slow people I mean, “most of you have sued someone”).
Update: Chipotle is not: Chi-poat-lee, Chi-poat-a-lay, Chi-poat-ul, Chi-polt-ee. It is Spelled: C-H-I-P-O-T-L-E, please take notice of the order of the letters. The P-O-T is not p-o-l-t. L-E is not t-e-e, or u-l. Please be respectful to an amazing place to eat.
Seriously people take these steps:
- Look at the word
- Read the word
- Spell the word
- When you are positive you know what the word it, say the word in trusting company to make sure they don’t laugh
- If and only if (this is a definite statement, no possibilities for error) you can go out on the streets and use it all you want.
I make exceptions for people whose primary language (Read: First language) is not English, and children with missing teeth (see “supposebly” above).
Thank you for reading this lesson on the English language, if you have any more you would like to add please leave them in the comments.
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