pet peeve: homonyms and incorrect word usage

There are many of these, depending on where you live. In the Midwest, "marry", "Mary", and "merry" are generally pronounced alike. Likewise Midwesterners pronounce "caramel" as "car-mel". "Poinsettia" is alway butchered.

If words were properly pronounced, English spelling would be a little less confusing; not much, but at least a little.

Tom

 

Unless "good" is a person's name...like "Goode".

 

ifin day wur spelt rite, daid b ezr 2 say

 

LOL, sadly that was entirely too easy to read.

I noticed the big change when texting first started. It was expensive so everyone kept it short/abbreviated. Spelling and English usage skills went downhill steadily after that.

 

Is that some sort of Upper Peninsula pronunciation? :madgrin:

 

Don't get me started on that. There's a ton of pronunciation differences based on region that most people aren't aware of. I was totally surprised when I went to Texas, thinking I had the standard "correct" speech patterns, and they (of all people) pointed out words I mispronounced. I rhyme flag and flake, not flag and flack. But they pronounce Wendy as windy (took me off-guard when answering the phone once), and tent as tint. Then there's pee'con, dee'troit, and gee'tar. I remember one girl spelling her address over the phone and I just had to laugh because virtually every letter was pronounced differently. Then I moved to the east coast and found out I was unique in that I couldn't distinguish between Don and Dawn, or cot and caught. But then they'd say something like "hold a drawering" instead of a drawing, and would sit on the sofer. That really bugs me. There was a commercial in the NY market that pointed out some mispronunciation but then went on to say "fajita" with a 'j' sound. And only in the upper midwest can you apparently go to the store to get boughten bread.

 

Texas - It's like a whole other country. :madgrin:

 

I've ued up my quota of that letter, o now I can't type anything with "" in it until the art of my next billing cycle.

Tom

 

I have some extras I can loan to you.

sssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss

 

Thanks. I'm back in business. That used up four of them. Darn, make that five.

Tom

 

Re: Different dialects - I spent a couple of months in Texas, so became acquainted with their unique type of speech. But that is nothing compared to what I experienced in Georgia. I was riding in a car with two gentlemen who were from the Atlanta office of the company I used to work for. I think they were speaking some type of English, but I couldn't understand a word they were saying. Everyone I met in Georgia commented on my "California accent". "You aren't from around here, are ya boy?"

 

If they asked if you were a revenuer, you knew you were too far out of the city.

 

Lately I've noticed a lot of people spelling the past tense of lead as "lead," when it should be "led."

That one really bugs me, for some reason.

 

You get billed regularly for tarts? Don't let your wife see the charge card statements.

 

LED is a type of light. Lead is a heavy metal. I don't see how you could confuse the two. Furthermore, lead is the past tense of uranium.



Tom

 

That's right. I never knew I was a Yankee until I moved to Texas. I thought that was a New York baseball team, but I was definitely corrected. I also found out that "y'all" is often singular, and "all y'all" is plural.

But if you really want different dialects, go to England. There were some blue-collar workers from the Midlands I was working with, and I couldn't understand half of what they were saying (and that was with some guessing involved on what I could understand). Then I met one of their colleagues, who was an Indian Sikh. I'm used to the Indian accent, so I had him translate things for me.

 

Ha, that's good.

OTOH, the past tense of read is read, so why not do the same for lead?
Loose and lose bugs me though.

Words can differ in 3 ways - spelling, pronunciation, meaning.
Lead can be spelled the same and pronounced differently, or spelled differently (led, lead) and pronounced the same, so it's a little unusual that way. In all cases it means something different. Bass is like that too.

 

One that drove me NUTS in Minnesota, was "borrow"...

As in, "Here, I'll borrow you some sugar until you can get to the store."

I learned the proper usage from Gilligan's Island as a child!! "Neither a borrower or a lender be. Do not forget - stay out of debt!" (Yes, the castaways were performing Hamlet)

 

Somehow I was able to survive growing up in a strong pennsylvania dutch area (with pa dutch father & grandmother) without garbling my syntax to say things like "throw the cow over the fence some hay" or "throw grandma down the steps her shoes".