Also, Testicles
Read us the great story of the separation of Testicles
No. Testicles, though lacking the raw strength of Muscles or the courage of elder Uncles, would not be separated from steadfast Principles. Though many tried to insult him with nicknames like “Tubercles” or “Microparticles”, those could never stick like they did to poor Treacles or restrain his vigor like heavy Manacles.
Tired of senseless Debacles, he studied scholarly Articles and read ancient Chronicles and prayed nightly for the most magnificent Miracles. Finally one day while meditating, a vision of complex Epicycles formed in the most profound Tabernacles of his mind. He awoke to realize it mattered not what hateful words prodded him like chilly Icicles; he was already atop the Pinnacles of manliness, and he wasn’t alone. From that day forth he hung proudly with his wiry protector, the hideous and patchy Follicles no one dared approach.
Because of a single line in An 18 year old Questionable Content strip, I will never not pronounce “Penelope” wrong in my head.
Fucking hell, I’ve been reading that comic for longer than some adults have been alive! 😬 #FeelingOld
Man it’s crazy to remember how much the style of QC has changed over time
I can’t unread “unionizing” (the act of joining a union) as un-ionizing (to remove ions from something)
I still like pronouncing “device” similar to “DaVinci”
One of my favorite mispronounciations comes from the joke how there’s 5 words in the English language with “meow” in them:
meow
meows
meowing
meowed
homeowner
I’m a happy ho-meow-ner
I checked the list of 370k english words I downloaded from github a while ago and yeah, its true other than the variants of homeowner (homeowners, homeownership)
I was looking at some other random words, heres some I found:
- self: weaselfish, damselfish
- eye: greyer, honeyed, journeyed, etc
- bear: beard
this got me interested so I wrote a program to find each time a small word bridges the gap between two larger words in a compound word, honestly the funnier part of its outputs is the weird ‘compound words’ its finding, like “asp: aspirating: as, pirating” or “at: deepseated: deepsea, ted” (ted, apparently, meaning ‘to scatter hay for drying’). Occasionally it finds good ones, like “ices: apprenticeship: apprentice, ship” or “hen: archenemy: arch, enemy”, and it did find the meow one. It does allow the small word to contain the first word in a compound word, because that can still give some interesting ones like “warp: warplanes: war, planes”. It probably would have been a lot better if I had actually used a list of compound words, it tries to find its own very slowly which does allow it to find any possible combination for any word
anyways, here’s the list
As someone whose contact with English is mostly by reading, this made me sure I’m likely pronouncing a bunch of words wrong in my mind.
As someone who didn’t their formative years reading a lot more than taking, I also certainly pronounce a bunch of words wrong. It’s always the pretentious ones, too, like pretentious, because people so rarely use them in speech.
Anyway, if enough of us pronounce them wrong together, it’ll be the right people who are wrong!
