pahsketti!

A co-worker was telling me about how her son said to her once, "Mom, guess what my favorite food is." She told him that she didn't know. He said, "I'll give you a clue: it starts with a B." She told him that she still didn't know. Almost disappointed that his mother didn't know his favorite food, he quickly retorted, "It's bahsketti!" Spaghetti is easily one of the toughest words for kids to get right. I always called it "pahsketti" as a child. We expect children to make such mistakes and find it humorous and cute when they do. What is not humorous or cute, however, is when adults mispronounce words. And they do it all the time. Let me clarify, first, that I am not talking about words being mispronounced due to regional accents. I, being from Boston, used to have a lot of trouble pronouncing the letter r. I am speaking of mispronouncing words out of ignorance to their spelling and therefore pronunciation. And for the record, I am almost certain that I have been guilty of such mispronunciation myself. This whole thought came to me one day when I was talking to a friend and she said "expecially" instead of "especially." I started thinking about how people always do it. There are so many words/phrases that are mispronounced. The other big one I could think of was saying "supposably" instead of "supposedly". That one has always irked me. I knew there were many more, but could not think of any off hand. So I did what I normally do in that situation and googled "commonly mispronounced words." I was directed to the following link which offers the "100 Most Often Mispronounced Words and Phrases in English." I was shocked to see a couple that I still mispronounce thinking they were accurate. You should check it out: http://www.yourdictionary.com/library/mispron.html For the record, it also irks me when people say, "I could care less." They should say, "I couldn't care less." The point you're trying to get across when you say that is that it's something you do not care about. That's a little different than what I was talking about with mispronunciation but I needed to get that off my chest.