Commonly Mispronounced Words

For your amusement (and, possibly, education):

10 Words You Mispronounce That Make People Think You're an Idiot

I totally agree with all of those, especially "expresso." I will never forget training, when I was 19, for my summer job at the cafe inside a Barnes & Noble. My co-worker who was training me began by explaining how to tamp down the "expresso" so that each shot would pour correctly. "And then we discard the used expresso here," she would say. I kept flinching throughout the training; she probably thought I had a neurological disorder.

They Say I'm Crazy... I Really Don't Care...

Correction... I agree with all of the mispronounced words in that article except "prerogative." I have never, literally never, heard anybody pronounce this word any way except "purr – ogg – uh – tiv". If anybody actually pronounced the first syllable "pre," I think they'd sound pretentious. (I also think "can – da – dett" sounds tons more pretentious than "can – uh – dett", but that may be due to my growing up in the midwest where nobody pronounces the first d in candidate.)

I remember asking my mom how to spell "prerogative" when I was a kid. My seventh grade pom-pom squad was doing a dance number to Bobby Brown's "My Prerogative" and I needed something to write on the label for the dubbed tape that I was going to practice to at home (and yes, I did just admit all that in public... I say OWN IT, BETCHES!).

Anyway, Mom didn't know how to spell it. So we looked it up in the dictionary, but to our surprise, we couldn't find it. We looked it up under P-E-R, then P-U-R, then P-I-R. Then, in disbelief that we hadn't already found it under one of those spellings, we looked under P-A-R and P-O-R. Nada. It was ages before we figured out that it begins with P-R-E. Because NOBODY actually pronounces it like that.

If I'm wrong, do set me straight. But it seems impossible that I could have traveled the world and reached the ripe old age of 35 without hearing "pre – rogg – uh – tiv" if it is indeed as correct as Mr. Justin Brown (author of the above article, and "writer and artist living in Virginia") seems to think it is.