Educated Mispronunciations

If you’re a reader, you realize that there are lots of words that you read every day but never really hear anyone use in conversation. You recognize these words and understand their meanings, but they are not words that seem to fit into your everyday speech. This is called your Reading Vocabulary. (You actually have four different vocabularies—Reading, Writing, Listening, and Speaking.)

Now, just because you’ve never said these words aloud or heard anyone else pronounce them, doesn’t mean you don’t “say” them inside your head, and you can drift along for years, comfortable in your verbal ignorance. The big shock comes when you finally hear an educated person, your professor, for instance, use the word in a lecture, and you suddenly realize that you have always said the word incorrectly in your head. These mispronunciations usually consist of putting the emphasis on the wrong syllable, but occasionally you may have mangled a word almost beyond recognition. You are mortified and console yourself by thinking, “Thank goodness I never said the word aloud in public!” all the while wondering how many times you have humiliated yourself without being smart enough to even realize it. You discover that ignorance is not bliss.

Now, of course, you want examples. You want me to humiliate myself before you. Okay, okay, I will abandon my pride. The first instance of my pronunciative ignorance (I think I just coined a new word) began in my preteen days. My favorite reading material was a series of mystery novels, the Trixie Belden collection, and I think I had about eighteen of them. In these novels, Trixie’s brother Mart had an old jalopy. Now, in my head I pronounced this word JAlopy, with the emphasis on the first syllable. (As an aside, as I now think back, I am amazed at how many times the author felt the need to use this word throughout the course of these eighteen books. She must have liked how it sounded or enjoyed the appearance of it on the page.) When I finally heard someone say the word on television, I realized it was pronounced jaLOPy, with the emphasis on the second syllable. This discovery did not bother me too much because jalopy is not a word that a teenager just throws around, and even if I had decided to use it, I didn’t figure that any of my friends would have known what the word meant or how to pronounce it anyway.

Not so with this second illustration of my ignorance. I had seen the Latin term ad infinitum, meaning without limit or end, and, basing my pronunciation on the word "infinity," I assumed it was pronounced ad inFINitum. Wrong again. After hearing one of my professors use it in class, I discovered that it’s pronounced ad infinEYEtum. After class, I made straight for a dictionary, and sure enough, the professor was right and I was wrong. Imagine that.

I have never been a stranger to dictionaries. I have always kept one handy, looking up words that I don’t know when I encounter them in reading or conversation. So what bothered me most about this event was not that I had made a mistake, but that I was making them without even knowing it and was likely to continue to do so. Because I could decode the meaning of the word from the text and could apply general rules of pronunciation, I assumed that I knew these words. It had never even occurred to me that I should look up these words.

Well, right after that class I was scheduled to work my shift in the Writing Center, and the professor I was working with that day is a stickler for correct grammar and pronunciation. I told him what had happened and about my worries that I would embarrass myself in the future. I don’t really know what kind of solution I expected from him other than the admonition that maybe I should look up everything, but his reply both surprised me and gave me comfort. He said, “When I hear a person mispronounce or misuse a word that is common to everyday usage, I think he is uneducated. When I hear a person mispronounce an unusual word but use it correctly, I know he is a reader. There is a great difference.”

Whew. Readers, we can relax now.