I, like I suspect many of the tumblr populace, ran into the issue in my youth of reading a lot of words I never heard spoken. My vocabulary has always been above average but my implementation is often flawed.
Like the day I told my dad I was the epitome of something and he laughed in my face. It wasn’t my fault that I didn’t correctly intuit the emphasis. (Mine was Ep-i-TOME vs Ep-i-to-ME).
My dad didn’t apologize for his rudeness but after my initial disgruntlement I just learned to roll with it. I’d get corrected and laugh it off. Some words were more frustrating though because it necessitated having to rework the word in my brain every time I read it. Like a few years ago when I learned I’d had “seneschal” wrong for decades. (I can’t explain why I thought it was sen-shull and not sen-es-shawl)
I learned that I had harbinger wrong during a Transformers movie without needing to embarrass myself. Thanks, Shia Lebouf. (Har-bing-er (wrong) made way more sense than har-binge-er (right) but no one asked me)
At this point in my life though I’ve managed to work out most of the kinks. I don’t often get corrected anymore.
But there’s one other snag that crops up between me and my beloved. I’ll confidently say a word and they’ll go, “That’s not how that’s pronounced.”
“Yes it is,” I’ll say, very firmly. Because in these cases I’ll generally have heard with my ears and repeated a word verbatim. I’ll know I heard it, so it can’t be wrong.
And pretty much every time I’ll be saying the British pronunciation instead of the American one. I’ve consumed enough British media that often it’s the only time I heard certain words said and I never realized American English handles it differently.
In some cases I’ll switch to the accepted American one. But they can pry machismo out of my cold dead hands, the American version is so stupid I can’t even handle it. I now recognize we stole the Spanish word but we made it worse.
