To say it’s “cliquey” not “clicky”

[Fortunesmiles]

Just that, really. I keep seeing things like “the parents at school are very clicky” - no! They form cliques, not clicks. Not normally one to comment on this stuff, but that one really makes me cringe!

I think its because generally people in the UK dont pronounce 'foreign' origin words in the accent in which they are spoken, so people dont say clique, they say click

I sure as hell don't say "click" and have no recollection of ever meeting anyone in the UK who said "click". It would have pinged on my radar if they did because it's just so ... so ... <insert appropriate adjective as required>

@OrderOfTheKookaburra see, that's what I've said all my life but two people within the last month have used that word in conversation and both pronounced it "trow" so I did wonder if I'd been going around mispronouncing it for years!

Okay I have listened to a few of their ads and it is ‘Ji-vonchy’. So both of us mangled it 😂

I thought Givenchy was 'zhee-von-shee'?

YANBU and people who write 'clicks' or 'clicky' don't understand the word is pronounced clEEk. Cleek. Not 'click'.

Perhaps I'll get busted by the MN attitude police for saying this, but I can't bring myself to say 'paella' incorrectly.

Did he know the way to Amareeyo?

How do you have enough time on your hands to appoint yourself the grammar police? Seriously, use your time to make a cup of tea or life someone up! I'm not having a bitchy pop at you but I'm sure you have as big of a mental load as most people so if you're starting an unnecessary thread it would be better to do put something positive out there.

Maybe "are you a cat person or a dog person?"

You are wildly generalising. Plenty of English people say foreign words as the people do in the country the words came from, especially if they speak the language concerned, in which case they will feel they are saying them 'wrongly' if they say them like monoglot Brits do. DH and I know someone who is actually a teacher, who says she can't bring herself to learn any foreign language because 'it would feel like taking gobbledygook'. Thank God we're not all like that!

But can't bring myself to pronounce paella correctly, even though I happily say choreetho...there is no logic sometime

I'm the same! It's just convention though isn't it, which is fair enough. Like saying Paris (not Pareeee) is correct in English. Or valet which should have a hard t at the end in English English but not American English.

Poor is different to all the rest

Chic. You wouldn't pronounce that as chick; you'd say sheek, because it's French.

you and me both @CharlottenBurger. Lived in Spain, degree in Spanish. Sets my teeth on edge when people call it pie-ella.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=B6R2YHe74b0

My first run in with “click” was this Aaliyah song from the 90’s “ Down with the Clique” - ( great song) I know that language evolves but you can’t expect people not to be irritated if a pronunciation suddenly deviates from the accepted standard. There’s plenty of slang to provide colour to language.

( PS it’s not ect it’s etc. I don’t even know how your phone lets you type that )

You don’t say. Well spotted. No jokes allowed when you’re on duty.

Gah. The different ways of pronouncing ll in Spanish have caught me out a lot. In Castiallan Spain, it sounds like y, like pp have said most Brits know how so say tortilla.

In Peru they enunciate it as L sounds.

And then I went to Buenos Aires and couldn't find the damn underground station people told me (verbally) to go to, called Cashao. Because they say ll as a sh and it was spelt Callao. 🤦‍♀️

South Americans also say the z as a hard sound not th, so I adapted my speaking which did not go down well with my Spanish family on return.

Yes the LL sound varies hugely, especially in South America. In the standard Spanish accent I was taught to pronounce LL in "me llamo" (my name is) as "may yamo". Some regions/countries make a sound somewhere between the Y and L, but definitely not just L.

It's not just South America who replace the "th" sound with a "sssss" sound, they do it in Andalucia and the Canary Islands too. But someone in Malaga or Mexico City isn't going to misunderstand you if you ask for chorizo with a TH sound.

Fun fact - chorizo is Spanish slang for a thief or con man. No idea why.

All be it instead of albeit 😵‍💫

In our house we love Ricardo Darín, and he does zheismo beautifully.

I prefer cliquish.

Not in my accent. All identical!

Going off on a slight tangent here but is describing something or someone as "cliquey" or in a "clique" always perceived as a negative thing? Has it always been used that way or only recently been a pejorative?

That reminds me of a thread a while back where poster couldn't see how "pork" could possibly rhyme with "fork".

Think it was a north of the border issue.

A tricky one is femme fatale.

Some say "fem fataley"
Some say "fem fatarl"
Some say "fam fatarl"

It's all a minefield.

I bet the people saying they wouldn't dream of saying paella incorrectly don't call the animal a yama.

I pronounce the ll as ly, I've only ever learned Spanish from South American teachers.