Mispronounced words that drive you mad

[puds11]

Just overheard someone ordering an ‘expresso’

What mispronounced words drive you mad?

My mum says "Amazon prime time". It drives me mental.

'mischievous' pronounced to rhyme with devious. Ugh.

Then instead of than drives me mad.

And been instead of being.

DH says "vairify" instead of "verify".
Considering his job entails "verifying" a great deal I hear it a lot!

Arks instead of ask
Pacific instead of specific 🤯

As others have said, many of these are simply regional variations and are considered perfectly correct.

Regarding the word "sixths"- hardly anyone pronounces all the sounds in it (remember, we're talking sounds, not letters) because you have a big fat consonant cluster which is virtually impossible to pronounce without sounding ridiculous. /siksths/ Far too many oral gymnastic moves needed because of the different place within the mouth where each sound is made. (Say it correctly, very very slowly and see how many times your lips and tongue go back and forth) So, it's been simplified over time, and the standard will eventually become what we all say anyway. (Wednesday and February will also find their spellings modified, but not in our lifetime)

As a Midlander, I was momentarily surprised during a phonetics exam to hear my examiner saying "pronounciation" as it's spelled. She was Irish. Again, simple regional variations.

Mischievous as miss-cheeev-ious

Bregg-sit (is it so hard to pronounce the letter x?)

Adverse instead of averse, as in 'I'm not adverse to...' (I never hear 'battling averse circumstances' though, it's all one-way traffic towards adverse).

That's a misuse rather than mispronounciation but I'd put in the same category as people who fail to perceive a difference between bought and brought (how? bring, buy, quite different words and concepts!). Both are similarly recent and performed by the same people. Though 'I'm not adverse' permeates further along the educational spectrum.

Dh says all-mund for almond. Gah!

But surely, surely the most irritating one is "click" for clique??? Lots of people say this, it's on the rise, even people who surely should know better!

My husband says "appcept" instead of accept and it makes me want to pull my ears off.
My sister is planning to "enlope" next year.

My line manager talks about when plans come to “fruitition” instead of”fruition”.

GiveHerHellFromUs, funnily enough I know plenty of people from Lancashire and they pretty much all drop the 'h'.
fedup21, probably a bit of a mixture of the two I'd say. Could be 'couldav' or 'could 'ave'...but both to the naked ear in conversations could easily be heard as 'could of'.
The point is, there are definitely ways of pronouncing things that are a result of regional accents (dialect is something different again), which is very different from a complete mispronunciation (like expresso or nucular).

Conshumers and ashume. Instead of consumers and assume.

Sounds like their teeth don't fit.

No one says conshumption or assumption though.

Also uninterested and disinterested are two different concepts. Lots of MPs were mangling those recently.

Ashumption- bloody autocorrect is a pedant too.

People being pretentious by using French words, which they get wrong.
"restauranteur" is actually "restaurateur" no "n"
"ménage" (household) is not something you exercise your horse round, that would be a "manège"
It's "crème pâtissière" not "crème pâtisserie"
I'm always shouting at the TV during Masterchef!
I could go on

‘Pacific’ instead of ‘Specific’ gives me the rage

It's "crème pâtissière" not "crème patisserie YES!

Although I don't know if it's worse when they say 'crème pat' instead.

I queued for 30 minutes in a very posh cheese shop. I had to listen to the assistant say slither instead of slither so many times that in the end I had to intervene. She didn’t look very impressed!

Yes, yes, it definitely is worse to say crème pat.

Oh yes, 'disinterested', as if it sounds better than uninterested, rather than being a totally different thing. That's a real Bou-qet marker, though I think it's spread further and lots of people now believe it's correct.

@RiddleyW Holy monkeys! Thanks for the correction, I shall go drink a flat white in shame.

(Expresso is French for Espresso)

Unerversity credit

I listened to a fairly pompous barrister saying 'disinterested' when he meant 'uninterested' the other day.
I smiled benignly and felt annoyed.

PAPrika instead of papREEka. I let it disproportionately irritate me. Dp and I argue about this. Is the first an Americanism? I'd never heard it pronounced this way before meeting him.

I hate it it when people get the emphasis wrong and say CONtribute and DIStribute instead of conTRIBute and disTRIBute!