#017 Pronunciation (English language)

Speech is not something to be taken lightly. How you speak and how you present yourself by your spoken word can make or break your credibility in a variety of situations. By no means am I an expert in English as a spoken language, but I could consider my skill level to be maybe an 8.5 out of 10 (this blog in the written form excluded).

I am extremely bothered by people who refuse to properly pronounce words in their native language. I’m not talking about technical terms specific to a certain profession: for example medical terms are difficult to people not involved in that industry, and engineering terms are a challenge to others as well. I’m talking about basic words that are used in everyday conversation and in the media. A very commonly mispronounced word is “nuclear”. People often pronounce this as “nuke-u-lar”, and it drives me crazy. This is an example of an extremely phonetic word in the English language! What is so difficult when it comes to pronouncing this word correctly?! This is often mispronounced even in the media, which is absolutely horrifying to me.

I used to work with a woman who could not properly pronounce “remember”. If you’re puzzled by how anyone could possibly mess this one up, you’re probably not the only one. I was SO confused by the fact that she pronounced it “renember” (yes, with an “n”), and could not understand why she said it that way that I actually asked her. Her response was: “My family’s from the South, so I say a lot of things different.” Well, I have family from the southern United States, and they don’t say “renember”. When I asked her from which state her family was from, she told me “Oklahoma”. So does this mean that all people from Oklahoma say “renember” instead of “remember”? Now I’m curious. Also, the fact that she’s a mother bothers me because she’s going to repeatedly use this word in front of her child, who will likely learn the word this way and continue the cycle of mispronunciation. I wonder what other words she incorrectly pronounces...

A guy I currently work with frequently says he’s “fustrated” (for the record, I had to force auto-correct to keep the first “r” out of that word!). No, idiot, you’re FRUSTRATED, and you’re frustrating me because you can’t say it right!!!

It bothers me that the people using these words are not adolescents, teens or even young adults –they are college educated adults over the age of 25. I mean, we’re not talking about a 4 year old trying to say “spaghetti” and having it come out as “puhs-ghetti”, we’re talking about adults who have written reports and completed theses and written formal documents of some kind for an employer at one time or another (or several). Why does this continue to happen? Do these people not realize that they’re not pronouncing words correctly? I can’t and won’t tolerate it for a second. If I hear you mispronouncing something, I’ll be the first one to correct you. The cycle MUST be broken!