On the way to a party Saturday night, my wife told me a story in the car about some system she has to use at work. It was a long and complicated tale, and I tried to follow it, but once she said “DOS” I couldn’t follow any of it any more.

That’s because she said DAWSS and that’s how it’s correctly pronounced to me, too, and that got me thinking. Where we’re from, everyone pronounces everything correctly. It just seems to come naturally to people there to say things correctly. Unfortunately, our children, who are all California-born, have their own ideas of how things are pronounced. To them, this is probably pronounced DAHSS, even though that’s wrong, and, worse, even though I’ve told them it’s wrong.

These same children, two all grown up and one nearly so, believe that “compass” is rightly pronounced COME-pus when I know full well that it’s pronounced CAHMPus. Two of  them were snickering at me a few weeks ago when I said that something CAR-uh-lates with my experience and they said it CORE-e-lates. CORE-e-lates:  hah!

My wife and I are smart, well-educated people, and we’re certainly talkers, so I don’t know how our children wound up this way, mispronouncing everything.

The horror. (Which they pronounce HORE-ur!)

This entry was posted on Monday, January 28th, 2019 at 8:07 pm and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.