Words people use that are incorrect

Physicality.

Could you imagine what would happen if everyone in China learned American English?
Billions of people spelling words like colour and favour, incorrectly.

It's already happening in S Korea and Singapore.

Well, this has opened up a tin of worms or, is that can or container of worms?

You're getting into conflicting ways of pronouncing the same word there though, we could have a row about the way you row a boat and I might get angry and throw my woodworking router at you!

Americans pronoune route both ways, regional dialects... I've only heard router pronounced "rowter" though, never "rooter".

Its a can of worms god-damn-it

if you had grown up in America, you would know: "Call Roto-Rooter, that's the name, and away go troubles down the drain."

So do Brits pronounce grout (the stuff connecting tiling and such) as 'groot' (rhyming with how they pronounce route)?

No. The 'e' on the end gives it the 'oo' sound.

That's why words like pout and gout have the 'ow' sound.

There are places in NE england where boots is prounounced 'b yu ts' - i have no idea of a better way to write it. .

Its 'b' 'yu' 'ts'

Cook is pronounced 'cuck'... and

Book is pronounced 'buck'...

Like the states, it varies from region to region and seem to have no logic or sense to it.

Vytamins??? I just got bytten? How do the yanks cope with bits and bytes...

Ironically the people in the US with the most atrocious offenses against the English language are from New England.

Vitamins & Vital...they should have the same pronunciation of the vita part.

Of course, "quite" and "quiet".

Hogwash, everyone knows it is perfectly correct to say you "was hun'en up ahn te moun'en buy jezass! I got me ah ten pointah!"

Some of my all-time favourites are "low and behold" and "towing the line".

I also love it when people use foreign words to show off their learning and then end up writing things like "ad nauseum" for "ad nauseam", "viola" instead of "voilà" or "in lew of" instead of "in lieu of".

Here, here!

Or when they pronounce a v in a latin phrase as a v and not a w.. (in vino veritas, veni vidi vici come to mind)..


Thats a wicked pissah

That one, too!

If you get into regional accents the whole topic just gets crazy - I've capitalised the nouns

Mi Marras Bairns luv Tatties an other Nosh like when they are wi us but a canne wait til they gan yam-ower as they get on Mi Chebs...

You have to love regional accents..

Anyone care to have a stab at what they means...

wouldn't the correct pronunciation depend entirely on whether one was being vulgar or not?

It's jibe, not jive.

Your quoting phrases from Caesar and Pliny that weren't written in the vulgar, damnit

That's no accent that's slang.

My ?? children love potatoes and other food when they're with us but I can't wait until they go home as they get on my tits?

Really? I've never studied latin but have had to sing in latin a lot. Have I been taught wrong all this time?

Is it really supposed to be "Awe Maria"?

Lilplatinum - You're

On the 'router' pronunciation topic.. I also questioned those who said 'row-ter', but was told that it should be pronounced like that even by the Brits for the computer part, whereas 'route' is pronounced as 'rowt' by US and 'root' by UK. Is that true? I still can't bring myself to say 'rowter'.

Re: Latin - one thing my Latin teacher used to say was that no one knows for sure how to pronounce it, as it is a dead language. We have no recordings of how it should sound! So, how do you know it's w not v?

"router" is never pronounced like "rowter" in the UK, only in the US (and not by everyone in the US either)

@Timmeh,

Spot on

The only bit missing was 'friends'..

For advanced dialect translation, a few episodes of rab c nebbitt, with or without subtitles :-)

Thanks OG! Hooray!

The best part of being a Canadian is you can pick and choose the best parts of American and British English so I can pronounce route both ways depending on my mood. In general we speak American English and write British English.

Presumably there are contextual and usage clues to be found. Latin poems for instance?

Well I think they look at how the language broke apart and the development/seperation of letters especial into the proto romance languages and thats how they kinda figured it out, sounds for v, w, and b kinda shifted in and out if I remember correctly. but i'm being somewhat of a pedant because I was dumb enough to take that language in college instead of something i could have used (like german)

Its been a while since i went to church but it depended on if they pronounced v like v or w, mostly the former i suppose because thats how church latin developed.

And yes, its Rowter in the US but no idea in UK.

I've seen the word literally be used in a wrong context, too... people will say literally when they really mean metaphorically / figuratively. Like when someone says, "I literally shit my pants." Really? (This may not be an example to the misuse on TT but a particularly awkward example.)

I think "I literally shit my pants" is an attempt at hyperbole

I know, but I doubt people are aware of what they are literally saying there.

what a bunch of loosers

often heard on Jeremy-Kyle type shows:
'specific' said as 'pacific'

I like the Irish way of saying "film". I went to see a fillum

this was actually why I made the comment on being vulgar in my post above. Classical Latin uses reconstruction to produce rules on pronunciation. The "V" in classical Latin is pronounced like an english "w" because linguitsic scholars believe that is how it was initially pronounced. The basically looked at loan words into other languages from early Latin. One example is the gothic word "wins" meaning wine which was borrowed directly from the early Latin word "vinum" which leads linguists to believe a "v" was pronounced like a "W". pronunciation shifted after latin broke up into various dialects and languages and one shift was the "V", so in vulgar latin "Veni, vidi, vici" is pronounced like with an enlgish "V" and the "C" like a "ch" instead of a "k".

Also the fact that they used but one letter "V" for the vowel and semivowel (see the use of "I")

That would be a can of worms.

Anyway instead of getting into Ami/Brit bashing, I was more going in the direction of both Brit/Ami ways of spelling are OK when correct, I meant more the use of the words being totally wrong. Now apparently the amount of University graduates on this forum is pretty high. I find it appalling that so much bad, indifferent and frankly unacceptable grammar is being used. (spelling is bloody awful too, typos accepted !) I never went to Uni but I usually read over what I´ve written before launching it into cyber space, please raise my reading enjoyment a little bit in the future. Thank you.

_{No doubt be ripped apart for some God awful mistake for the above, I´ve upset the Spelling Police, no doubt!}

Well I wasn't going to name names, but in the interest of raising your reading enjoyment, I'll point out that you were the person one of the people I was thinking of when I wrote this post about incorrect usage of the accent mark.

Most people misspell sadistics.

Who? Me? No really, do I?

And just for a bit of variety

Which is why I put this down below! You do get out sometimes do you?
No doubt be ripped apart for some God awful mistake for the above, I´ve upset the Spelling Police, no doubt!

I'm just trying to raise your enjoyment level is all.

Oh and I also find it incredibly hypocritical to start a thread and post in a rather self-righteous way complaining about misuse of language ('it's appalling!') when you yourself are guilty of repeatedly making a rather egregious language-related error. A typo is one thing, we all make those, but a fundamental misunderstanding of punctuation is something else.

"Guilty as charged M´Lud" Off to the scaffold with me
I never said I was a bleedin´rocket scientist neither! Did I?

To make an apostrophe, like in bleedin', press the apostrophe key whilst simultaneously pressing the shift key (see diagramme below).

Standard German Keyboard


Oh, and the shift key is the one you use to make small letters big.