As I’ve said in other posts (here and also here), I just love words. I love to read them, I love to play with them, I love to learn new words, I love to learn that I’ve mispronounced something my whole life (okay I don’t love that one quite as much 😜, but I’m glad to know how to say it right going forward). I love to play Scrabble, Words with Friends, Bananagrams, Catchphrase, Password, and Taboo, just to name a few. And I can even create nerd games from Words with Friends—like finding presidential last names that are also normal (acceptable for play) words. Grant. Pierce. Carter (one who carts, right?). Hoover (oh come on, they used to say hoover instead of vacuum, so it counts). Bush. Ford. Trump. Actually it’s a pretty short game. In fact, I just won.
Word Games
I also get pretty excited when I have the letters to play fun words like (Doctor Who reference alert) Daleks, even though Words with Friends will not let me play it. I’m sure every Whovian wonders why it isn’t acceptable. I mean yes, I guess it’s a proper noun, but Words with Friends makes up its own inconsistent rules about things like that all the time, in my opinion. So I say Daleks should count. And I certainly wouldn’t want them to hear about this omission!
6 Down
I love to do crossword puzzles, and I have lots of fond memories of doing them with my dad, often standing next to his chair when I was young and looking over his shoulder. He let me figure out the easy ones. He also loved words, and of course did his crosswords in ink, not with a pencil. He was a purist. He even challenged himself by seeing how fast he could complete them. He also liked to play with words and expected us to look them up if we didn’t know what they meant or how to spell them.
It took my sister and me a while to find “erysipelas” when Daddy used it in the sentence, “It’s erysipelas to me.” He told us to look it up when we asked what it meant (of course he did). We could tell from the context that he meant “It’s six of one and half a dozen of another,” one of his favorite ways to say that it didn’t matter either way which choice was made. We had a good laugh, though, when we finally found that erysipelas was actually a bacterial infection in the upper level of the skin. And now you know, too! 🤗
It’s so much easier to find that with Google, because it figures out what you mean even if you spell it wrong! At the time we had to look it up in our ginormous dictionary (which was also very good for pressing flowers). Now you can fat-finger your way on the keyboard through a word like “onomatopoeia” and your phone or computer will spell it for you. Either that or some completely unrelated and possibly awkward word.
Say what?
My dad rarely mispronounced anything—to the extent that I can remember the only two words I ever heard him mispronounce. But my sister and I used to mispronounce some words just for fun between ourselves, and when Dad heard us say “swayve” instead of “suave” one day, and we were adults, his jaw actually dropped! We hastened to assure him that we did know how to pronounce it and were just playing. Another fun word is “coinkydink” for “coincidence.” Again yes, we know how to say it. 😏 You can pronounce “champagne” similarly to “lasagna,” and “subtle” with the “b” just for fun. I mean, you don’t have to do it if you find yourself unable to deliberately mispronounce words. I do know my idea of fun isn’t everyone’s idea of fun. I am easily amused.
Give it a hook
I just have a thing about words, and if a word gets hooked into my memory as a result of where and when I heard it, I can still remember it even when I forget what I had for breakfast. Many in my family are good spellers. I have a daughter and nieces and nephews who all have won spelling bees. My sister went quite far in our regional spelling bee when she was in 4th or 5th grade, but the word “opossum” tripped her up. Which means I will always remember how to spell it. It has a hook in my memory.
Oatmeal. Just making sure I still remember what I had for breakfast. 😂
I saw a fun little list of words that we often say to ourselves by sounding them out in creative ways in order to spell them correctly—words like:
Con-science
Wed-nes-day
Feb-ru-ar-y
Lie-u-tenants
An-swer
Chi-hua-hua
Atten-dance
Connect-I-cut
Do you use any of those ways to remember the spelling? Oscar Mayer helped a generation learn how to spell bologna, which for some unknown reason is pronounced “baloney.” Sing along with me:
My bologna has a first name,
It’s O-S-C-A-R.
My bologna has a second name,
It’s M-A-Y-E-R.
The song ends with
‘cause Oscar Mayer has a way with B-O-L-O-G-N-A.
See there? You never have to misspell baloney—I mean bologna—again.
The day it all went awry
I can remember in my English class in high school taking turns reading aloud. I was so thankful that I did not have the section read by the person in front of me, because it had the word “awry” in it. I had read it often, but apparently had never heard it spoken before, and I always pronounced it “aw’ ree” in my head. I would have been mortified to have read it out loud that way.
It can happen the other way around, too. I had a friend read a couple of chapters of a novel I was writing, and I had my character use that great Italian word for goodbye: “chow.” When my friend finally stopped laughing, she informed me it was spelled “ciao.” 😳 I mean, how was I supposed to know, right? (Helpful hint: “ciao” is a great word to play when you have lots of vowels in Words with Friends).
Try to remember…
Do you remember when you learned certain words, or am I just weird? Don’t answer that. I can remember the first two-syllable word I learned to write in school (wagon). One of my dad’s preacher friends often used a word that was new to me in his sermons, or a word that I didn’t know how to pronounce because I had only read it, and I remember learning the pronunciation of “vehemently” from him (Hint: it’s not “ve him’ ently”). He also explained words in a way that didn’t make you feel dumb.
My husband taught me the meaning of “ubiquitous,” shortly after we met, though I already knew how to pronounce and spell it. McDonald’s and Starbucks are ubiquitous. You may be laughing at me for not knowing these words, but that’s okay, because I love learning new words and I’m not ashamed to admit it! Besides, how can you not fall in love with someone who teaches you the meaning of “ubiquitous”?
My roommate in college also loved words. In fact, we were admittedly word snobs. We talked about how it was nice to be able to use the one right word instead of having to use 3 or 4 to describe the nuances of a thought. We enlarged each other’s vocabularies, too. I will always want to know what a word means and how to spell it. I have heard people, though, who say “I don’t know what that means,” and go on with their lives as if their world hadn’t just shattered as a result of not knowing that word. I cannot relate to that.
Rachel’s English
All this came to mind because Facebook introduced me to Rachel, my wordie soulmate, when this video of 14 of the most commonly mispronounced words in American English came across my feed. No way was I able to resist watching it, which led me to watch more of her fun little informative “Rachel’s English” videos. I was hooked. She made the point that Americans pronounce some words wrong in our own native language because we’ve only read the words and haven’t heard them pronounced properly. English is not entirely a phonetic language—the spellings don’t always correspond to the sounds. So we may sound it out when we read the word and be wrong, and it can happen more often with avid readers. Now I feel vindicated if my word pronunciations go awry!
They call me Mrs. B
I’m particularly aware of all the different pronunciations of the letters “ough” because my last name is Bullough and it is very hard for people to figure out how to pronounce it. Do we pronounce it like “cough,” or “through,” or “bough,” or “enough,” or “hiccough,” or “although”? Ding ding ding! 🛎 The last one is correct. We say it like “bull-o” and ignore the silent ugh. When I was teaching, it was hard for my students to remember, so I also answer to Mrs. B.
“Rachel’s English” covers a lot of these confusing anomalies in the English language. And it doesn’t help that Americans pronounce some words the same as they do across the pond and some differently, like “schedule.” The Brits use an “sh” sound at the beginning, where we use the hard “sc” sound as in “school.” And then there’s the extra “i” they add in when they say “aluminium” instead of the way we pronounce “aluminum.”
Some word pronunciations defy explanation, like “colonel” and “Worcestershire.” Discussions of things like that is why I enjoyed “Rachel’s English” videos so much. If you like words as much as I do, check them out!
What words float your boat? Do you have favorites, or some you’d like to ignore? Or could you just not care less? Either way, let me know in the comments. I’d love to hear your fave words! And sign up below to get my emails and occasional freebies. I promise to use the right words in them!