I pronounced hyperbole as it is spelled "hyper bowl" for decades and nobody corrected me! It wasn't until I finally saw someone say it in a TV show that I realized the error of my ways. Now I stumble over the word every time I try to say it because I have decades of habit to overcome. Sometimes when I think I might need to say it, I start mouthing it ahead of time so that I get it right on the first try. There are at least a dozen other words like this for me, and I'm sure dozens more that I'm not even aware of.
Edit: for those of you who have never heard it pronounced, hyperbole is pronounced "high-per-buh-lee".
44I'm almost 50 and recently learned I've been pronouncing two words wrong.
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"Template" as 'tem' + 'plate' (like a dish) instead of 'tem' + 'plet' (like 'let')
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"Opacity" saying the middle 'a' like 'hay' instead of like 'math'.
That one I was SURE I was right when my wife told me, so I asked my Google home mini: "Hey Google, how do you pronounce the word 'opacity'?" (Pronouncing it my way), and to prove that Google has a mean sense of humor, (and I swear this is true) responded with "Guacamole". My wife has not let me live that down.
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I am so with you. I'm not a native speaker. I learned most of my English from reading books - thousands of books, actually. So written English is absolutely no problem.
My pronounciation sucks, and my listening comprehension is horrible, on the other hand.
14You can tell someone grew up a rube because they say things like "You can tell someone grew up reading"
10I feel personally attacked.
7I think this is more attributed to how the people around you spoke rather than strictly reading.
My college roommate and I both grew up reading. My family also read books and one parent was college educated. Her family only read the local paper (6th grade reading level). She was the only reader in her family.
So we both grew up reading, but I could pronounce words she couldn't simply because the people around me also knew and used them.
6It genuinely is hard to master more obscure English pronunciation because so much of it is made up of loan words from very different languages, but this will help as a general principle to follow.
6One of my buddies is in his fifties. He's been an avid reader his entire life. He pronounces "chasm" with the ch of "chicken" no matter how much we correct him. I've known him long enough for that word to actually have shown up in conversation a not-insignificant number of times.
5Had to hear Triumvirate before I said it out lound...but honestly it has never come up in casual conversation, so go figure.
4Reading comments here: TIL
4Instance of this I remember, was genre. I had seen the word, knew what it meant, 0 clue how to say it. At work one day in my teen days and someone asks "What kind of genres do you like" (in context, we were talking about video games). I clearly had a confused look on my face and the guy that asked me that switched to insulting me for not knowing a word. It took me maybe 30 seconds to figure out the word he said and the word I knew were the same thing, but apparently that was "too long".
3I call it being bookish, pronounced "bawkish"
3Now pronounce “Nukular.”
2I said Hermione "hermy-own" in my head until I watched the movies.
1Permanently Deleted
1Funny...I didn't read much when I was growing up because the schools I went to made me hate reading.
I spent most of my waking hours watching stuff on the various discovery networks during a time where they showed actual educational material.
The vocabulary I show here in text is only a small portion of the words I know
1Hey. That is not a nice thing to say.
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