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Comment by ewzimm | Hacker News Reader

I did the same thing when I was younger. There's still some of it left over, but the embarrassment of being a teenager definitely normalized it. I learned to read when I was pretty young, before I was exposed to a lot of words in speech. I also watched a lot of TV, and people spoke with different accents. Since there wasn't any authoritative way to say things, I preferred to say them how they looked on paper.

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I was in college before I learned how hyperbole is supposed to be pronounced. I'd never actually heard a person say that (it's a little beyond typical small-town Maine vocabulary), so I worked for years under the assumption that it was hyper-bowl, rather than hi-per-boll-ee. I knew hyper, and I knew what the bole of a tree was...

My version of the same was the word "rendezvous" which appears in many detective stories for kids (eg Hardy Boys) but doesnt often come up in daily conversation. So, in my head (to this day), it is still pronounced as it is written...

I found out how to pronounce sal volatile just the other day, perhaps thirty years after first reading it (crops up quite a lot in Victorian novels). Fortunately, I never once had occasion to say it out loud in the intervening time.

I remember pondering the hyper-bowl. Not insurmountable though, unlike "colonel", which I suspect a certain primate[1] would still refuse to comply with long after completing the works of Shakespeare. I also refuse, either imposing the image of a penguin or cob of corn upon the head of anyone titled thus.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem

This is commonly known as a 'calliope', pronounced kal'ee-oap

My family of heavy readers enjoys finding them, and the memories of arguing with teachers about the 'proper' pronunciations.

And sometimes realizing that teachers had their own regional pronunciations they wanted to impose (days of the week as Sundee Mondee...)

It also took me until college to learn to pronounce the e.

So you went to kah lej ee?

Don't get me started on homogenous!

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