{"id":527,"date":"2006-08-03T11:02:57","date_gmt":"2006-08-03T16:02:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=527"},"modified":"2007-05-24T13:47:21","modified_gmt":"2007-05-24T18:47:21","slug":"verbally-illiterate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=527","title":{"rendered":"Verbally Illiterate"},"content":{"rendered":"

I read far more than I converse, and so I may see a word in print years before I hear it spoken. More to the point: I may end up saying<\/em> it before I hear it pronounced correctly. This means if my first guess at the proper pronunciation is wrong I will read it many, many times and that improper pronunciation will be deeply ingrained before I realize my error. The risk here is that if I drop my incorrect usage into conversation I risk making a fool of myself.<\/p>\n

This happens alarmingly often.<\/p>\n

I saw the word “meme” years ago and have typed it and read it many times since then, always pronouncing it “mem” in my head. Yesterday I saw a Wiki on memes and found out it’s pronounced “meem”. Now I wonder: How many times did I use this word incorrectly in conversation and the other person was too polite to let me know I’m an idiot?<\/p>\n

I spent most of the early 90’s thinking “cache” was pronounced “catch”. As in, “This system has 8kb of catch memory, that’s huge!” If I had guessed that I was saying it wrong, my next guess would have been “cashay”, to rhyme with “sashay”. Saying “cash” was not obvious to me at all. <\/p>\n

Same goes for “Chasam”. I once earned a bit of riddicule when someone caught me pronouncing it the way it looks, instead of saying “kasam”.<\/p>\n

Some people don’t have this problem, and I don’t know how they avoid it. Are they better at intuiting words? Do they run to the dictionary every tme they see a new word?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I read far more than I converse, and so I may see a word in print years before I hear it spoken. More to the point: I may end up saying it before I hear it pronounced correctly. This means if my first guess at the proper pronunciation is wrong I will read it many, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-527","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/527","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=527"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/527\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=527"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=527"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=527"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}