Book Worm Embarrassments

By Clare Langley-Hawthorne

My children constantly ask me to tell them stories of embarrassing things I did as a child (I'm hoping because they want to feel better about their own mistakes rather than because they just want to laugh at me...) and one of the things I had to fess up to the other day was the number of words I mispronounced or misunderstood, simply because I had only ever read them and never heard them spoken. 

Take detritus, for example, for years I said this incorrectly as 'derritus' (don't ask me why) until I realized my mistake (and in my head this word still sounds wrong). And then there's 'victuals' - another word I had only ever read rather than heard - so when someone finally said the word to me I had no idea what they were talking about. Sadly, there is quite a list of words that I continue to stumble over  because they are imprinted in my brain as the way I read them internally when I first encountered them as a child. It's amazing how hard it is to undo that kind of conditioning. 

I confess there were also few words that I misconstrued as a child and had no idea of their true meaning until I became an adult. One of these is avuncular - as a child I didn't encounter the word much but I always assumed it meant someone mean or evil! Clearly, I had no idea how wrong I was...

In some ways this is a peril we all face when reading, as we pronounce words in our head we've never actually heard spoken. The pitfalls with foreign words, place names and regionalisms are ever present (and I still haven't quite mastered how to pronounce 'quinoa' or 'acai' yet) - though I think that some ebooks now embed pronunciation guides for the gormless like myself...so there's some hope!

Have you ever mispronounced or misunderstood a word that you had only ever read and not heard spoken? How did you overcome the embarrassment? And in the meantime let's revel in words like segue, quay, sudoku and epitome, safe in the knowledge that all of us at one time or another will make a 'fox paz' (faux pas) or two:)