Things you were shockingly old when you learned

I thought that "window sash" meant the drapes. Because a sash is a long piece of cloth, right?

Whatever it is, it's always seemed like a painful thing for the narrator of A Visit from St. Nicholas to vomit out.

Handkerchief is a kerchief for the hand. I guess I didn't know the word kerchief til I was shockingly old and so then took even longer to reevaluate handkerchief.

An errant sash also caused the circumcision of Tristram Shandy.

Dusty Springfield was 5ft 3 always pictured her taller but she was shorter than Warren Mitchell.

that that one bee gee's name is pronounced 'morris'

!!

but some people call him Maurice

Do Americans pronounce it "mo-reese dancing"?

No, we rhyme Morris with Boris. Maurice rhymes with more fleece.

https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Frobertwimer.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2016%2F06%2FLakinis-Juice-Live.jpg&f=1&nofb=1

MORE FLEECE!
Such a dirty haaaabit

and we're back to the juice

We're back at my theory that US pronunciation often shows a notable French influence.

right, but the causality is backwards. Britishes have a long and well-established tradition of anglicizing loanwords. RuhNAYSance. Don JOOan.

USians tend to pronounce French loanwords more like they sounded in French. We're not consistent in that (cf. lawnJOOray) but it is comparatively our habit.

British English has an insular tendency, driven by geography, economics, and (of course) longstanding tribal/national antipathy to the French.

You may remember there was a war a while ago

I quite like UK English in general and it sounds more Frenchified to my ears than NA English in some ways (queue, courgette, aubergine, autumn, post, telly, etc.), but 'garadge' drives me up the wall.

You mean GA-ridge? Not everyone says it that way. I think there’s probably two other UK pronunciations: ga-RARGE (which sounds comically posh) and GA-rarge, which is what I say most of the time I think.

I (a Canuck) pronounce it the Nestea80 and islandgirl way:

https://forvo.com/word/garage/#en

Garage d'or
How many puns in that?

I used to work on reception in a recording studio, and there was a session once with a fairly well-known US actor doing vocals on a dance track. He could NOT pronounce the line about "garage DJs" - every time it came out as ga-rarge. I think they had to rewrite the lyrics in the end.

Yeah, I’m an English accent that sounds stupidly posh, hence the lolz here:

What Matt Hancock thinks he hears Skepta play ... pic.twitter.com/3u6Y85CxHH

— Katie🤍 (@Katiejsmithx) December 22, 2020

in an

'GA-ridge' sounds like mangled French, which is harder to pull off when it's one of your main languages. Conversely, when I'm in France, I can't, for the life of me, pronounce 'tupperware' the French way except with a scathing smirk on my face. See also: 'speeder man' (spider man) and 'ee clood' (iCloud).

This is all highly irrational and unfair, of course. Prescriptivism can go fuck itself.

Eheh, some of us even pronounce it "speedairrr man" !

lol, that is indeed a more accurate approximation.

Confession: I have a Dutch friend who pronounces WiFi as VeeFee and it makes me so happy. Like, I sometimes try to get her to say it just because it's so fun to hear

We probably should be saying it "Why-fih" now that i think about it

Oh no, you've just opened up a whole new 'gif pronunciation' can of worms.

Technically, the French pronunciation (wee-fee) is half correct and hence on par with the English one.

My ears over-accomodate my Australian wife. She was recently asking me to buy a product, and I was all, "DORN? DARN? DORN?"

And she finally sighed and said, "Like the time of day when the sun rises!" DAWN. Which she had been saying correctly, but I'm so used to her rhotic accent, I just assumed...

Like the time she said she liked going into pawn stores and browsing around, and I was all O Really, eh? Heh Heh, and she was all What is wrong with you.

I've been known to pronounce it 'whiffy' on occasion but then I've also been known to be a total dumbass.

xpost

I had never heard "Last Christmas" before, erm, last Christmas. When it was new I was following The Minutemen and The Meat Puppets, and Wham! was really not in my orbit at all. I also amazingly never encountered in in a supermarket or elsewhere in the years since, so Taylor Swift's 13 year old cover version was my first exposure to what is now apparently an overplayed holiday classic.

Gertrude Jekyll pronounced it Jee-kill, I think. I had a conversation this summer with my neighbour about his wonderful Gertude Jekylls and we settled on Jee-kills.

I think UK English is becoming more frenchified. You don't hear people talking about Nessles chocolate much these days, and I think "Marsails" for Marseille has disappeared. We'll be saying Paree by 2050.

Pronouncing Racing Club - two English words - as Rrrra-seeeeeeeeng Cloob has been popular in the football/rugby world for a while

'Rrrraaaa! Sing! Club!' is a solid war cry.

Also pronouncing Milan (also an English word) as Mee-lahn when it comes to the football club but not the city.

Pay-Ess-Zhay for PSG (Paris St-Germain) is pretty common.

you should hear how they pronounce it in Milan, TN

That's what the tourist board there has been telling me but I'm not biting

They do that in New Orleans too.

There's also all of the Lima's in the US, Peru's as well. Hearing some cornpone person say "Yeah, I had to drive through Lye-Mah to get to the Cracker Barrel" makes me want to punch things, tbh.

The problem with VeeFee, as far as I'm concerned, is that it reminds me too much "fifi," as in "fifi pillow" or "fifi bag."

Fergie sang backup vocals on Martika's "Toy Soldiers"

Zappa is Italian for 'hoe'.

Superman dat Zappa

Some Like It Hot was on earlier.

... wrong thread but I'll just leave that there.

Can't Make a Zappa a Housewife

Spider know I got Zappas, M.O.P. know I got Zappas
Mobb Deep know I got Zappas, Eminem know I got Zappas
Dr. Dre know I got Zappas, Lord knows, I got Zappas

Pimps up, Zappas down