Things you were shockingly old when you learned

Mine was "hyperbole". Was well into my thirties when I finally realized the spoken and written words were one and the same

I thought it was a single syllable for a while but that just sounds like it should go with the word Heil dunnit. As commonly said by stereotypical National Socialists

I was 30 before I realized why I got eyebrow raises when I said "banal"

xps Oh yeah, "hyperbole" is another one it took me a long time to figure out.

Lol and that's how i heard "banal" in my mind before ever actually hearing it said.

He pronounced the word 'banal'
While I pronounced it 'banal'
I said it rhymes not with 'canal'
But properly with 'anal'

(from some old New York Magazine competition 30 or more years ago)

yeah had the exact same with "segue" too

segue heil

For some reason it was a word often used by radio one djs in the 80s so I was shockingly young when I learned.

the correct pronunciation annoys me because seeeeg sounds like a smooth transition whereas segway trips itself up in the middle of the word.

TIL Godspeed You! Black Emperor took their name from a Japanese biker documentary.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_Speed_You!_Black_Emperor

And it's playing on catodetv.com right now.

the correct pronunciation annoys me because seeeeg sounds like a smooth transition whereas segway trips itself up in the middle of the word.

basic humour alert (i like it)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJ69ny57pR0

for a while i thought "segway" was just a comedy way of "seeg" and i would always laugh when i heard people say it

I mispronounce words like this all the time; my reading vocabulary is way ahead of my speaking. The funniest instance was in middle school when I excitedly told my friends about this thing I read about when three people have sex together called a menaj a tree-o.

the OG:

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. [...]

Ah, but double the psalm number to 46 in the King James Bible, and things get intriguing. Why multiply by two? Well, there are two references here:

– The 46th word from the start (disregarding the parenthesised opening dedication) is "shake".
– The 46th word from the end (disregarding the standard formula "Selah") is "spear".

Clearly, Shakespeare was a 23er and translated this one for old Jim.

segue came into ordinary english from music jargon: it may look kinda french but like a lot of musical instructions it's italian, hence the pronunciation

in music it means "follow on without pause or break" (which i guess DJs picked up from band-leaders, who knows) (it's not like they're fluently dropping furioso ma non troppo hither and thither, but it is a good term for good pauseless DJing so there you go)

Instructions for DJs at my college radio station, circa 1989, spelled it "segueway," in a doomed attempt to have it both ways.

in my brain that's how it was spelled, instinctively

do any latin based words ending in "gue" share that pronuanciation? Cannot think of any

brb checking my catalogway of words now

Merengue, the dance (not meringue, the food)

lol @ Hunt3r

AHH YES! xp

https://www.thefreedictionary.com/words-that-end-in-gue

233 words, but only true heads will know how many are derived from latin

Portsea Island is the third most populous island in the "British Isles" after Great Britain and Ireland.

... population 207,100 (I didn't even know it existed!)

Try Guys

xp I mean it's most of Portsmouth, and it's only an island on a technicality.

Still a good pub quiz question.

https://www.ezglot.com/words-ending-with.php?w=gue&l=ita&l2=&length=&submit=Search

Looking at the least-populated islands in the British Isles, some very odd ones

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lundy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calf_of_Man
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%B9m
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foulness_Island

The most-populated ones are kinda odd too.

Calf of Man's lighthouses built by Robert Stevenson, grandfather of Robert Louis Stevenson

lundy island was just all over the lore of the puffin club

(i guess bcz lundi means puffin in norse, something i only just learned)

https://www.barterbooks.co.uk/catalog/images/books/ppt201.jpg

I just learned this week that puffins visit the Farallon Islands right outside San Francisco Bay

I had no idea they ventured this far south

Lundy = knights templar, puffins, "self-proclaimed king Martin Harman", pirates & wreckers, gets a shout-out in the shipping forecast, quite a Big Deal for a barely-populated island.

HEY

You are talking about my kindred

We can dig it.

what a 'try guy' is

I'm hoping to never learn

I vaguely knew that Alsatians were a dog breed but I guess I'd never been curious enough to discover that they're just German shepherds utilizing an alias.

of Glen Ballard's involvement in Thriller and Bad, and writing credit on "Man in the Mirror"

After detour through the Glen Ballard Wikipedia links, I learned that Ringo is putting out a record every year of late.

Wow, wonder who is buying them apart from Rob Sheffield?

Calling the breed Alsatian or German Shepard is just another point of contention in the ages old border dispute between France and Germany over the Alsace region.

Disputed Terri(tory)ers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolley_Kibber
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colley_Cibber

https://fullhouse.fandom.com/wiki/Kimmy_Gibbler