Q: How many art directors does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Does it have to be a light bulb?

Q: How many copyeditors does it take to change a light bulb?
A: The last time this question was asked it involved art directors. Is the difference intentional? Should one or the other instance be changed? It seems inconsistent.

You're right. A stronger prescription would be a good idea.

(It might also be a legal but uncommon variant spelling of dyslexic, I suppose.)

I did not know that that word was spelled that way.

that & my visual memory make me a pretty good speller. my knowledge of how a word is spelled affects my pronunciation ever so slightly, because i often see the word when i say it, like people were saying about "grey/gray". i don't misspell millenium as millinium, cause i can hear the difference between e & i when i say it.

the everyday word that gives me the most problems is separate. i think of lepers to remember it, but then i forget whether it is like leper, or not like leper.

When I was in first grade I had a spelling test where one of the words was "emperor." I spelled it "emperer," and my doddering old bat of a teacher marked it right by accident. The mistake was corrected soon enough, but apparently the damage was done, because when I was in fourth grade I made it to the citywide spelling bee--and got out on the word emperor. Guess how I spelled it?

And goddammit, I knew every single word after that.

I love the spelling reference very much, but one thing confuses me: I honestly can't imagine how anyone misspells Asimov. Can anyone enlighten me with a plausible wrong spelling of that name? To my eye, it's written exactly as it sounds.

I'm generally good at spelling (which claim probably guarantees there's a typo in this comment!) The types of spelling challenges exemplified by the bad OED list I always do well on. I have a decent vocabulary, and enough Latin and Greek and general sense of etymology to guess most deliberately obscure words. There are a few relatively common words that always trip me up though: fulfil (in its various parts) and focused I think are the worst.

Many of the words on your list is on my "always look it up on dictionary.com" list.

Isn't it somewhat of a rule, that, in natural languages, the most commonly used words are the exceptions to the most rules of that language?

So, for example, to be and to have are irregular verbs in French and English.

There's just one more I'd add to the list -- "cemetery." Everyone wants to put in an "a."

If there is one word I consistently kill, it's silhouette.

As for English stealing its vocabulary like a big stealing thief person, I was surprised to find out that the word shark does not have old-world linguistic origins. OED says it's first usage was on some sort of shipping expedition in 1550. The book I'm reading on Maya says the word comes from the Mayan word xook (pronounced shok) which means 'a shark'. I'm guessing it's ultimately onomatopoetic. It's easy to imagine frantically screaming the word while being eaten by one.

"Azimov" is reportedly common (by some accounts, that's how Asimov came to write his classic story "Spell My Name With An 'S'").

Also, famously, the magazine Planet Stories once published correspondence from a certain "Isaac Asenion". (Hint: cursive handwriting.) That one made it into his fiction, too: in one of his robot stories, "Asenion" is the name of the guy credited with developing the Three Laws.

(There's also a story, set far in the future, in which one of the characters reiterates a vaguely-recalled factoid about a twentieth-century chemist named Azimuth; but I think he just made that one up.)

Excellent list.

I have to admit I've got the copyeditor's eye. Worst case is when I'm running a roleplaying game and people hand me character sheets which I hand back copyedited. Accounting errors don't bother me half so much as misspelled words.

I have no doubt whatsoever that this will get me into trouble.

Both the spellchecker and the indefinite definitely.

On the GOVDOC-L mailing list, for librarians that deal with government documents, we've had long discussions of "supercede" vs. "supersede." The Federal Depository Library Program prefers the latter, of course, and their Superseded List is what we who are in charge of FDLP collections at our libraries are required to go by when weeding our collections, because the collections are, legally (U.S. Code Title 44), government property and therefore there are regulations to be followed.

(And sure enough, I had "regulatiosn" there, but caught it just in time.)

"weird" is weird in that it violates "i before e except after c", anyway.

two that it took me a long time to not be confused about:

satellite
dilettante*

*The Dilettante makes excellent chocolate delights here in Seattle, and that's where I finally got "one l, two t's" into my head

Course not.

Anecdote warning: I used to edit an online magazine years ago, and the owner was setting up a calendar page for the staff regarding due dates and the like. It began as the "Calandar" page, and after I corrected him, he changed it to the "Calander" page. I decided that it wasn't going to work, so as a joke I sent him another memo reminding him that it was spelled "Colander," which he promptly got right, as it were. To my knowledge, the staff at that magazine continued to sift through their assignments to the day it closed.

Like Miriam, I tend to pronounce words in my head with appropriate vowel values (no matter what comes out of my mouth), so I'm unlikely to be tripped up by pin/pen sort of issues. (And yes, I do pronounce those two words differently.)

Of your list, the ones that would be likely to catch me are:
supersede (although that one is now on my mental Oh-oh! list)
sorcerer (because there are a number of fantasy books in which it is consistently spelled "sorceror") *
restaurateur (yes, I'd add the n)
prophesy wouldn't be a problem if it was pronounced correctly ("prophecy" ends with a long-e sound)
pharaoh would be a problem orally, but not written
fuchsia (your hints have been noted)
jodhpurs (y'know, I probably mispronounce this too)
frieze should also prompt a call for definition, as it's homophonous with "freeze"
sacrilegious (one wants to put "religious" into it)

I used to have problems with putting an extra o in the middle of "pronunciation", but have since broken myself of that.

* It occurs to me that if one has sufficient French to think of Dukas' piece by its French title of L'apprenti Sorcier, that could be a useful mnemonic.

Then again, I am not a native speaker, so I do not count. I still cannot differentiate between 'license' and 'licence' and other pairs of that type, and the English way of double consonants confused my Russian spelling a bit (after writing 'corridor' too often in English it's hard to remember there are no double r's in the Russian version).

That's a humbling list, that. Meh to accommodation, meh, I say!

You know, I was tempted to gloat a little, thinking that, as a German, I have it a little easier with spelling because we mostly (with exceptions) "pronounce what's there" (there is no GHOTI in German)... and then I got to fuchsia. Proud users of our velar fricative - is it transcribed as [x]? - we go ahead and ignore it. I hadn't noticed before! We say "fook-see-eh" (Fuchsie). I wonder why...

*re-lurks*

This separation does seem to make some sense to me; in high school I always gave the teachers the impression of good spelling skills, but this was more due to my ability to tell if words were correctly spelled or not. However, sometimes I would look at a word I knew I had spelled wrong, and had no clue how to spell it; I would then usually find some other way of writing what I meant - and thus my teachers would rarely see misspelled words in my work.

I have to admit I've got the copyeditor's eye. Worst case is when I'm running a roleplaying game and people hand me character sheets which I hand back copyedited. Accounting errors don't bother me half so much as misspelled words.

As an engineer I've had to write and review more technical documents than I like to think about. Because technical writing is very much about the details, reviewing and copyediting can sometimes become inextricably intertwined. So when my wife first started writing, and asked to help out by reviewing early drafts, I'm ashamed to say it took me quite a few go-rounds before I'd broken myself of correcting the spelling and the grammer before I commented on the character development or the plot.

Most of the rest of the words on your list wouldn't give me a problem, but I see a few:

frieze: Unless you pronounce it some way I'm not used to, I'd assume you said 'freeze' (but if you defined it I could spell it)
sorcerer: I would probably spell this with the (incorrect) -or because, darn it, so many roleplaying games do
harass: I often put in an extra r, alas
prophesy: I spell this with a -cy and was under the impression that was correct -- what am I missing with that one? Verb vs noun form?

(Darn it, why do I keep doing this thing where I think I've typed everything I want and then remember something else afterwards? Is it the sleep dep? I blame the sleep dep.)

I argued that I had spelled what I heard. She argued that we had had a list to memorise, that "futile" was on it, and that "feudal" was not.

Then I think she heard herself trying to take points off of me for going beyond the assigned coursework and thought better of it. I got the mark back.

Re: Prophesy, you're absolutely right, verb vs. noun. When you tell a prophecy, you prophesy. Not elegant, but there you go.

icthyological is difficult because the h in fourth position makes you want to put in an h following the initial ic.

I realise how foolhardy this is, but I think this is wrong; there should be an h after the initial c.
Three reasons;
First, it's pronounced "ich-thee-o-lo-ji-kal", not "ik-thee..." with the voiced ch as in loch, Bruichladdich, Mach, Rachmaninov, Nagorno-Karabakh, etc.
Second, it would make sense given the root in Greek, which starts iota-chi-theta, not iota-kappa-theta.
Third, that's how the dictionary spells it.

Asimov might be misspelled either:

(1) Asimoff or

(2) Assimov/ff or

(3) Asimow.

But if you want some more ideas, I'm reminded of this horrible poem, the first verse of which I've copied below for a sample.

Dearest creature in creation,
Studying English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
It will keep you, Susy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.
Pray console your loving poet,
Make my coat look new, dear, sew it.

Same with license/licence, at least in the UK: when you license someone or something, you issue a licence. My mnemonic involves advise/advice.

And as a classicist, I'm with ajay on "ichthyologist". The Greek word has a chi, which should be transliterated with a "ch". Remember that the fish is the Christian sign because the second letter in ichthus was taken to stand for Christ.

Iesus
Christos
Theou
uios
soter

Some words are only hard because their pronunciations screw up our ability to remember how to spell them; thus: calander, strategem, sorceror, restauranteur, pharoh, fuschia, sacreligious.

- they are all (deliberately) misspelt, as examples of how pronunciations can be misleading.

SIR VIVIAN FUCHS OFF TO ANTARCTICA.

Supposedly genuine: and he did call his book "Of Ice and Men".

Me, I've never been north of Schenectady. Although I did just have to check if there was a second 'h'.

When I was a kid my journalist grandma taught me this helpful version of "I before E:"

"I before E, except after C, and when sounding like A as in 'neighbor' and 'weigh.'"

"Ichthyological" is the more common spelling (e.g., 186,000 Google hits vs 16,300 for "icthyological"), and the only one in the couple of dictionaries I have on hand (including the American Heritage Dictionary, which is one of the better ones). And, as ajay and candle pointed out, it's more faithful to the standard transliteration of ancient Greek.

A little further poking around suggests that many of the Google hits for "icthyo-" really are misspellings of "ichthyo-". E.g., this page for the Ichthyological Society of Japan uses "ichthyological" all over the page, except once where they refer to their journal, "Icthyological Research". But then if you follow the link to the publisher's page, it's clear the journal really is Ichthyological Research.

Yes.

//shudder

(I too have the proofreader's eye. Working in a copy shop, I find this to be occasionally good, occasionally just annoying.)

I once psychically divined the spelling of a word. I was playing in a Quiz Bowl practice round, and a tossup question involved the deciding word in one year's national spelling bee, "kaolinic". Naturally, for ten points you had to spell "kaolinic". I'd never seen or heard the word before, but somehow as soon as the question was finished the spelling popped into my head and I knew it was right. (It was, too.)

It hadn't occurred to me that the original story wouldn't have spellchecked its own wordlist backward, forward, and sideways, so I decided the word must be on the list because one so naturally wants to spell it ichthyological. Ten out of ten for spelling; naught out of ten for execution.

I'd also suggest that in a couple of cases, we can be misled by the fact that closely related (and more common) words are spelled differently than the words in the list: i.e., strategy vs stratagem, restaurant vs restaurateur.

(I now have to confess that while I have little or no trouble with most of the words on Teresa's list, I had absolutely no idea that "fuchsia" and "restaurateur" were spelled the way they are...)

"...I myself was such a bed spiller once upon a term
that my English teacher in my sophomoric year,
Mrs. Myth, said I would never get into a good colleague.
And that's all I wanted, just to get into a good colleague.
Not just anal community colleague..."

My husband and son Adam can spell. Son Jason can sort of spell. Daughter Heidi and I are hopeless, though she is much worse than I am. Yet the writers in the family are Heidi, Adam, and me.

However, once we bought a house in Scotland and began living there half the year, no one in the family could spell. Has to do with all those s/z combinations. When to put in the ou and when not. And even some actual words or combinations that are Brit-o-centric or wholly American.

So, as I used to tell kids, good write no spell--that's me. (I know lots of terrific copyeditors, though, who need to keep their hands off my prose.)

Jane

As a fan historic note, the company we used to make the buttons, Hodges Badge and Button, has become the major supplier for decorative ribbons for science fiction conventions. We used them for the early Boskones and the news spread. Currently located in Rhode Island, at that time they were near Fresh Pond in Cambridge.

Re bureaucracy: I use the piece of furniture and think bureau-cracy.

And I just noticed your very neat "spelling reference" aid for commenters. I don't think I've seen that elsewhere.

Cairsten (3), supersede is super + sedere, which I always remember as "to squash something by sitting on top of it." It's the only -sede ending in English. So many people substitute the commoner -cede ending that dictionaries have taken to listing that spelling.

Rymenhild (6), I've never spelled the word dislexic in all my life. I'll blame that one on Titivillus, who in modern times has left the scriptorium, and instead works to insert nonsensical typos into posts and comments about spelling. Who among us hasn't had that happen?

Miriam (8), some people (like Mary Frances) remember separate via "there's a rat in separate"; but IMO, the logical mnemonic is that it shares a root with parity.

Zak (16), it's not your fault; spelling's part of the hardwiring. Some people spell easily and automatically. Some can't spell to save their lives. And in the midrange, there are people who have greater and lesser difficulty remembering spellings.

Bruce Cohen (17): There are indeed a bunch of different skills involved in spelling. That's one of the reasons I always asked wanna-be proofreaders for accommodate: their reaction to it would tell me a lot about what kind of spellers they were.

I was irked by that story and spelling list because it was full of assumptions about the way spelling ought to work, and wrong about the way it does work.

Note to self: minuscule, liaison, camouflage, cemetery, silhouette.

I have a theory that this word only exists as word that gets talked about as an awkward word (although I way have stolen that theory from someone else). The obvious way to misspell it is to think it's french and try and make it "jejeune". Where this misspelling mostly occurs is in instructions not to spell "jejune" that way.

That said, I just googled "jejeune" and it seems the Internet has got a lot more pretentious/stupid since I last tried to claim this.

It still seems to be a word that's more talked about than used, though, and there should be a word for that.

I'm a decent but far from perfect speller. What improvement I've managed in my adult life has largely come from this kind of linguistic approach--getting to know the history of particular words. For better or worse, this kind of historical approach sticks with me better than arbitrary rules like "there's a rat in separate." Most "rules" for English spelling seem to come down to variations on "I before E except when it's not."

Spelling and writing are unrelated skills.

Thank you! That's something I've needed to hear for a long time. I live in mortal terror of spelling, especially aloud; it ranks with zombies and dentistry.

Or perhaps zombie dentists asking me to spell 'anonymous' out loud.

...I'm gonna be up all night with a baseball bat, now.

A couple of weeks ago, I noticed that I used the word "issue" rather than "tissue" in a sentence. This, of course, makes complete nonsense of the sentence. That sentence has been in the story I was writing since, oh, November. *facepalm*

We see ourselves in separate small spaces,
others see the outline, the plain silhouette,
the liaison between hope and regret
which we have found in the most vacant spaces.
So here we are, the mule's kicked over traces
and made the cemetery into its oubliette;
we might find reason here just to forget,
but we remain in place till we have faces.
Our memories put things in bold and majuscule,
but that's a falsity, some sort of camouflage,
for what we do not know. But still we've tried
to put our words into small space, in minuscule
letters, in our best hand, yet without persiflage;
we told ourselves we'd know when others lied.

I think I am growing up now. I don't get as angry about 'triskaidekaphobia' as I used to. I've seen it spelled at least three different ways. It might be normal for words made up of pieces rather than wholes, though.

We all know that "millennium" comes from the Latin words "mille" and "annus" and means a thousand years. The word "millenium" comes from the Latin words "mille" and "anus" and means something else. This web site is devoted to the millenium of sites which don't deserve a place on the Web. We are not putting them on a pedestal - we are offering them a stool.

Am I wrong? Does one indeed "riffle" through one's victim's pocketses? Have I been doing it wrong all along?

desiccate, ecstasy, address, irresistible, occurrence, embarrass, pronunciation, independent, questionnaire, broccoli, referring, recommend.

The OED clearly has no clue what words people even bother to try to spell when actually, y'know, using the language. :)

I don't think I'd mess up the spelling of "harass", but damn it, I always mess up the pronunciation! ("Har-rass" instead of "Harris").

And my "separate" mnemonic, given to me by my 5th grade English teacher, Mrs. Fabricant, was "you separate a rat from the pack".

Ooh, and Teresa, thanks for the "supersede" mnemonic.

Sorry, I couldn't resist. Admittedly, I didn't try very hard.

Sovereignty
Bureaucracy

However, some depend on one's occupation. Being a corporate writer for many years, I never have a problem with.

Necessary
Accommodate
Miscellaneous
Commitment
Committed
Committee (duh!)
Calendar
Stratagem
Receive

Some others just come naturally to me. I can't explain, but often words just "don't look right" to me.

Are we supposed to kill the people who misspell it "sibboleth"?

Also, if you want to see how un-noteworthy foreign words in English are, read some passage in which they are deliberately not used. Uncleftish Beholding is the best example I know of, but there are probably others.

When I was in college, however, I once roomed with a world-class speller, the sort of surpremely gifted speller who can hear a word, get a definition, and spell it correctly without ever having encountered it before. She claimed that spelling made sense -- English spelling! -- because once you figured out the etymology of the word and where it came from, the rules of spelling that applied to it were obvious. This is not the sort of thing I could ever learn by rote; it's the sort of thing you're born with, as she was.

"Silhouette" drives me insane though -- I have to look it up every time. Worse, I can't spell it close enough to get the spell checker to spot it.

I end up having to search on "on the shade, what a lovely couple they made" to find out how it's spelt. :/

Quite right - it would mean "a thousand old women". Or possibly what they are getting at is "a thousand rings".

Note the spelling of "millenarian", though.

Really, who came up with that one?

I just applied for a job to write for PBS. On my resume, I misspelled "English." I actually said my major was "Enlgish."

Of all the words to get wrong! I almost didn't get the job, but I did and now I have a freelance gig which I enjoy, but it was the best stupid mistake I've ever made.

My personal bugaboo is 'sargeant.' No, wait: 'sergeant.' Um... trying not to look it up... um... failing... OK, it's the second one. But I have to look it up every time. It bothers me both ways.

Who came up with that one?

The Romans, damn them.

Add it to the aqueduct...sanitation...roads...medicine... education...health....

Spelling also morphs over time, along with word usage -- Chaucer to Shakespeare to Hemingway is a long, twisty "evolutionary" path! And one sector's dialect or one era's slang may be another's perfectly acceptable language. (I was taught that using "stuff" as anything other than a verb was totally incorrect, but it seems to be making its way into respectability now, even if it hasn't quite arrived.)

To add to the "these are my personal problem words" lists, the ones I always have to stop and think about are the "ent/ant" ones--independent, dependent/dependant, and so on. Maybe some British influence there--I also have trouble with the doubled consonants for participles, like traveling/travelling. Finally, I have never been able to spell "occurred" or "occurring" without a dictionary. I've no idea where that one came from.

Apropos of not much, a friend of mine just reminded me that there are (she remembers reading somewhere), 13 different ways to pronounce the "ough" spelling in English. Not counting "ghoti." We tried, but we couldn't come up with more than five or six offhand.

Oh, and I also throw in a vote for liaison as difficult. That's another word I often see spelled incorrectly.

Yes.

"Bureaucracy," though, throws me every time, because French is most definitely not one of my languages. It's something about all those words with bunches of consecutive vowels most of which are silent and the one that's left doesn't sound like you'd think it should. It's almost as counter-intuitive as Gaelic.

All in all, though, I'm a fairly decent speller. I make up for it by being a poor proofreader and a lousy typist.

"Running the gantlet" vs. "Running the gauntlet"

The former seems to have been created out of whole cloth several years ago when it was used in relation to some sexual harassment at a military academy. This in spite of the fact that the latter spelling has been a preferred "team building" exercise in the [British] military since at least the 17th century.

"First world, Second world, Third world" vs.
"Old world, New world, Third world"

I'm not sure when the former became the preferred formulation, but it isn't historically accurate. Neither form is particularly welcome in the Third World (since they both recall the earlier colonial times).

And don't get me started on what is the first year of the Millennium...

John

I _live_ next to Schenectady and I still have trouble spelling it--though my error is different, I always want to leave out the first "e."

However, living in Rensselaer was a lot worse.

On the general topic, I can usually just write and the correct words will come out of my fingers if I don't think about it. (Disparate, separate, and supersede are exceptions.) I can't spell out loud, however, if I'm not allowed to write down the word first; so I would flunk TNH's test, no question.

The downside is when my fingers decide to substitute commonly-typed words for similar ones without consulting me. As a lawyer, for instance, I have a hard time writing about representational sculptures without turning my comments into a discussion of laws enacted by a legislative body.

Still, it is all good, clean fun and I stopped having problems with 'millenium' a few years back when it was rediscovered.

One thing, though. Why so down on the Oxford English Dictionary? Don't you have a fount of frustration of your own to pillory? As Spike Jones sang, speak American, boy, American. Leave us English pedants (and God knows, there are enough of us) to mumble into our beards about that particular ivory tower set in its silver sea.

Calander? Even in Scotland, where they occasionally spell it Callender if they live there, it is usually spelled calendar.

I'm not sure when the former became the preferred formulation, but it isn't historically accurate. Neither form is particularly welcome in the Third World (since they both recall the earlier colonial times).--

I thought that "First World" referred to capitalist industrialized countries, "Second World" to communist industrialized countries, and "Third World" to non-industrialized countries.

On-topic: I thought I was a good speller, until I read this post and found out all these words I apparently misspell all the time. Thank Ghod for Firefox! Without it, I'd just embarass--embarrass--well, you know--myself every time I tried to spell those words.
I before e, except after c, and when it says "ay" as in neighbor or weigh--except for in the words science, deity, weird, height, conscience...

I can think of seven ways to pronounce "ough" in the dialect of English I speak: off as in cough, up as in hiccough (granted, I don't see this one as much in newer books), oo as in through, ah as in thought, oh as in dough, ow as in doughty, and uf as in rough.

But proofing a magazine with a lot of Arabic names is its own kind of fun. Is it spelled "hizbullah", "hezbollah", or "hezballah"? How is the Libyan president's name spelled again?

It took us thirteen days by stolen car to get this far. Don't say you're doubtful now!

I didn't know they were yours, although it does not surprise me. I stole them from A Prarie Home Companion. It appears that they do get around . . .

(The OED etymology tells me that I am not so much wrong as many centuries after my time:

[a. OF. superceder, later -seder, ad. L. supersedere (in med.L. often -cedere) )

I got knocked out of the eighth-grade county championship spelling bee on the word "butte." I'd forgotten my state capitals, clearly.

And they robbed me in second grade. I was asked to spell "Earth" and was not allowed to ask them to use it in a sentence, to disambiguate the planet Earth and the earth in which plants grow. I chose the planet and began with "capital E." They booted me. They later apologized, but told me "Well, the other kid already won and we don't want to take that away from him, so you understand, right?"

Not that I am still bitter.

yse-shog, yse-shoggle, yse-shogle

I see where "spelling demonology" came from. Aren't most shoggoths yse-shoggoths?

I can, and so can Sasha. All expatriate Welsh people can, because people are always asking them to.

However, it may be worth noting that when there was a murder there a few years ago, and then another murder in Bangor, newsreaders started speculating about the possibility of a serial killer with notable lack of enthusiasm (and indeed, notable deep breaths before they pronounced it), until they started asking if the "Llanfair PG" killer had struck again. Llanfair PG is what everyone who lives there apparently calls it.

I have the same problem with "barbiturate." Apparently most people pronounce it with no R.

I can spell considerably more words than I can pronounce.

Jo Walton #123: I'd say Llanfair PG too, I've heard it pronounced (by Welshfolk, natch) but I wouldn't attempt it myself.

Embarrass. That is too many Rs. Some words just look wrong when you spell them right-- accommodate is another, but that may be because all the letters are round. I have trouble focusing on it to count.

Caroline at 122, that is a horrible thing to do to a child.

I understand that part of the reason for variance, at least in that particular case, is disagreement over whether one should: a) spell it using the standard transliteration of how his name is spelled in Arabic; or b) spell it as something closer to how it's actually pronounced; Libyan Arabic is evidently not the same thing as classical Arabic.

(How would one spell the English last name "St. John Smith" using a different alphabet, bearing in mind that the first part is pronounced "sinjin"?)

I could cry out of love for this post.

- A Former Spelling Bee Kid, and the person who reads every document that goes out of her company for spelling and grammar.

And Jo (123), you was robbed, but I suppose second grade is about the right time to start learning that life is unfair, and that you can get robbed by stupid people.

Me, I washed out of the (8th grade) bee early because my brane melted in the middle of "definition". The whole class's eyes were upon me, and three more is broke the camel's back.

Q: How many copy editors does it take to screw in a light globe?
A: I think you'll find that in Australian usage we'd say "light bulb", and mostly we still use boyonet fittings, but since this is intended for publication on a US-based Internet site, the US usage should be allowed to stand. On the other hand, diversity of usage on the US sites can function as a reminder of teh trues internationalism of the Internet (etc)

My pet peeve misspelled word on college campuses - roommate.

The only mnemonic I can think of is for weird - we weird. I like it, it's too bad I've never had a problem spelling weird.

Spelling with transliteration is a pain. My languages were Russian and Latin. Latin makes sense, Russian makes sense in Cyrillic.

*one night I had a dream that I was in a spelling bee with the latin names of various animals. I was on stage in front of a microphone, and this disembodied voice would ask me to spell things like clupea pallasi, chionoecetes opilio, oncorhynchus gorbuscha, eumetopias jubatus, and so on. It was strange, but amusing.

While I'm back, I'll note that I was floored by an NPR commentator saying that they intentionally pronounce the month "Feb-u-ary". Harrumph.

I certainly wouldn't pronounce restaurateur with an n unless I forgot how it was spelled. Which I believe is the only reason anyone does.

I had heard that the given name "St. John" was pronounced sinjin, but I never heard it until a radio presentation of Jane Eyre played Sunday night.

Re: Arabic names, and Muammar Gadafy/Gadaffi/Qadafi/Khadafy/ohwhatthehell in particular - to quote the Guardian's style guide:
"Though Arabic has only three vowels - a, i and u - it has several consonants which have no equivalent in the Roman alphabet. For instance, there are two kinds of s, d and t. There are also two kinds of glottal sound. This means there are at least 32 ways of writing the Libyan leader Muammar Gadafy's name in English, and a reasonable argument can be made for adopting almost any of them." Simple enough?

And yes, locals do refer to the place as Llanfair PG, and yes, despite being only technically Welsh I can pronounce the full version (probably not quite as a native, though), and apparently it was originally only called Llanfairpwllgwyngyll until some Victorians got hold of it and decided to make it a tourist attraction by lengthening the name. I won't swear to any of this, though.

Edinburgh, Middlesbrough, Market Harborough...?

And has anyone mentioned inoculate?

Tania @132 -- what a fun job that must have been! As a grad student working with scientists who are non-native speakers of English, I'm often pressed into service as an informal copyeditor. I secretly enjoy it. In my first year, one of our senior grad students drafted me to edit her dissertation manuscript -- such a great feeling when I was able to suggest an organization scheme that eliminated all of the instances where she'd had to repeat information. I have absolutely no formal training or experience, and make absolutely no pretense that I'm anything but a rank amateur -- but your job sounds like so much fun!

My pet peeve misspelled word on college campuses is "prospective," as in "prospective student." I lived in a dorm that made a tradition of hosting prospective students for overnight campus visits. There was a sign-up sheet in the lobby that said "SIGN UP TO HOST A PERSPECTIVE!"

(There's a pun there about liberal-arts education, possibly involving David Horowitz and Michael Bérubé, but I can't put it together right now.)

I attempted to pronounce it, as did a Finnish woman.

'Oh no,' said the Dutch guy cheerfully, 'you would have been shot.'

(If anyone knows the name of the town, please tell!)

My favorite spelling bee word is 'aitch'. The poor girl who had that one (81st National Spelling Bee, USA, 1998) did her best, but it's not a word you see in American English. We just scribble the letter on.

As far as transliteration goes, I'm really tangled because I usually don't know the right pronunciation to begin with. I could make a reasonable attempt at a spelling, but not based on other people's spoken interpretations of yet other people's misspellings. When I wrote out French pronunciations for singing, I broke out far more IPA than was strictly necessary.

#132 Scientific names are always tripping me up. Most recently "Mulloidichthys" was the bane of my existence (my brain insisted on spelling and pronouncing it Mulldoicthys) until my boss gave me a quick lesson in Greek spelling just last week. I was all set to point out the mistake in "icthyological" from Teresa's original post but several people beat me to it. I still can't pronounce Chthamalus without coughing up phlegm though.

My favorite impossible place name is Schuylkill (which, as any good Philadelphian knows, is pronounced Skoo-kul).

In French, the letter "Y" is called a "Greek I". But do they spell it "i grec" or "y grec"? I don't really know.

Restaurateur
The keeper of an eathing house or a restaurant.

Here's another candidate for the list.

I've been known to torture midwesterners by asking them to pronounce "Kvetch".

There are at least two words on the list that I did not know were spelled that way. (Restaurateur... restura... restoronto... and sorcerer.)

Tetaumatawhakatangihangakoauaotamateaurehaeaturipukapihimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuaakitanarahu, New Zealand

(Ghu bless copy-and-paste!)

In tenth grade I had to memorize:

Neither weird sheik seizes leisure either.

and

A friend does mischief if he makes a sieve of your handkerchief.

I feel compelled to point out that "guerilla" and "vermillion" are both in Web. Collegiate as acceptable alternate spellings, though I think we would agree that we don't like them.

Then there's the whole "two countries divided by a common language" issue of British and American spelling. "Licence"/"license" is touched on above. Then there's "judgment"/"judgement," "acknowledgment"/"acknowledgement," "lodgment"/"lodgement," etc., about which it is best to Agree to Disagree. And then there's "gray"/"grey"...

The words that still give me trouble are -able/-ible words...

How else would you spell "accommodate?"

I am in despair.

Last time I heard about someone really liking them, it was an editor at The New Yorker. She got them as anonymous passed-along email.

I've gotten worse, much worse as I get older, which sucks because I write so much more now. Correct things don't look right, or I fatfinger it so much that the wrong spelling looks right. Gah, you wouldn't believe how many words I just had to fix, keyboard must be wearing out....
The one I notice the most on advertisements is "rennaissance."
The one that smarted the most was writing a whole manuscript with "pheremone."

A lot depends on the angle at which you look at things, I suppose.

I fall squarely into the category TNH described as "Being unable to ignore the existence of a typo that’s within your field of vision, even if you aren’t consciously reading the text in which it occurred." I usually describe it as having the equivalent of perfect pitch for spelling. It does work much better for text than oral spelling; it's far easier to tell if a word 'looks' right.

However, my smugness is tempered. As an expat Canadian in the US, I sometimes spell words correctly only on the other side of the border (I do this in both directions now). It's also tempered by having been the only bad speller in my Grade 5 Hindi class, when I was briefly enrolled in a convent school in India. Hindi's a totally phonetic language, so 'spelling' doesn't really exist as a subject. My problem was the converse of the one that James E describes (#135); my English-trained ears couldn't distinguish between pairs of consonants, and I would be reduced to guesswork when I had to transcribe anything.

My dad always said it was Copenhagen, which isn't in the Netherlands at all. Wikipedia sez:
IPA: [kəʊpənˈheɪgən] or [kəʊpənˈhɑˑgən];
Danish: København (help·info) IPA: [købn̩ˈhaʊˀn])

He could pronounce it with both the German and Danish accent - it's something about how the o and the a are pronounced that gives most of the distinction. I could only manage the German pronunciation. :(

(Though he did say that I'd be okay with the American accent. I filed this away as a tip to learn the history of any country that I traveled to, under the heading "quit while you are ahead". His claim to credibility in this matter was spending time there in 1955, when memories of the Second World War were quite vivid.)

by the way, what are the names of the rest of the Latin alphabet, aside from "aitch" and "zed"?

Diatrima #140: A few years back, a student in a graduate class on the politics of developing states came to my office with a problem. What, she wanted to know, was a 'sentray', a word she kept coming upon in a reading on China. A little investigation revealed that the word was 'centre'. After I explained the issue of differences in British and American orthography, she left satisfied. I mentioned this case to the then Chair of my department, who asked me what I was going to do about the problem. My reply was 'I'm moving to an entirely different theatray'.

Rehoboam is a hard word to spell. Because it's Rechavam, and the King James transliterations are just crazy. (I'll admit to have confused Isaac and Jacob because Jacob was just too far away from Yaakov, and I was sort of reaching for whatever English word came to mind.)

My personal problems in this area are sufficiently wide and broad that it'd take far too long to go through them all. I will admit to tacking on an extra l at the end of just about every word that ends with "ful", and some words that don't. Also, I habitually misspell "assassin" as "assassain". You can imagine how much of a problem that is for someone who writes fantasy.

What's interesting to me is how rarely sapphire is misspelled. Pph isn't a combination that shows up that often, but people generally seem to get it right.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIAdHEwiAy8

My dad always said it was Copenhagen, which isn't in the Netherlands at all. Wikipedia sez:
IPA: [kəʊpənˈheɪgən] or [kəʊpənˈhɑˑgən];
Danish: København (help·info) IPA: [købn̩ˈhaʊˀn])

He could pronounce it with both the German and Danish accent - it's something about how the o and the a are pronounced that gives most of the distinction. I could only manage the German pronunciation. :(

(Though he did say that I'd be okay with the American accent. I filed this away as a tip to learn the history of any country that I traveled to, under the heading "quit while you are ahead". His claim to credibility in this matter was spending time there in 1955, when memories of the Second World War were quite vivid.)

by the way, what are the names of the rest of the Latin alphabet, aside from "aitch" and "zed"?

But I only guessed it because of the recent posts, which are presumably what reminded you of it in the first place.

Nzcrefnaq, qbrf, nsgre nyy, ortva jvgu n ibjry.

Strangely, I am completely unable to spell things someone has said to me aloud. If I can write the word, I'm fine, but I find it almost impossible to visualize words. Misspelled words, however, tend to pop out at me on a page, just by glancing at them. Must be something about it looking unfamiliar.

I also suffer from the so-called readers' vocabulary, where I often incorrectly pronounce words because I've only ever read them and never heard them aloud. Imagine my surprise when I heard the correct way to pronounce hegemony!

I would like to add "vehement" to your list of difficult words. When I proofed plays, that word appeared incorrectly again and again.

Um, why is "R" in both lists? (not that it misled me, but ...)

Ol evtugf vg fubhyq bayl or va gur svefg yvfg, lrf?

There is not a chorus director on the planet who will agree with you about the "v = w" thing, with the exception of a conductor I had many years ago who insisted on the "w" pronunciation for one text only: Hindemith's "Apparebit repentina dies," on the theory that it was a classical rather than liturgical text and therefore should have a classical pronunciation. The rest of the time, it was "v"s (and soft "c"s) all the way down.

I don't actually want to be a copy editor. But there was something soothing about being able to filter my anger into "It's spelled CINNAMON, dammit!"

And there's a computer language called Wierd, spelled that way on purpose. It's not in general use, thanks be to Mercury.

miriam 8: Separate yourself and you can avoid being a leper.

Keir 14: Yes, that's generally a rule, because the commonly used words are subject to sound change (as is everything in the language) but not analogic change (fitting into the common pattern because no one can remember how the words UNcommon pattern worked). If people wrote about supersession all the time, 'supersede' wouldn't be in the process of being analogized into 'supercede'. This would be good.

BUT I'm told that 'be' is not entirely the result of this process, but rather truly suppletive, that is, the different forms actually come from different historical sources. I gawped gormlessly when I learned that. Somehow no one had explained that to me while I was getting a degree in linguistics!

Steve 26: What Teresa said, plus: All those -cede words have some sort of "give" seme in them. None in supersede; it's all takin' and no givin'.

Zak 16: I'm xooked, xooked to find that there's gambling going on here!

glinda 28: I once went to a large Pagan street fair (well, not exactly, it was indoors) called the Bizarre Bazaar.

abi 39: This is no longer a problem. No one pronounces 'futile' like 'feudal' anymore, not if they've ever watched ST:TNG! It's all "few-tile" now.

Jonathan 137: 'inoculate' should go next to 'innocuous' -- or is it 'inoccuous'? Argh.

[*] OK, or ueni, uidi, uici if you prefer.

There is a municipal sign that reads 'NO OVERNITE PARKING' a few hundred yards from our college gates. The only thing stopping me from getting some blue and white paint and going out in the dead of night to do some guerrilla copyediting is the thought of having to explain to a cop what I was doing, and the headlines that would result: COLLEGE PROFESSOR ARRESTED FOR VANDALISM: "I was only trying to correct the spelling," protests alleged vandal.

(I can't much spell, but I know some rules. For some reason, I won some spelling bees as a kid, but I frequently misspell ordinary words I use all the time. And I often suddenly can't remember how to spell something. Thank god for spill-chickens.)

The word *I* always have difficulty with is dissipate, due to that double 's' there. I try to be conscious of it and think of memorising it every time I see it written down.

I've still probably got it wrong, haven't I? *wry grin*

Then I joined a Gregorian chant choir, which of course used the ecclesiastical pronunciation. Fun!

------
* Even on my answering machine message ("Salve. Nos, Paula et Abi, absumus, quodsi nominum, numerum et nuntiuum tuum dabis, quod primum te vocabimus. Gratias tibi agimus.")**

** None of my classics professors got beyond "Erm, hail...". My parents' lawyer friends used to ring up just to hear the Latin, and leave legalese tags. But the prize was Paula's Spanish teacher who listened, hung up, and then called back with a message in Latin (followed by a translation, bless him).

Ooh, a pronunciation problem in our house that caused fits when we discovered it.

hyperbole - hy PER bow lee or HIGH per bowl?

We fight over toMAYdo/toeMAHtoe as well.

While the original posting may say "riffle", James Nicoll notes in a followup posting that this was a typographical error, and "rifle" was indeed intended.

I note that he also misspells "converts" in the original post. Typos happen.

Although in searching for those two posts, I came across an alt.usage.english thread that pondered the question of whether "rifle" was used correctly.

Q: How many cover blurb writers does it take to change a light bulb?

A: A vast and teeming horde, stretching from sea to shining sea!

(I know I picked that up on your topic on GEnie, lo these many years ago. So at least somebody remembers they're yours, OK?)

I argued that I had spelled what I heard. She argued that we had had a list to memorise, that "futile" was on it, and that "feudal" was not.

I missed marks for giving "czar" instead of "tsar". After the (substitute) teacher refused to clarify which she wanted when I asked, "Er, there are two ways to spell that, which do you want?" Because I was supposed to memorize the spelling list, not actually know the spellings.

On the other hand, Cincinnati is one I still have to think carefully about, even though I live only about 120 miles from Porkopolis.

My favorite pronunciation stumper is Maquoketa, Iowa. Almost no one who hasn't previously heard of the place can guess the sound from the spelling.

Fox Mulder's mother supposedly had a summer home there, and it supposedly had a hospital. The X-Files wasn't always right, but David Duchovny did pronounce it right when called upon to do so, which was impressive.

While looking for typos in my library catalog, I came upon "foreward." The rule is, if the typo was the cataloger's (for instance, in the summary or subject headings), then we correct the typo. But if it looks as if the error came from the book's title page, then we have to look at the book itself. If the misspelling is in the book's title page, then we don't correct the record but add a [sic] to it.

We found six books with "foreward", including a 1982 Tor.

When I was at school my teachers had to get creative to find anything to put on my spelling lists at all. I think there was one whole year when the only word my English teacher could find to make me correct was draggled. He insisted that it wasn't a word and that I had meant bedraggled but left two letters out. If that was what I'd done, it wouldn't have been a spelling mistake.

The only thing that stopped me going and getting a book that was on display in the same classroom and locating the page from which I had picked up draggled (which I could have done in about five seconds - I have a knack for opening books at just the right page) was my awareness that I talked about that author all the time and needed to cut down.

(Actually I expect that if I said that the character who sees the draggled thing later hears another character describe it as a revenant, which is where I learned that word too, somebody here could identify the book and the thing being described.)

I heard this story by way of Rita Dove's poem "Parsley"; her version turns on the letter R instead.

But wrong spellings can lead to absurdity. Long ago when I was employed in acquistions at the U. Kan. main library, one of our cataloging dept. librarians, who had been doing some kind of research in the subject catalog came back with some staggering news. We had a subject section for Britian as well as Britain...

It all appeared to have been done in the 60s, in a specific stretch of time. Much amusement was had, I think the decision, because they were not too far away from starting the online catalog, was to leave it as is and put a 'notes' card in the subject catalog.

Skid Road: a Seattle phrase, created by a popular preacher here. When speaking of First Avenue he'd use the line "It used to be the Skid Road for logs from Henry Yesler's sawmill to slide into the Sound. Now it's a Skid Road for the souls of drunks and prostitutes to slide into hell!" Seattle didn't give up on the sin (contemporary accounts have the City wider open than the Barbary Coast, and during WWI the Army wasn't allowed to take leave here because the brass were worried about the troops catching something the doctors couldn't cure), but liked the line and took to it.

Skid Row: what you say if you're too lazy to look it up.

Skid Row if you're last week's New York Times: And you fired Molly Ivins for calling a chicken feather removal party "a Gang Pluck?" For Shame!

When I worked in Michigan many years ago, someone called from out of state to ask about bidding on a project at -- here he paused, and I could tell he was debating how to pronounce it and he finally just gave it his best try -- the project at "Salt Stee Maree" (he said with a question mark at the end).

Forsight.

I believe that they expressed remorse post-production.

I also side with those who feel that "supersede" should be spelled "supercede", but I capitulated to the majority spelling back in high school. (But as long as the alternative spelling is listed in dictionaries, it's still an "adaptor" and not an "adapter", dammit. :))

Definitely should add "minuscule" to the list.

noticed that the locals nearly always spelled it "Cinti".

I've never heard it called that. Where I grew up in the Northeast, it was always shortened to "Cincy". I wonder if that's changed over time, or it changes across space, and if so, how far east you'd have to go to see the change.

Not to mention my unhappy suspicion that if the two of you had been reversed, they'd have taken it away from you, to give to a boy, in a heartbeat.

J Austin, #154: I was at a gaming-con recently where the organizers had very kindly put printed signs up at all the vendor booths. One vendor's company name had the word "Renaissance" in it, and it was horribly misspelled on the sign. (I don't remember exactly how.) Midway thru the event, I was amused to note that the vendor had taken the misspelled sign down, so that only his own merchandise (on which the word was prominently, and CORRECTLY, visible) would be seen.

Alter, #165: I'll bet "sapphire" gets a special tag in most people's heads because it's a precious stone, and secondarily because it's the only word in reasonably common usage with that -pph- combination.

Bruce, #207: This is absolutely the first time that I have ever seen any other spelling than "Skid Row". Your etymology is doubtless spot-on (and interesting to learn!), but I'm afraid the other version has become common usage. (Perhaps not right around Seattle, but certainly everywhere else.)

It's the same old transliteration problem: you can't expect someone to be able to pronounce a word written in an orthography invented for a different language: the choice of phonemes is different, and they're often not divided up the same (like the fact that Chinese-language group speakers don't differentiate between the 'l' and 'r' sounds the way Romance or Germanic language speakers do). Let's face it, Philly is a very foreign language, or so says my wife from New Jersey :-)

When and where I grew up in Philadelphia, most people spoke the word Schuylkill almost as you describe except that while they accented the first syllable, for some reason they tried to get it out as fast as possible, so it came out something like
Skukil, with 'u' pronounced like the 'oo' in snooker, not as long as the 'oo' in choose.

Another fun alphabet is, the world's worst phonetic alphabet

a as in 'aye' or 'aisle'
b as in 'bee'
c as in 'czar' or 'cue'
d as in 'djinn' or 'double-you'
e as in 'eye' or 'ewe'
...

I'm a good speller, but I do occasionally mistype.

#8 miriam beetle: "privately pronouncing things wrong was always my spelling secret weapon."

Me too! It's my only defense against the terrible ie/ei. I still say FRY-end under my breath every time I write "friend," my second-grade nemesis.

#135 James E: "Re: Arabic names, and Muammar Gadafy/Gadaffi/Qadafi/Khadafy/ohwhatthehell in particular - to quote the Guardian's style guide:
"Though Arabic has only three vowels - a, i and u - it has several consonants which have no equivalent in the Roman alphabet. For instance, there are two kinds of s, d and t. There are also two kinds of glottal sound. This means there are at least 32 ways of writing the Libyan leader Muammar Gadafy's name in English, and a reasonable argument can be made for adopting almost any of them.""

As I understand it, all of the Arabic vowels (each of which have a long and a short sound) lie somewhere in between European vowels, so a single sound can sound like an "a" in one word and like an "e" in the next. Unlike Japanese or Chinese, no one's ever proposed a consistent Romanization system and made it stick.

#165 Alter S. Reiss: "What's interesting to me is how rarely sapphire is misspelled. Pph isn't a combination that shows up that often, but people generally seem to get it right."

I think it's because pph such a rare case it's easy to remember. It's with the cases where there are two contradictory and widely-spread rules, like ie/ei or doubling letters, that it gets really tricksy.

Steve Zillwood @ 215 -- Look, sir! Druids! -- that would have been a very different Star Wars, wouldn't it?

Those very confused druids walking around on Tatooine, I mean.

It's something that makes proofreading really kind of fun for me -- when I run across an error of that type, the comedy skits in my head rival Monty Python.

Please excuse pedantry. On pronouncing "v"s in Latin, the locus classicus for this stuff, W. Sidney Allen's Vox Latina, makes it clear that the shift to the fricative was already under way by the end of the first century. So for Christian texts, "w" is not merely customarily wrong, but unhistorical. Likewise later secular writers such as Ammianus Marcellinus.

[/delurks]

"What is it?"
"Your father's menhir. An elegant weapon from a more civilised age."

#226: Thank you for getting to this point. Any Christian-era Latin (and thus, much of what you'd ever sing in choir) probably used the V. Caesar, however, did not. Also of interest: a slightly more reliable account than Shakespeare (Suetonius) asserts that Caesar probably never said "Et tu, Brute?" because he was an educated Roman and spoke Greek! "Kai su, teknon?" or "You too, my child?" are his purported last words. I believe Plutarch claims he said nothing at all, but that's not nearly as much fun.

Or, to follow the etymology a bit more slavishly, ‘...since food has the property of restoring one's well-being.’ As purportedly did the original tonics and potions known as restaurants.

(223) I'd pay good money for the collected Nielsen Hayden lightbulbiana. All the wheat and none of the chaff. As opposed to that kneebiter Carson Wyler.

(227) ajay, re your father's menhir. Where is that from? Sounds like something Joe Orton would say. Very good, at any rate. Such a manhly weapon, though prone to ithyphallicity (which I would have misspelled with an i had I not looked it up).

(165/217) Yes, sapphire. Shades of phenolphthalein! (he said, proud and amazed to have guessed that one right before checking.)

[nitpick] Chinese does differentiate between the 'l' and 'r' sounds, though they parse them a little differently. I think you're thinking of Korean and Japanese, which do have only a single sound along that spectrum. [/nitpick]

The version of Star Wars that includes the bumbling druid Saig Treppio and his more competent buddy Arty Detu.

(And I'll have you all know that I looked up "competent", as it is one of my personal nemeses.)

According to the Wikipedia article, it's from three different I-E roots. Cool, huh?

I don't understand the question.

The menhir thing comes from Steve Zilwood's #215, in which he mentions someone having accepted a spellchecker's "correction" of droids to druids, thus leading ajay at #227 to make a joke.

Me, I was trying to mangle C-3PO and R2-D2 into something more namelike; if there is actually a canonical Star Wars character called "Saig Treppio", I am unaware of him/her (but completely unsurprised). And "bumbling" doesn't mean "fat", it means "incompetent".

Of course, people in the 'Nati drive to Kentucky for dinner. I'm just sayin'.

Not obscure, but I've never read Asterix so I missed the joke. :)

I did a quick check on OED, and need to add that 'calender' is synonymous with 'calenderer' (pretty easy to see why that version got adopted!). And apparently a calender can be a member of a mendicant order of dervishes in Turkey or Persia. Also, a corn-weevil.

Hee! That post brings back memories.

For the record, since then I've mostly learned how to pronounce it--though I'm generally told my "sch" sounds Flemish, rather than Dutch. I consider "Flemish" better than "American", under the circumstances.

Spelling it is easy, as long as I'm a) typing, and b) not thinking about it.

Speaking of which, Asterix has caused Sasha to be permanently unable to spell asterisk and obelisk and given me cause to hesitate about them.

I was delighted to see how many others have the same response to grey/gray derived from reading Tolkien at an impressionable age... Grey is a twilight, elf-like, faded color with a hint of blue and an English accent. Gray is the Gray Mouser -- a bit brownish, more for camouflage in the shadows than elegance, with a bit of American broadness to the vowel.

Ack - this is what comes of trying to make up our own diacritical notation ;-) The way I pronounce it is actually somewhere in between those two, and the accent is on the first syllable, as you say. I think it's partly because we talk fast as well - Philadelphia tends to come out closer to "Flduffia" when my friends are going full spate.

And to give Dan@#145 full credit - it's not like there's only one Philly (or even SE PA) accent. And it may indeed be pronounced a bit differently, especially further west where there are more Dutch speakers and influence.

Also: 'weird' is spelled weird. (Or, "we are weird")

Teresa should add siege/seize to her list. The second letter in 'seize' is 'e', just like in the sound-alikes 'sees' and 'seas'.

A few weeks ago, I completely failed to spell 'corollary'. I was trying to double one or both of the 'r's and totally forgot about doubling the 'l'. I also tried changing the second vowel. Everything I tried looked so wrong that I finally gave up and used a different phrasing.

I'm another visual speller. I'd get most of the words on Teresa's list right, but I'd have to write them down.

With some of those multisyllabic Welsh or Maori names, I suppose anyone in their right mind would prefer slurring!

--

But I think I have possibly the most embarrassing story as regards misspelling.

I used to work as an 'editorial assistant' for a science publisher, and it was my job to invite Very Important Scientists to write papers for our journals. One time, I sent out about 60 invitation letters, but as the responses came back, I became increasingly perplexed by the number of people asking "Is that really how you spell your name?" I mean, I know 'Charman' is a little unusual, and people often mispronounce it 'Sharman' or try to put a p in it (Chapman), but it's not that noteworthy. So I'd shake my head, say "Yes", and leave it at that. After the fifth such enquiry, I decided that something was wrong and pulled out the original letter that I'd sent out.

I have to admit feeling rather mortified to discover that I had spelt Sue as Suw. My squiggle of a signature gave no one any clue that I had actually misspelt my own name so, after the panic subsided, I decided that it was probably just easier to change my name than admit to a bunch of really important people that I couldn't spell it. I've been Suw ever since.

Of course, I thank my fat-fingeredness now - I'm the only human Suw in Google and that has turned out to be pretty useful.

No actual cool person says "the 'Nati." Only "cool" people, such as regional youth marketing directors or local entertainment reporters, say this.

The mnemonic that was taught to me for "separate" is to pronounce it French-style. That only works if you've taken French, of course.

My favorite place name is Skaneateles. It's a quaint town in the Finger Lakes district of upstate New York. I'd never heard of it until the Clintons took a vacation there once. At that time I read that it was pronounced "skinny-atlas" but what I've actually heard up there is something slightly different - I think there might be a schwa after the t.

Meanwhile the town of Hauppauge was the spelling bugbear of us Long Islanders. (It rhymes, more or less, with "Hop-frog.")

And add me to the list of the xooked to learn there's no "n" in that word for someone who runs a restaurant.

Agree with you about "Chi-town," by the way, though it may have been more common once. The local term for "Chicago" that you almost never hear outside of the city is "Chicagoland," which used to boggle the minds of friends of mine who had just moved to the city--especially when they figured out that "Chicagoland" was larger than "Chicago" . . .

ethan @199 - No, I don't know how to pronounce Quonochontaug. My guess would be kwon-o-SHON-tog, long o in 2nd syllable and the rest as in "on", but I am quite prepared to be told it's something very different. You wanna take a stab at Maquoketa? Anybody?

Kevin Marks @252 - 12345! Way cool! I live maybe 50 miles from a very small village called Scottown, which has the zip 45678. Its only other claim to fame is as the site of a lethal fireworks store fire.

Faren Miller @246 - According to some people around here, I live in Porchmuff, Ahia. Down in Saudi Counny.

I'm also in the bluish grey/brownish gray camp.

Stephan@234 & Carrie@235: Could the overweight reference have been to the new first name "Saig?"

ajay@248 - No slinking! A&O references are always welcome.

Waves hand mystically..."These are not the druids you are looking for..."

And there's also "asafoetida".

Local insight: Zip Code "12345" is actually assigned to the General Electric works on the west side of the city. I'm reasonably certain that there is not a single residential address in that Zip.

The SF ideas are sent out from a box at the Heritage Station Post Office in zip 12303.

(Not only was I born in Schenectady, but I attended Rensselear Polytechnic Institute. The very first thing they do there at freshman orientation is drill the incoming students in "How to Spell "R-e-n-s-s-e-l-a-e-r".)

It also rhymes with Patchogue. But not with Copiague, which is 'co-pay' with a hard 'g' on the end. (I had to look that one up.)

Ah, I was being sneaky. I couldn't remember which languages made no distinction, but I knew that even in the ones that did, the distinction was different from that of Western European languages in general.

So I said, don't differentiate between the 'l' and 'r' sounds the way Romance or Germanic language speakers do, which can be interpreted as "don't differentiate in the same way". Got to be sneaky to cover your ignorance when there's just no time to google.

Back when I did trade shows, it was common to hear it mispronounced "haw-paaaaj." As though it were a hi-falutin' French word.

there's a double "w" (quadruple-yu?) in Tsawwassen, BC.

& the first "s" is silent, as long as we're talking about trick pronunciations of city names.

If anyone cares, Tsawwassen is one of the ports on the B.C. ferry system. It was a nice place to sit in the sun and breeze and enjoy a peaceful afternoon.

In some places, it's even preferred.
E.g., the Wikipedia entry on Joseph Stalin.

Also, phthisis. Another I learned from the theatre (same play, too).

This is absolutely the first time that I have ever seen any other spelling than "Skid Row".

Here.

And here, although with the bastard spelling first. Obviously Wikipedia has a Californian editing: "There are formally recognized neighborhoods named Skid Row in Seattle." Not by that term in the city limits...

I cannot be the only person with a pathological fear of parallel, can I? I know there is a double consonant in there, but is it a double 'r', or is it a double 'l', and if so, which 'l' - and why does it seem to switch from time to time? Hmmmm....

I would also like to point out that the supersede/supercede controversy is always a constant source of strife at my job. We occasionally file a 'superseding indictment' which is, you know, an actual legal instrument filed with the court clerk, with the words 'Superceding (sic) Indictment' emblazoned on the first page (it was coded incorrectly in the software we use to prepare our filings); the lawyers are evenly divided between the wise Superseders and the ignorant Superceders

I must also confess to often turning 'independence' into 'independance' (see also, 'independent' as 'independant' - because 'pendant' is a word, and 'pendent' is not. Hrmph) And once in a while a second 'm' finds its way into amendment, but I have no idea how it gets there, honest.

A second 'm' finds its way into the first half of 'amendment,' I meant to say.

Now would anyone care to guess how Iowans pronounce Nevada (the town where I live), Madrid, Buena Vista, or the one you absolutely have to be from here to know: Tripoli.

Isn't it somewhat of a rule, that, in natural languages, the most commonly used words are the exceptions to the most rules of that language?

My experience of languages is not wide, but in Japanese I believe that the only two irregular verbs are suru and kuru; respectively, to do and to come. Make of that what you will.

#222, Heresiarch:

Unlike Japanese or Chinese, no one's ever proposed a consistent Romanization system and made it stick.

There is one alternative to Japanese romaji and that is the so-called Yale romanization, which uses a more scholarly basis for spelling for consistancy's sake. However, it is deceptive as to pronunciation. For example, the syllable group ta chi tsu te to in romaji is rendered ta ti tu te to in Yale. This wouldn't matter except to Yale scholars who attempt to speak Japanese, except I believe I hear the occasional non-Japanese asian actor playing Japanese parts in Western movies attempting to pronounce the Yale romanization as written.

Meanwhile the more friendly (if inaccurate) Wade-Giles romanization of Chinese has been rendered almost extinct by Pinyin, which is more accurate but less friendly. (I mean, Q is pronounced Ch, X is Sh?)

Anne Sheller #257: I'm glad you were ready to be told you were wrong. Quonochontaug is pronounced (by its current residents; I've no clue how the Narragansetts might have said it) KWON-uh-kuh-tog, no long Os. It's a beautiful little town on the bay with its own little inlet. Again, nice place to visit but I'd never want to live there.

I haven't even a guess for Maquoketa. Steve Zillwood's at #259 is as good as any I'd have.

So how are things in nuh-VAY-duh?

One way I define the Midwest is by mispronounced French. My French-minor roommate yelled at me in college because I insisted on Prairie dooSHEEN, rather than pronouncing it all correctly.

When a web browser follows a link from one page to another, as part of the request for the second page it normally includes information about the first page, allowing the owner of the second page to tell who is linking to them.

The first browser to support this feature did so by sending a "Referer" header. For interoperability, other browsers followed. To preserve compatibility, the formal HTTP 1.1 standard set that spelling into stone. And now we all spell it that way.

Mispronounced French in very deed! I thought Detroit was bad enough, with (among other atrocities) a major street named Cadieux and pronounced "CAD-jew".

Then I moved to Nashville, where one of the major streets is Lafayette... pronounced "luh-FAY-et".

Worse yet, 26 years of living in Nashville have actively reset my default pronunciation for the latter, so that now when I'm living in Texas, I routinely embarrass myself in discussions of American history. :-(

Not to mention CAY-ro, IlliNOIZ.*

(Though I've got to admit that that pronounciation of the state name exists mostly in memory and old folk songs, these days.)

Rats, you beat me to it. I'll just add that the double parallel line is the standard geometric construction symbol that signals that two lines are parallel, so if you took Geometry in high school (and actually remember it), that one's dead easy.

I've always thought Milngavie was the worst place name in Britain. At the least with Welsh you just get a good run up and have a go, but how could you tell that Milngavie is pronounced Mul-guy?

Australia also has fun names, Woolloomooloo being one, pronounced with the stress on the last Loo, not WOO-lloo-MOO-loo.

Q: How many art directors does it take to change a light bulb?

According to the creative director at the studio I'm working at this morning, the answer is, "We're not changing a f***ing thing."

British placenames are great for confusing the unwary foreigner who, until arriving, thought he/she could read and speak. They fall into three categories:

BASIC: England
Leicester
Derby
Holborn
Middlesborough
Pontefract

INTERMEDIATE: Oxford and Cambridge
Gonville & Caius
Magdalen
Magdalene
Worcester
Wadham

ADVANCED: Scotland
Dalyell
Menzies
Sgurr nan Ceathreamhnan
Beinn a'Chlaidheimh
Meall Ghaordaidh

The answers, incidentally, are:
Lester
Darby
Ho-burn
Middles-bruh
Pumf-rite

Gon-vill and Keys
Maudlin
Maudlin (aha! trick question!)
Wooster
Wad-um

Dee-ell
Ming-iss
Skoor nan Tcharyavan
Ben a Khlayiv
Myall Urdy

I always say English doesn't have rules of pronunciation. They're more like guidelines*.

-----
* We didn't have enough zombies in this thread.

Wade-Giles is quite accurate as long as one remembers the secret decoder ring and remembers to use apostrophes when appropriate. e.g., there is a difference between p and p'. The uninitiated to Wade-Giles will pronounce p as if it were p'. Thus, we have an entire generation of people who mispronounced the name of the capital city of China. However, if one actually follows Wade-Giles pronunciation rules, one does get the correct pronunciation.

One could argue that Wade-Giles is actually more linguistically accurate at least in this example. The only difference between p and p' is that the latter is aspirated. However, pinyin uses two separate letters, b and p. English speakers might assume that b in pinyin is voiced. They would be wrong.

I suppose one advantage of using j, q and x is that one isn't as tempted to pronounce pinyin as if it were English. However, when you do this with either Wade-Giles or pinyin, you end up with the Celeborn problem. (The Yale system of Chinese romanization might do better in this respect. I don't remember now.)

People were mentioning sapphires, and it occurred to me that the "ph" was probably a Greek phi. Checking on this, I discovered that there is a Greek word "σάπφειρος"...which means "lapis lazuli". The Romans borrowed the word and then applied it to another blue gemstone.

Flushed with this success I went and looked up the name "Matthew", expecting it to be "Ματθαῖος" -- nope, it's "Μαθθαῖος". Go figure.

I enjoyed the movie The Man in the Iron Mask, what with Gabriel Byrne and Jeremy Irons playing Dumas's mousquettaires now older, but it drove me nuts that the north-American actors in the cast (for example, John Malkovich) couldn't be bothered to pronounce d'Artagnan's name correctly.

(*) not 'mispronounciation'...

Well, actually, no. It was the description of the pair of druids, one bumbling and the other competent, along with the sizes of the originals, that made me think they were dead ringers for Obelix and Asterix (which Ajay's original joke was so obviously about (to me, anyway)). I didn't stop to consider that Carrie might not have read it, I mean, they had to be Obelix and Asterix.

Well, you might as well do something with those otherwise-useless letters, and since Chinese has some sounds that don't match up exactly with English ones, why not? X is not the same sh as English, nor is Q the same ch. I'm pretty sure the Chinese version is the retroflex s` rather than the postalveolar S, for example (from the IPA via X-Sampa).

Speaking of mispronounced French, around here we have Duquesne (du-KANE) and North Versailles (ver-SALES). Beats me why it's not either du-KWES-nee or ver-SIGH.

They seem to fall into two groups: as descended from the original pronunciation, after the descendents have stopped speaking French, and so slurred but not too far off, and as handled by people who knew French only as Foreign (pronounced Furrin).

Also, Fee Fee Road, in St. Louis County, has nothing to do with small dogs.

Actually, one is not supposed to pronounce the 's' in 'Duquesne'. Same with the 'u' in 'que'.

As for 'Versailles', it should indeed be pronounced 'ver-sigh'. The mispronunciation of 'aill' as 'ale' is common though. That's why my family name has been turned into 'maalox'.

(Yes, come see me if you have tummy problems.)

Yes, I know that--I took French up through college. :) I was pointing out that we have two French place names; one is pronounced correctly and the other is not. It just strikes me as odd that they're not both right (du-kane, ver-sigh) or both wrong (du-kwes-nee, ver-sales).

Oh! You mean there are places where -ham at the end of a placename is pronounced as in the food, and not as a a gulped "'m"??? Well well well.

(Other examples: Birmingham- Bermingum, Cheltenham- Chelt'num, Nottingham: Nottingum, or indeed Nott'n'm [for extra points, the T should be a glottal stop].)

Although now I'm picturing a zombie copy-editor...

Which brings us right back to "ichthyology", which is consistently mispronounced "ick-theology" (which may be why some people drop that h). It could be worse though, people might try to pronounce the ch like a ch. (Ditto chiral, Christ, chord, chorus, ichor...)

#296: People were mentioning sapphires, and it occurred to me that the "ph" was probably a Greek phi. Checking on this, I discovered that there is a Greek word "σάπφειρος"...which means "lapis lazuli". The Romans borrowed the word and then applied it to another blue gemstone.

Interesting, I had no idea that there was a pi in sapphire. Does that mean "sa-fire" is an incorrect pronunciation? It's the only one I've ever heard... my dictionary seems to think that there is no "p" sound in either sapphire or words derived from Sappho. But then, they sanction "ick-theology", too.

"Maththew" looks unbelievably awkward, though, even if it would be more technically correct. Maybe that's just because we're not used to it?

pinyin uses SH for the retroflex s'.
X is s\, the voiceless alveolo-palatal frictive.
(i.e., blade of tongue below lower row of teeth, raise body of tongue towards palate, pass air through mouth without engaging vocal cords.)

Q is the aspirated affrictive version. I guess that would be ts\_h in X-SAMPA. (Thank you for the link, BTW. IPA, but renderable in 7 bit ASCII. What a great idea!)

BTW, I don't actually know anything about linguistics. Having been laughed at for speaking like a hick, I'm just obsessed with getting the standard Mandarin accent right. (But it's not clear to me that I pronounce S differently from s\ although I might if I thought about it.)

Thank you, you *would* have to bring up why I bombed out of the 7th grade spelling bee.

Still, better than the time in third grade I put my brain in automatic and came out with "babby".

Touche*, Bruce Cohen, touche. Though, now that I think about it, not even Western European languages have any sort of agreement on how to pronounce 'r.' The French 'r,' the Spanish 'r' and the English 'r' are all totally different, at least to my ear. The Japanese sound romanized as 'r' is a whole 'nother beast as well.

*There's a teensy little town just outside of Walla Walla, Washington called Touchet, which is pronounced TOO-shee. Don't ask me.

#280 NelC: "Meanwhile the more friendly (if inaccurate) Wade-Giles romanization of Chinese has been rendered almost extinct by Pinyin, which is more accurate but less friendly. (I mean, Q is pronounced Ch, X is Sh?)"

Wade-Giles and pinyin are both equally accurate: they map the exact same set of sounds. More importantly, pinyin is wayyyy more friendly than Wade-Giles. Wade-Giles renders what is pronounced "dao de jing" into "tao te ch'ing." Friendly? Not so much. Wade-Giles has far more bugaboos than pinyin. Marking aspiration and non-aspiration with an apostrophe is highly unnatural, and causes far more problems than using x or q to mark sounds that aren't in English anyway.

Pinyin's flaws are, to my mind at least, more forgivable than Wade-Giles. Chinese has two sounds that sound to western ears like 'ch'--in pinyin, one of them gets 'ch' and the other gets 'q.' Same with 'sh'/'x' and 'zh'/'j.' Complicated, but unavoidable.

#294 JC: "Thus, we have an entire generation of people who mispronounced the name of the capital city of China."

I don't think you can blame Wade-Giles for that. From what I've heard, Peking was the product of the (Hong Kong-based) British Post's transliterations based on Cantonese pronunciations, which bear only passing resemblance to Mandarin. Beijing in Wade-Giles would be Peich'ing, no?

"However, pinyin uses two separate letters, b and p. English speakers might assume that b in pinyin is voiced. They would be wrong."

They'd still be closer than they would if they were following Wade-Giles. Voicing is a continuum, not a binary, and 北京 sounds a lot more like "beijing" than "peijing" to my (admittedly American) ear.

John Malkovich does have that effect on people.

No, no, not John Malkovich, as I'm several months older than he.

pronunciation/pronounciation.

Indiana has Russiaville, pronounced "ROOsha-Ville," named for the Miami chief Jean Baptiste de Richardville.

Take your pick: Is it misspelled or mispronounced? Is it French or Native American?

English (or American English) dictionaries describe the pronunciation used by speakers of the language; if it is consistently used by native speakers, it can hardly be an error. When English picks the pockets of other languages, it often shucks off any inconvenient phonemes in order to make the swag easier to conceal.

How would you imagine ichthyology could be correctly pronounced? icks-theology? Maybe the first step is figuring out why "chi" is pronounced "kiy".

Ok, I agree with that. It's a bad example. However, your explanation of why you think Wade-Giles is unfriendly makes better the point that I was trying to make about what happens when you pronounce Wade-Giles as if it were English. (i.e., the Celeborn problem.)

They'd still be closer than they would if they were following Wade-Giles. Voicing is a continuum, not a binary,

Yes, this became very clear to me when I attempted to master French vowels.

北京 sounds a lot more like "beijing" than "peijing" to my (admittedly American) ear.

Of course it does. A typical English speaker will aspirate the "p" in "peijing" but not the "b" in "beijing." The initial used for 北 is unaspirated and unvoiced. We're going to notice the aspiration more than we'll notice the voiced consonant. A speaker who either did not aspirate "peijing" or did not voice "beijing" would be closer still.

Like I said, the consequences of pronouncing pinyin as if it were English is still pretty dire. Because it uses "x" and "q" though, I suspect people are less tempted to do it. This is good since "c", "ch", and "sh" don't have the same sounds they do in English. I think a romanization which used English phonology wouldn't look like pinyin.

psst tsks phpht schmo schwa schlep schmoe schrik tsktsk pschent schlepp schlock schmalz schmeer schmoos schmuck schnaps schnook schtick chthonic phthalic phthalin phthises phthisic phthisis schmaltz schmelze schmoose schmooze schnecke schnecken

I manually took out inflected forms "-s", "-ing" "-y", etc. and also "cwm" and "crwth" because they use the vowel "w". I didn't go through to see if there was a case of "y" being used as a consonant. "phthises" is arguably a form of "-s", but irregular enough to leave in. I also left "tsks" in because "tsk" is not there, but I'm not sure why. If he "tsks", why cant I "tsk"?

Well, if you speak properly*, you have no problem pronouncing "chi" as "chi" (as in Rachmaninov, loch, Nagorno-Karabakh, och aye) - so "ich-theology". "ik-theology" is quite wrong.

*i.e. Scottishly.

RON-sess-vailz.

Oy.

Did I ever tell you about trying to get a train ticket from Glasgow to Holyhead by way of Oxford? The kind agent told me I would do best with a round trip ticket to Oxford, and then to... but he cleared his throat every time he started telling me where to catch the train to Holyhead. He finally had to spell it for me (<rot13>Perjr</rot13>).

You ask them to pronounce "shibboleth", and if they pronounce it "braaainns", you bash them in the head. Simple.

I shall now go and take a train to Cirencester, pron. "Sisister" by the upper classes, and "Zoyren" by the people who live there.

Sympathetic snerk.

What can possibly be the relationship between "sisister" or "sissiter" (which is how some tourist book I read many years ago had it, unless I'm having an uncommon dyslexic fit) and "zoyren"?

Did you ever have trouble in Atlanta with Brits who thought that Ponce de Leon Rd was the red-light district if they'd only heard the name?

spell-check doesn't catch "miniscule,"

It's not enough to say "spell-check" - which spell checker are you using?

Firefox spell-check dislikes both "miniscule" and "grey".

Windows Office (Word 2003) likes gray, grey and miniscule — is that what you're using?

That last might be considered a bug rather than a feature.

I do use MS Word ('97 I think)but my question was heading another way. I prefer "grey" because it looks pretty to my eye, and that's the way it sounds in my head, and thankfully, is considered a correct variant. I'll now write "minuscule" because I'm thinking "minute" instead if "miniature." I was just curious what made something an acceptable variant, and another thing merely a wrong spelling that's come into common usage.

"Maththew" looks unbelievably awkward, though, even if it would be more technically correct. Maybe that's just because we're not used to it?

well the greek maththew comes from the hebrew matityahu, where both the t's are the same letter, & of the two letters that both sound like t in israeli hebrew, it is the one that has been rendered "th" in biblical translations, e.g., nathan, bethlehem.

so i don't know if the greeks took a breath between th's, but as long as there wasn't a vowel there, they weren't pronouncing it "correctly" either.

proving that, after a point, you have to choose between pronouncing a borrow word correctly, or pronouncing it in your own language.

The surname McKlveny starts with 5 consonants, and it's not Greek.

I think it's pronounced Mackle-Vainy.

Anne @ 282: Thanks for the correction. Apparently Des Moines newscasters don't know how to pronounce Maquoketa like the natives.

MAD-rid and NuhVAYda are pronounced the same in Iowa as they are in Missouri. The first syllable of Buena Vista is pronounced like the last syllable of jejeune (misspelling intentional).

Still no takers on Tripoli? It's Trapola, accent on the second syllable.

Well, Chinese has a lot of sounds which just don't exist in English, period. Trying to pronounce it like it's English is going to be kind of bad no matter what, and trying to transcribe it with roman characters is going to involve some phonemic fudging. At least pinyin gets you into the ballpark even if you've never studied Chinese.

Though, really, the more I think about it the more I feel this is a to-MAY-to/to-MAH-to argument. Like I said earlier, Wade-Giles and pinyin map the same phonemic set, so they're essentially the same. I think pinyin picks its battles with accepted pronunciations a little more wisely than Wade-Giles, but you make a good point about the pinyin b/d/etc. They both have their flaws, I guess.

(And what's the "Celeborn problem" you speak of?)

Of course. My point is that you end up in a pretty large ballpark whether you use pinyin, Wade-Giles, or Gwoyeu Romatzyh. (The latter does have what I think is an advantage. It encodes tonal information in the spelling rather than with diacritical marks which invariably get dropped.) Yes, those untrained in these romanization schemes are inevitably going to screw things up in significant ways. e.g., they'll get anything which has an aspirated form wrong in Wade-Giles. To an untrained English speaker, c, j, q, x, ch and sh in pinyin are downright deceptive.

One could come up with a romanization where each Chinese sound is replaced by its closest English equivalent. The result would be Yale, or something very much like Yale. (To be fair, I doubt the intent of any of the other systems was to be pronouncable as if it were English.) I think Yale gets an English speaker into a smaller ballpark. (Of course, it's undoubtedly worse for the rest of the world.)

I'm not a big fan of romanizations in general. My preferred method of encoding pronunciation is bopomofo (aka zhuyin). A completely different character set. One can not even pretend to pronounce it like English. (I suppose, though, we should all just use IPA and be done with it.)

(And what's the "Celeborn problem" you speak of?)

It's a reference to Lord of the Rings. Elvish uses a hard "c." So if you pronounce the name as if it were in English, you will mispronounce his name. (Maybe one could have romanized Elvish some other way? I don't know Elvish. Perhaps it never occurred to Tolkien that people would pronounce it as if it were English.)

Allan #337: Interesting. Do you know the origins of the name - Scottish? Thinking about surnames with a surfeit of consonants makes me think of Eastern European languages. As Scotland has an ever-growing Polish immigrant community, I can imagine the eventual names... McKrzysck and the like.

Google has turned up a few people called just "McKlv" which has rather a Scots/Czech sound to it. I suspect these are OCR errors, but that's how a lot of Scots names got started: Mackenzie, for example. We may have actual McKlvs running around the place in a century or two.

(The "z" in Mackenzie is not a z at all; it's a "yogh", a Scots letter written as a sort of drooping figure 3, printed using English alphabet type as a z and pronounced more or less as a y. "Mackenzie" is a version of the Gaelic "Mac Coinneach" - pronounced "mac coin-yach" - which would originally have been pronounced "mackinnyie". That's why Dalziel is pronounced and sometimes spelt "Dalyell" or "Da-yell" and Menzies is pronounced "Ming-iss".)

joann @331 - "Zoyren" is simply a phonetic representation of "Ciren" in the local dialect; it's the "Sissiter/Sisister" version that defeats me.

As in, what in Much Puddleham did they do with the "ren"?

And since those are all the four-consonant words on my list, they include all the words with more consonants: phpht and tsktsk. One variant of the latter is tsktsks, which holds the record.

Second, it is sensible advice to give a Czech who has just swallowed a toxic substance (it means "stick your finger down your throat").

Third, by an eerie coincidence, it is also the noise that the Czech will make as he follows your advice.

(And then I'd send them down the street to the original Krispy Kreme, but that's a different kind of red light entirely.)

I read that in Lisa Goldstein's The Alchemist's Door. Did you?

the sch- words on that list were from Hebrew often through Yiddish,

Um, all of those words are from Yiddish, and except for "schmoo(s/z)e", all are of Germanic origin, not Hebrew.

Although I see that the Yiddish "schmuck", which I always though was derived from the German for "jewelry", actually derives from Old Polish for "snake/dragon", it says here.

Huh.

IIRC, most of the Yiddish vocabulary originates in German or PlattDeutsch (I'm guessing on the second). Hebrew's main contribution is the written alphabet. Used to drive me crazy as a kid, learning classical Hebrew in Hebrew school and trying to read my grandmother's Yiddish newspapers. For some reason all the second generation immigrants* in my family (both sides) insisted on *not* teaching their kids Yiddish; maybe it left them a secret language for mid-argument-with-the-kids consultations.

* The first generation born here in the States: my parent's generation.

most of the Yiddish vocabulary originates in German or PlattDeutsch (I'm guessing on the second). Hebrew's main contribution is the written alphabet.

Hm. Ethnologue says Yiddish derives from High German (HochDeutsch) rather than PlattDeutsch; Wikipedia says Middle High German. And in addition to the alphabet, lots of Hebrew vocabulary got sprinkled in as well. I was surprised to see that "schmooze" is one of those.

Speaking of Yiddish reminds me:

Yiddish with Dick and Jane

*What? Having to do with digits (i.e. fingers). Get over it.

Still, without -ein we wouldn't have "grok".

Jakob #341: ... Thinking about surnames with a surfeit of consonants makes me think of Eastern European languages. As Scotland has an ever-growing Polish immigrant community, I can imagine the eventual names... McKrzysck and the like.

That triggers my own 'Scots/Eastern European name' story.

My Lithuanian grandfather paused for a year or so in Glasgow to work up passage to America.
The Lithuanian surname is "Macuirles" (approximately "Ma-chu-les").

In Scotland, "Macuirles" is obviously pronounced "MacCurls." Which is pretty much how it stayed after that.

I'm a speller.

My bugaboos: maintenance, recommend, memento (which I thought was momento for decades), committment. Probably a few more, but that's all I can think of off the top of my head. Oh, and millennium, of whose spelling I have no idea, because I moved to a Spanish-speaking country in 1997 so it's all "milenio" to me.

I couldn't spell out loud at all until I learned to touch-type; a nice side effect was developing the ability to recite the spelling of any word (given I know how to spell it) without having to see it written down.

Place name pronunciation: Dalhousie in Canada. The university of that name in Halifax is about how you'd expect it, but Port Dalhousie, a town in the Niagara Penninsula, is "pordle-oozie" with the "oo" prolonged in comparison to everything else which is rather rushed and indistinct.

I used to live in Nepean (which no longer exists, it's all Ottawa now). When one moved to the National Capital, one had no idea how to pronounce Nepean, so one kept quiet until one learned the native pronunciation (Neh-PEE-uhn, where "eh" and "uh" are schwa-like; almost N'PEE'n). Outsiders tended to guess "NEE-peen" or "NEE-pee-an".

Lenox is on my way home these days, but I'm trying to avoid it until I've got a bit more money in the bank. On the other hand, when I do go it means I can avoid the horrible Sidney Marcus/Lenox/Cheshire Bridge series of intersections, which destroy my soul on a regular basis.

Lenox Square has a branch of Teavana which is my principal reason for going there (my beloved, of course, would want me to stop by the Lindt shop or Godiva...). When I lived in Brookhaven, I could just hop off MARTA at Lenox and then hop back on. When I lived in Buckhead, back in 03 and 04, I was just a couple of blocks from the Lenox station, and a couple of blocks from Phipps Plaza where there's another branch of Teavana. Now, I'll have to make an expedition when I run out of tea.

"Smok" is perfectly good modern Polish for dragon - most famously living in a cave under Wawel castle in Krakow.
Getting from there to schmuck feels like quite a jump, though.

#212: There's the "Calendar Prince" movement of Scheherazade, often spelled "Kalendar," but not always.

#232: I'm still keeping the cartoon I drew with the punchline "These are not the druids you're looking for." #260: That goes double for you. If all the mindreaders in the world would only go find something productive to do, and leave my cartoon ideas alone.

#303:
"There was a young man of Duquesne
Who got sick as he rode on a tresne;
Not just once, but agesne
And agesne and agesne
And agesne and agesne and agesne."

Now to get behind again.

Fragano @ 366: I've been promising myself one of the gorgeous teapots at Teavana for a couple years now, but it's hard to justify when my Bodum one still works just fine.

It's also given its name to the district, thus there's a Nepean Hospital, Nepean College of Advanced Education, and a bunch of businesses and community organisations. So, tho' it has probably now merged into the Greater Sydney Sprawl, the name is kept to identify a distinct locality.

Characteristically, this was named after something or someone Back Home, like Penrith. In this case the source seems to be the name of a British colonial administrator, an important sub-group of the Back Home variety. (Nepean is across a few different former colonies). Sydney is after a Lord Sydney, for instance, and Port Phillip Bay is from the first Governor, Arthur Phillip. The most notorious example is Governor Lachlan Macquarie. There may be virtually one of almost every geographical feature named after him, sometimes his wife, and even his home town.

The usual other methods are: a version of an Aboriginal word (which may be from the local language (Parramatta = probably 'place of eels'), or just one they like the sound of); or baldly descriptive (Blue Mountains, Emu Plains).

The baldly descriptive can be repeated very many times (giving the Geographical Names Board much work). There must be dozens or scores of Stringybark Creeks, for instance. So can the nostalgic ones, like Camperdown and Maryborough, for instance. Thus there's a place called Point Nepean on Port Phillip Bay in Melbourne too, which has minor, yet marked, places in Australian History. Cheviot Beach is there, for instance.

There once was a man of Dunleogharie
Who propounded and interesting theogharie
That the language of Erse
Has a shortage of verse
As the spelling makes poets so weogharie.

I don't think that's actually how it was spelled when I first read it, and I don't remember my two semesters of Gaelic well enough to reconstruct with perfect accuracy. But you get the idea.

I happen to live pretty much right next to Lenox Square, mainly so I can take MARTA to work and avoid all the traffic issues. For me, the downside of living so close is the temptation to just walk up and visit the Apple Store.

Sidney Marcus/Lenox/Buford Hwy/Cheshire Bridge is indeed a nightmare to drive through. I loathe it so much that if I'm going to something on Sidney Marcus (like Home Depot, frex), I usually go back home via Piedmont and Peachtree just to avoid navigating all those crazy intersections.

BTW, I think I have the proofreader's eye myself, and wouldn't mind getting a job as a copy editor or proofreader, but I have no idea how I'd go about it.

I can understand the seduction of the Apple Store, though my own attraction to Lenox Square is opposite it.

Hmm. Do you, by any chance, live in Phipps Place?

One of them was spelling; I screw up. A lot. Especially when I'm tired, or posting on Making Light. And yeah, I spell check.

The neurologist went down a long long list of words, hoping to find one I couldn't spell orally and / or in writing.

He found two: indictment, and sherbet.

Over the last few months, I've heard one transport person say that it'd be a good idea to go back to single-deck rail carriages in Sydney, and another that they might reinstitute double-deck buses. Sigh.

Thank you for the correction. It's been a *cough* few years, a person's memory might have eroded a bit.

That might be the impetus I need to finally stop being lazy and attend. Each year I think I should, since it's so convenient, and each year I never get around to buying a membership.

Do you, by any chance, live in Phipps Place?

Nah. Heights (formerly Summit) at Lenox. Just downhill from the Lenox station.

I used to live in Phipps Place, which is why I asked. Now, I live out in the sticks (and I mean sticks, there's a small forest right behind us -- left behind by the developers).

But whenever that Welsh town is mentioned, I wonder if anyone else remembers lovely Lake Manchaug in Massachusetts?

Or, to give it its full name, Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg, which has a lovely rhythm to it when you get it down. It's like speaking Ubbi Dubbi.

(Or, as some call it, Lake Webster, but where's the fun in that?)

My cousing Kirk and I spent part of summer talking sdrawkcab to each other. To this day I probably would answer to Ainat, and I still "think" of him as Krik.

bazaar, bizarre, accede, precede, supersede, barbecue, acquaint, accessory, necessary, desiccate, Cincinnati, occurrence, inoculate, accommodate, recommend, harassment, espresso, embarrass, corollary, grammar, hemorrhage, artillery, battalion, broccoli, guerrilla, iridescent, abattoir, miscellaneous, millennium, vermilion, millenarian, dilettante, minuscule, parallelism, a cappella, commitment, committed, committee, satellite, poinsettia, counselor, calendar, cemetery, stratagem, sorcerer, restaurateur, sergeant, prophesy, pharaoh, camouflage, pronunciation, fluorescent, suede, eulogy, pseudopod, bureaucracy, prophecy, fuchsia, feud, silhouette, jodhpurs, liaison, hierarchy, sovereignty, sacrilegious, deity, sieve, frieze, receive, seize, siege, weird

The spellchecker on my old word processor program is useless for anything but really common words.

I avoid using any obscure word which the reader's eye is likely to misinterpret as a more commonplace word. For instance, I never use the adjective 'minute' (as in 'a minute quantity') because the reader will mistake this for the noun 'minute'. I won't use 'tattoo' in the sense of a drumbeat (unless I'm writing about the Edinburgh Tattoo) because most readers associate 'tattoo' with skin art.

I will freely use the past tense 'led' but I'll avoid using 'lead' because the reader must stop a moment to figure out whether I mean 'lead' the metal or 'lead' the verb. I will use forms such as 'reading', 'reader' and 'reads' but I'll avoid using the word 'read' because the reader must take a moment to figure out whether this should be 'REED' (present tense) or 'RED' (past tense).

Re Debra Doyle's posting #105, which I've only just now seen: Gaelic is NOT counter-intuitive! Gaelic has very consistent rules (such as the broad-narrow rule, governing vowels) and there are only very occasional exceptions ... not at all like English!

If possible, the proper handling is to italicize it as a foreign phrase, thus: "She sang the opening number a capella." This is just one of the reasons why I'm irritated by those blog systems which don't support bold and italic in comments.

So you don't actually have to ignore anything; the pronoun agreement in that sentence is fine.

http://arxiv.org/pdf/0801.3114

Implications of Human Error Research for Spreadsheet Research and Practice

----excerpt----

... human error has been studied for over a century across a number of human cognitive domains, including linguistics, writing, ....

The research that does exist is disturbing because it shows that humans are unaware of most of their errors. This “error blindness” leads people to many incorrect beliefs about error rates and about the difficulty of detecting errors. In general, they are overconfident, substantially underestimating their own error rates and overestimating their ability to reduce and detect errors. This “illusion of control” also leads them to hold incorrect beliefs....
...
Some of the best human error research has been done in writing. Research on human writing, for instance, has shown that writing is extremely mentally demanding. When a person is typing or writing, they are also concerned about the grammar of the entire sentence as well as what he or she has already said and what he or she still plans to stay to complete the story or argument [Flower & Hayes, 1980; Hayes & Flower, 1980].

Figure 3 shows error rates by level. For mechanical actions, such as typing characters or words, human accuracy is 99.5% to 99.8%. At the level of complex thoughts, such as sentences, accuracy falls to 95% to 98%. At the level of a document, accuracy is 0%, in the sense that any document of nontrivial length will contain grammatical and spelling errors [Panko, 2007a]. ...
------end excerpt----------

Oh dear. Really?
... about 1,420 English pages for boyonet ...

I learned "accommodate" and "separate" early from an adult friend who used to quiz us with words to spell, trying to stump us (or to show off his spelling knowledge perhaps a little?)

Most of the words that came to mind as I started reading this entry have already been highlighted - many with double and non-double letters, as someone pointed out: professor, occurred, recommend...

The one commonly mis-expressed word that always bugs me is "mischievous." Even though it follows the i before e rule, for some reason people don't see the i in that place at all, and it gets spelled AND pronounced after the v! Presumably one error begat the other, though I don't know which difficulty came first... but it seems like such a dumb mistake; this is one thing I haven't been able to get over being irked by.

And did anyone mention "indict"?

"chaise longue" - not likely to be caught by spellcheck.

(My browser is highlighting "longue" but not "chaise.")

There might be a bit of poser value in it, but there's some science behind it. My experience is that gold-plated audio plugs are bit better made.

(And, incidentally, removing and reinserting a plug can be a useful move in itself.)

Here in Europe, we use the SCART standard for connections to TVs. I've never felt a need to go for expensive gold-plated SCART leads, but the really cheap leads are really cheap for a lot of reasons.

(Puts coal scuttle on head and hums The Imperial March - badly)

I find your lack of Clue disturbing.

Names being more variable and arbitrary than other kinds of words, I had trouble with "Delany" till I developed a mnemonic. He is the Singer of the Great Cities: "de LA & NY".

Another mnemonic (plus an arithmétic reminder) I put into song, to the tune of "Jingle Bells":

Double L, double M, just ten letters long,
That's how to spell "millennium", remember by this song.
One thousand years exactly -- the meaning of the word:
Year One began the first one, Two-thousand-one the third!

And another note in the long thread about "fuchsia": The sequence "chs" is pronounced "ks" in German, so "Fuchs", which is the surname of the botanist the flower was named for (and means "fox"), is fully regular in being pronounced "fooks", or in English "fyooks". ("oo" as in "school")