@passenger Appar-Theyd is a new failure state to me. I’d always heard ap-PART-hide in the southern US. Your transcription makes sense of the Dutch origin; not coincidentally it renders the spelling comparable to Scots.
Yeah, that's a pretty common pronounciation too. It's one of these words which everyone sees written down rather than hears spoken, so there are probably all sorts of pronounciations out there.
To mispronounce a word because you've only ever seen it written down means that you read more widely than your contemporaries. It is a badge of great honour.
@passenger I've heard this described as a "reader's accent" and I adore it.
I once got to find out in front of a crowded high school classroom that I'd inferred the pronunciation of "brazier" wrong my entire life, to rhyme with vizier - not a particularly experience for anyone, but especially a teen who was already teased about her chest. (Fortunately my awesome teacher acted like it hadn't registered but stayed excitedly focused on the content of what I'd said to keep the conversation moving.)
Oh, I love that term for it.
@passenger @cwicseolfor My friend group calls it Booklish. (Yes, Anglo-centric.) Every one of us has a few words we knew by sight but not by sound.
We shan't speak of how old I was when I learned the proper pronunciation of "epitome."
I don't know for sure how to pronounce that either; uh, epp-it-oh-mee?
@passenger I'll call that correct. If I knew IPA and had access to the characters, I could be more precise, but for our purposes? Yes.
Young me heard it internally as eh-pi-tome.
I had a specific word that was my nemesis when I was learning English as a kid and I read books in English: "negligible."
I stumbled over pronouncing it a lot, so I found that it was easier if I pronounced the second g as a y sound, like "neg-lee-ibble". I later found out that this was wrong, but I still kept saying it.
@GramrgednAngel @passenger I feel obligated contribute yet more trivia: "bookish" directly transliterates the name of one of the two written modes of Norwegian (Bokmål, book-speech.)
Fortunately, as far as I've been able to tell, if you read Bokmål you will near always be correct to do so in bookish (slight allowances for recent loanwords aside, especially all those French ones with silent letters.)
@GramrgednAngel @passenger Aw, darn. Yeah, that L is taken (both by me and) from the portmanteau directly with English, i’nnit. I’m going to blame excessive exposure to the use of the term “simlish,” which also shouldn’t strictly speaking include the L; we too easily drop the Angle etymology in favor of the common abbreviation “Eng,” I think.
Not for the first time: English ruins everything! Disreputable hound of a tongue, total mess and yet still too lovable to shove outside.
@cwicseolfor @passenger Truth!
@cwicseolfor @passenger I love this term. My mom still makes fun of me for mispronouncing façade as a kid. And it hurts a surprising amount? Like sorry you never used the word and I read it and thought I had sounded it out correctly? Why is this still an appropriate thing to tease me about 30 years later?
@SRLevine @passenger It's SUCH A STRANGE CHOICE. About equal weight on "parents: don't punish the behaviours (reading) you want to see" and "if your child, over whom you have almost comprehensive control, lacks life experience, whose fault is that?"
And then they're STILL AT IT NOW?? If it comes up again, imo, insert your annoyance that ***they didn't bother teaching you French orthography*** on what they considered a suitable timeframe - I had that exact rebuttal more than once, if you want to borrow it.
My parents both did it intermittently too. Fortunately they both had the same sort of strongly-marked features I inherited combined with the exact dose of underestimation of me to create these PRICELESS facial expressions when unseated by my unexpected knowledge of something, so that was far more memorable than the derision. Watch out for my upcoming paper, "Easily gasted parental flabbers as an unexpected psychological protective factor."
@cwicseolfor @passenger The thing is that my sister mocked me on the phone for getting something wrong a couple of months ago. I don't even remember the word, it was neither super common nor rare, but something I read a lot more than hear and at this point it's just family accepted to make fun of me for doing that I guess. This mostly happens over the phone, so they don't get my blinking in disbelief facial expressions that they felt like correcting me was important.
(I am reasonably secure in the fact my vocabulary is probably larger than either of theirs, and I read more books* than them combined, not that they aren't readers, but I'm a Reader, and there is a difference)
*I include self published and fanfic here too
@SRLevine @passenger I sense there's a whole lot more 1990s-"OOOOOOH" behaviour from people who feel like they've finally got one over on you when you're usually dubbed "the smart one."
Come to think of it I think that actually probably tempered my parents' indulgence in that specific form of mockery, they were both capital-R Readers.
Oct 26, 2026, 5:25 AM@SRLevine @cwicseolfor @passenger
wait a minute brazier doesnt rhyme with vizier?
@nolan @SRLevine @passenger AFAIK it's "viz-EER" and "BRAY-zhur."
I thought it was just a homophone with the garment.
@cwicseolfor @nolan @passenger Now I'm even more lost. I thought those words were pronounced the same!
@SRLevine @nolan @passenger I definitely did feel compelled to double-check before tooting by having Google read "the vizier behind the brazier" in standard American because I keep my computer set to a rotation of different dictation accents, ha.
@SRLevine @nolan @passenger Update: "The vizier in the brasierre behind the brazier" also reads out the former two as rhyming, and the latter not.
Oct 26, 2026, 5:35 AM@cwicseolfor @SRLevine @passenger
brain wandered off to thinking about how "reader's accent" and "non-reader's accent" are unique and curious tells
Oct 26, 2026, 5:49 AMCf. Calliope syndrome, from which myself derive the term Calliopeism.
@cwicseolfor @passenger This one I haven't figured out yet
@passenger @cwicseolfor I feel like this happens more in English than in other languages. In most other languages, when you see a word written down, you also often know how to pronounce it.
@erwinrossen @passenger Absolutely. 'English orthography' is almost an oxymoron. Polish, for instance, has a ton of redundancies and exceptions, but they still seem rule-bounded. Even French is predictable, it just has vestigial features. MOST languages behave as if not to confuse anyone deliberately, and then there's the one that managed to force itself into lingua franca position, to the exasperation of people from civilized tongues.
@cwicseolfor English is after all a language that has "pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary" (apols to James Nicoll)
Oct 27, 2026, 11:56 AM
@passenger @cwicseolfor
At least here on the west coast; I've mostly heard it pronounced apart-hide with the emphasis on the last syllable. And that pronunciation is used in the media as well as in private.
I did a momentary double-take there and thought you were also South African before I realised you meant the west coast of some other country.
"Wait, is laprice from St Helena Bay or somewhere?"