Conference thebay::joyoflex

    There are also only two syllables in the word "athlete", with no
    extra letters between the h and the l.
    
    Both "February" and "library" have 2 rs in them.
    
    "Junta" is discussed elsewhere in this conference.

    Being relatively new to this conference, I don't know if the
    three syllable versions of "pancake" and "chimney" have been
    discussed yet?  As a child I called them "panacakes" and
    "chimineys."  How many syllables do you use whan saying
    "conference" quickly? [CON-frince]

Another hopeless case is "vichyssoise."  Not vish'-e-swah, but vish'-e-swahz.

Larry

    re: .1
    
    Actually... I listened in confusion when the young lady asked me
    if I wished to have "R-juice" on my prime rib some years ago.
    
    re: .2
    
    A remarkably popular version in the south (I think I have only heard
    it there), is "chim-bly".  The number I have heard use that particular
    version cannot be counted using all of my digits and then some.
    
    Gary

    Re: .0
    
        "De Stijl."  It's Dutch and means "the style," and is pronounced Da
    	Style.  The peculiar spelling comes from the Dutch alphabet not having
    	a Y.  They use IJ for that sound.

    They use "ij" because it's consistent with Dutch spelling rules,
    not because of any supposed need to compensate for letters available
    in English.  At any rate, it's foolhardy for a user of English to
    deem another language's spelling conventions as "peculiar."
    
Lew Lasher

There are also dis-sect (not die-sect), and zoology (zoe-ol-a-gy not 
zoo-ol-a-gy.)  No one ever gets these two right.

Larry

    RE:  R-juice:
    
    More often, I hear, "Would you like it with au jus?"
    
    AAUGH!!!!!
    
    Spd

    Re .7:
    
    I've also heard it, "Would you like some au jus gravy?"
    <sigh>
    
    Steve Kallis, Jr.

   re: .8

   Or, as actually seen at the MK1 cafeteria:

		"Chicken Coq au Vin in Wine Sauce"

   I kid you not.

   -- Sam

    this was on the menue at Welsley college many years ago
    
    Chili con carne with meat
    Chili con carne without meat

    and I generally wake up in the morning looking fairly BED-raggled.
    
    
    

   Hey, your clothes look really depressed!
   
   
   
   Yeah, they're wrinkled!
   
   

    I always thought the two presidents, Teddy & FD, pronounced their
    name so the first syllable rhymed with "hose".  However, I often
    hear it pronounced something like "rouze".  Drives me nutty!
    
    Spd

        "Asterisk."

�    See the word.  See how it is spelled.  Now, why should it be neccessary
�    to say that it is pronounced AS-ter-isk and not AS-trix or AS-trick?

    In Digital I've always heard it pronounced `star'; is this convention a
    way of being kind to people who can't read? 
    
        "Aficionado."

�    It is pronounced ah-FEESH-eeyo-NAH-do and not avocado.

    Pet peeve - I do wish people who watched Fawlty Towers (and therefore
    know all there is to know about pronouncing Spanish) wouldn't fiddle
    around with -th- 
    
        "Bourgeois."

�    The first of our Fear-of_French words.  Do pronounce the R.  Do not
�    hide it.  It's there to be used.  It's BOOR-zhwah.  

    Historical point: there's an old typeface - I've only ever seen
    it used in a book known as `the Ruby Bible' - called Bourgeois.
    Typesetters call it b'goice.
    
�        "Guarentee:"  Rhyme the first syllable with hair.

    Fine.  Do what you like with the first syllable, but spell the second
    one right. (In England, I've never heard the gair- pronunciation.)
    
�        "Harassment:"  This, too, is a hopeless case.  The accent is on the
�    first syllable.  But most Americans will continue to put it on the
�    second.  Sorry.

    ... and a lot of British English-speakers too, I'm afraid. And don't
    even mention `secretary'.
    
    
    Final pet peeve (part of the menagerie):
    
    I think it was only about 10 years ago that it became fashionable to
    talk about machismo.  People who followed the fashion tried to give the
    impression of knowledgeability by pronouncing the word as an Italian
    would, with a `key' in the middle. I don't think I've ever heard an
    Italian speaking Spanish; but I suspect that anyone who tried to follow
    the advice of the Real Academ�a Espa�ola would make some kind of -ch-
    sound. 

    Final note: I've often heard the Spanish Don referred to as `don
    key-oh-tea'. But I reckon this a hopeless case; I've always found
    it possible to avoid naming him.
    
    Bob

    

    I had to give up pronouncing "croissant" correctly because of the
    blank looks I got in the bakery.
    
>             "Asterisk."
> 
> �    See the word.  See how it is spelled.  Now, why should it be neccessary
> �    to say that it is pronounced AS-ter-isk and not AS-trix or AS-trick?
> 
>    In Digital I've always heard it pronounced `star'; is this convention a
>    way of being kind to people who can't read? 

    More likely because "star" is a lot easier to say. ("Just type 'DELETE
    asterisk full-stop asterisk semi-colon asterisk.'")
    
    I think this pronunciation owes a lot to Asterix and Obelix the
    Gauls, myself.
    
    The company called Nestle(') seems to have a corporate change of
    pronunciation every few years. With the acute accent over the "e",
    it should be "nest-lay"; but I believe the American division pronounces
    it "nes-lee", while in Britain it used to be "nessuls" but has recently
    become 'french-fried' to "ness-lay".
    
    Andy
        

    On the other hand, to the onomatopoetically inclined, * is 'splat'.

    
    
    How about Wedn'sday - instead of Wensday, and
    Feb-rue-ary instead of Feb-you-ary?
    
    And if you say on-ve-lope and I say en-ve-lope, and you say 
    to-mah-to and I say to-may-to, should we call the whole thing off?
    
    -Gloria
    

    re .17 
    
    �How about Wedn'sday - instead of Wensday, and
    
    I looked up Wednesday in my dictionary to see if that's how they
    said to pronounce it and was aghast to find that, while the first
    (of two) syllable was, unquestionably Wenz, the second could be
    pronounced "dee" or "day", with "dee" the preferred.  Augh!
    
    Spd

Re: .-1  Should you burn your dictionary for preferring Wensdee.
Yes, but please "burn" it, don't "buhn" it.  As what's-his-name says on tv:
"we make our money the old-fashioned way - we uhhhhhhn it" (read "earn").

    Re.17
    
>    And if you say on-ve-lope and I say en-ve-lope, and you say 
>    to-mah-to and I say to-may-to, should we call the whole thing off?
    
    Bit of a hot po-tah-to , that  ;^|  <--- This is a grimace
    
    
    Is it ,
    
    We pulled our resources together , or
    We pooled our resources together , or
    
    touch my resources and die !?
    
    
    John J
    
    

    Another possibly hopeless case is "err".  I was counted among the hopeless
until I "looked it up".  Well, it's only Random House, but it's authoritative
enough.  Preferred is "ur", with a circumflex thingie over the u; secondarily,
you can try to say the "e" as in "ebb", which comes close to "air", but not
quite.  Oh, well, to be human is to ur.

    And everyone knows that BEAST-ee-al-i-ty is to do something bizzare
    with a beast.  Perhaps that is where the phrase: "...to sooth the
    savage beast..." came from.
    
    Thx,
       Rgdz,
           Scott

    Re: .15
    
    > I had to give up pronouncing "croissant" correctly because of the
    > blank looks I got in the bakery.

    What's the incorrect way then?  I only know of one pronunciation.
    
    Jeff.

re .17
    
    Is it ,
    
    We pulled our resources together 
No, not really.  That's okay, but the expression goes "We pooled our resources"
Which makes...

    We pooled our resources together

kind of a tautology (why would one pool them separately, unless one were 
talking about 2 sets of resources)
    
    touch my resources and die !?

This is the realistic one.

Chuck
    
    

    Re .24
    
>   re .17
    
    You mean re .20
    
    
    As a manager you may have a few programmers (or whatever) working
    for you .
    From time to time a condition known as madness sets in . In most
    cases this is detremental(sp?) .
    You would need to get them back on the straight and narrow .
    
    Ergo , we pulled our resources together .
    
    But you are right with 'pooling together' . 'Together' is superfluous
    to the statement . 
    But I don't think it's used as much as the former  :^)
    
    
    John J
    

>                   Perhaps that is where the phrase: "...to sooth the
>    savage beast..." came from.


Actually, the phrase is "...to soothe the savage breast" -- although I 
personally have never been attacked by one.  :-)

					>>>==>PStJTT

    Re: .22
    
    > And everyone knows that BEAST-ee-al-i-ty is to do something bizzare
    > with a beast.
    
    The definition is right, but the word is BESTitality.  Nor is it
    pronounced BEASTitality.
    
    Bernie

    Re .26 (PStJTT):
    
>Actually, the phrase is "...to soothe the savage breast" -- although I 
>personally have never been attacked by one.  :-)
 
    I think "savage breast" meant "the breast of a savage," as opposed
    to a Philip Roth mightmare. :-)
    
    I'd imagine aloe-based moisturizing cream would work as well. ;-)
    
    Steve Kallis, Jr.   

    re .27 (re .22):

    >> And everyone knows that BEAST-ee-al-i-ty is to do something bizzare
    >> with a beast.
    
    >The definition is right, but the word is BESTitality.  Nor is it
    >pronounced BEASTitality.
     
    That was Scott's point, exactly.  If you go back to .22, you'll
    notice that its title is -< Best of Prey >-
    
    					andrew   
    

    Re: .29 (re .27 (re .22))
    
    That may have been his point, but it wasn't exact - whatever his
    title.
    
    Bernie

    re: .26
    
    >  --although I personally have never been attacked by one.
    
    I believe Woody Allen was attacked by one in _Everything You Ever
    Wanted to Know About Sex..._ :->
    

    RE .29 RE .27 RE .22
    
    >>> And everyone knows that BEAST-ee-al-i-ty is to do something bizzarre
    >>> with a beast.
    
    >>The definition is right, but the word is BESTiality.  Nor is it
    >>pronounced BEASTiality.
    
    >That was Scott's point, exactly.
    
    Indeed it was, and thank you!  I am familiar with that particularly 
    virulent form of perversion and am aware of it's spelling and
    pronunciation.  Likewise, I am aware that music hath charms to soothe
    the savage breast.  My point, as .29 was kind enough to point out,
    was that;  1) The similarity between "BEST" and "BEAST" is strong
    enough to cause (less literate) people to mispronounce the term:
    bestiality;  2) Just for good measure, I threw in a very similar
    confusion that many, many people seem to have about the afore-mentioned
    prose regarding music, and BEASTs/BREASTs therof.
    
    To sum up, my tongue was in my cheek, and I think you all are just
    BEASTS for not seeing that!
    
    Thx,
       Rgdz,
           Scott.
    

    re .32 (Scott):
    
    To facilitate things, the tongue-in-cheek icon is   :-P
    
    Steve Kallis, Jr

>    To sum up, my tongue was in my cheek, and I think you all are just
>    BEASTS for not seeing that!

Sure, easy to say now -- after we've brought you abreast of the 
situation and bested your beastly remarks.    
						>>>==>PStJTT

    Re . 33
    
    And I always thought that  :-P  meant you were smoking a pipe, or
    panting ...

>    And I always thought that  :-P  meant you were smoking a pipe, or
>    panting ...

I always thought it was the general form of "I think I'm crazy" with

			{:-P

being the more specialized "I think I'm Napoleon."

					>>>==>PStJTT

    Soon we can use `thorn' for nyaa-n'yaa.
    
    						Ann B.

Some more I can think of:

	Pronounce "era":  Is it "EER-uh" ?  Perhaps "ERR-uh" ?

	Then there's the word "victuals", which apparently is correctly
	pronounced "vittles".  (look it up!)

	How about "escape".  Shouldn't be tricky, but I often hear
	people say "excape".  (but not seemingly correlated with the same
	poor miserable slobs that say expresso) [only kidding, I'm
	as slobbenly as them]

How about words that are hard to spell.  Here are words I think are hard
to spell:

	occurrence (two pitfalls, the "rr" vs. "r" and the "enc" vs. "anc")

	apparent ("ent" vs. "ant")

	separate (I used to think the correct spelling depended on usage.
	For instance I thought this was a correctly spelled sentence:

		I seperate the marbles into separate piles according to
		color.

		(there really is only ONE word - separate)

	committment (how many m's are correct ?  how many t's ?)

What words do you find hard to spell.  Maybe we can converge upon
the hundred hardest-to-spell words in English !

Then there are words that I don't find hard to spell but lots of other
people seem to, according to memos I receive from them.  For instance:

	usefull (correct spelling is "useful")

/Eric

    re -.1  
    
    I have trouble spelling "gray".  I always want to write, "grey".
    
    Spd

    Re .41
    
    gray n. [< OE graeg] a color made by mixing black and white 
         ...
    
    grey adj.,n.,v. Brit. sp. of GRAY
    
    This from one of those little "paperback" dictionaries,
    Webster's New World Dictionary of the American Language, 1975.
    
    Dan
       

    Re .41,.42
    
    �     I have trouble spelling "gray".  I always want to write, "grey".

    Don't fight it. The people (American, I think) who have been working
    on the latest revision of DEC Std 073 spent weeks dithering over
    how to spell grey (an important point, because _grey_ will be the
    colour of the DEC Std ring binder for all eternity - starting nowish).
    
    Re .39
    
    I've got it already, see? (probably not :-�)
    
    b
    

    From the 1978 New Edition Webster's School & Office Dictionary .
    
    Words often misspelled
    
    Cite
    Led
    Lead
    All right
    Lose
    Tear
    Piece
    Whim
    
    Words often mispronounced
    
    Emu
    Holocaust
    Short-lived
    
    
    {8-Q   Smoking something not quite legal
    
    John J
    
    
    

    Re: .42
    
    > gray n. [< OE graeg] a color made by mixing black and white 
    >     ...
    >
    > grey adj.,n.,v. Brit. sp. of GRAY

    You got that slightly wrong. It should be:

    grey n. [< OE graeg] a color made by mixing black and white 
         ...
    
    gray adj.,n.,v. N. Amer. sp. of GREY

    :-) :-) :-)
    
    One word I've seen misspelled more often than most is:
    
    	supersede
    
    Jeff.

    Can we have English back when you're through with it?
    
    Thx,
       Rgdz,
           Harlsbriligsteiner

    re .last_few:
    
    Gray isn't a _color_; it's a shade.
    
    Steve Kallis, Jr.

    DECspell dunna like "grey".
    
    Spd

    Re .45 ("supersede")
    
    I once read that only one word in the English language (well, 
    American English, anyway) ends in "sede" ("supersede") and only
    three words end in "cede" (what are they?).  The rest that end with
    that sound end in "ceed."
    
    Dan

    Well there's accede and precede.  And there's concede.  Is that
    the three you meant?
    
    Jeff (thinking at the keyboard)

    All three of your examples were in my dictionary.  I suppose
    the word "cede" wasn't counted because the trivia was about
    "-sede," "-cede," and "-ceed" as suffixes.  That would explain
    why "seed" and words ending in "-seed" were ignored, too.
    
    Dan
    
    I had not recalled the three examples when I wrote .-2, so I
    don't know if they were the three in .-1.

Some more examples are:

	antecede
	intercede
	recede
	retrocede
	secede

I'd be surprised if this list is complete.

					I

    Maybe it is the "-ceed" words that are rare?
    
    I have read lots of trivia about words, but they are hard to
    verify ...
    
         no words rhyme with "orange" or "oblige"
         only two words have the five vowels a-e-i-o-u
           once each and in order ("facetious" and ?)
         .
         .
         .
    
    What color is a retrocede?

    Re < Note 463.57 by ZFC::DERAMO "Daniel V. D'Eramo" >

    
>    only two words have the five vowels a-e-i-o-u
>    once each and in order ("facetious" and ?)
     
    Abstemious.
    
    
    
    Ian.

    Re: .47
    
    > Gray isn't a _color_; it's a shade.
    
    What do you mean by that exactly?  Certainly in common usage it
    is treated as if it is a color.  If someone asks us the color
    of something that is gray, we don't say anything like "It isn't
    any color at all; it is a shade of black, called 'gray'."
    
    I know from experience that both artists and printers refer to gray
    as a color in their common usage.  Gray is a mixture of black and
    white, but that fact alone does not make it a non-color; we would
    have regard pink as a non-color because it is a mixture of red and
    white, and orange because it is a mixture of red and yellow, etc.
    
    Are you saying that it doesn't fit the physicist's definition of
    color, that it doesn't reflect light within a certain range of
    wavelengths? 
    
    Bernie
    

    Re .59:
    
>>    What do you mean by that exactly?  Certainly in common usage it
>>    is treated as if it is a color.  If someone asks us the color
>>    of something that is gray, we don't say anything like "It isn't
>>    any color at all; it is a shade of black, called 'gray'."
    
    You mean you don't just give the RGB or HLS values?

    Bernie's absolutely right. The semantic field for colours is a sphere,
    with many words in it which would probably not pass a physicists
    test, but which in language are colours. The relationships between
    the words is probably different to the genuine physical relationships
    between the reflected light (if that's what counts to a physicist.)
    
    Phillip

    Re .last_few
    
    Yup. Geoffrey [sp?] Samson [do.] - lecturer in something lingistical at
    Lancaster - wrote (in _Liberty_and_Language_, I think) that in one
    South-East Asian language there were only three words in the semantic
    field for colour-words.  Those words equate roughly to the English
    `green' `brown' and `wet'. I don't go around saying that wet is a
    colour; but that's not because I know that wetness has little to
    do with reflected light. It's because in my language `wet' isn't
    a colour.
    
    b 

    re "Halley":  I don't know how Sir Edmund pronounced his name either,
    but Americans often misspell it as "Haley."
    
    re "Hyundai":  Until I hear a Korean pronounce it, I wouldn't be
    so quick to believe the pronunciation heard on American TV.  (And
    I'm not so sure that 'Subaru' should be pronounced SOO-beru.)
    
  --Simon
    

    "Halley" pronounced it "Hawley" according to a BBC program that
    was on when the comet came round.

    re .63:
    
>    re "Hyundai":  Until I hear a Korean pronounce it, ...
    
    Now I have heard it pronounced by a Korean (who lives in Seoul)
    and the "dai" in "Hyundai" does sound somewhat like "day" (American
    pronunciation) than "dye."
    
    By the way, the name of the South Korean president, Roh, is pronounced
    "no."  I guess he didn't want to be known as "Mr. No" and spelled
    his name "Roh."  :-)
    
  --Simon
    

    re:.63
    
    Does Mr. Roh have a doctoral degree? Then he'd be "Dr. No".
    
    --- jerry

    RE: Hyundai and Mr. Roh
    
    In the Hyundai commercials that I have seen on American TV, the word is
    mispronounced by the omission of the -y- and the pronunciation of -dai
    as -die rather than -day or -deh.
    
    As far as Mr. Roh is concerned, the name in Korean is spelled Roh, but
    pronounced No.  This is common in Korean where the initial r sound is
    frequently replaced with n.
    
    Wook (Korean-American)