How to speak American

The Big Book Of Beastly Mispronunciations: The Complete Opinionated Guide For The Careful Speaker by Charles Harrington Elster offers suggestions on how to pronounce thousands of words and expressions.  Here are a few of the 100 examples listed!

Grocery GROH-suh-ree or GROHS-ree
The word is acceptably pronounced either in three or two syllables. Avoid, please, with all your might, the ugsome GROH-shuh-ree and GROHSH-ree. Only one dictionary, M-W 10 (1993), recognizes the slovenly GROSH-ree, which is straight out of our Lower Slobbovia.

Hundred HUHN-drid.
Don’t transpose the r and e in hundred and say hunderd. Also avoid the even more beastly HUH-nurd, where the r and e are switched and there is no medial d sound at all. These pronunciations are slovenly and uneducated.

Realtor REE-ul-tur. Do not say REE-luh-tur.
A great many educated speakers have difficulty with this word. I have heard it mispronounced by radio and TV newspeople, by businesspeople, professionals, and people in high places, and by Realtors themselves. The problem comes from inadvertently switching the l and the a making rela- out of real-, which results in the beastly mispronunciation  REE-luh-tur. It can be resolved by carefully saying the word real and following it with –tur. See athlete, February, irrelevant, jewelry, nuclear.

Salmon SAM-un.
L silent, a as in ham. Anything else is beastly—er, fishy. See salmonella.

Washington WAHSH-ing-tun (or WAWSH-).
Don’t let an r creep into the first syllable: Warsh-ington is beastly. Also, don’t drop the g and say WAHSH-in-tun (careless), or clip a syllable and say WAHSH-tun (slovenly) See wash.

With WITH (th as in this and there), not WITH (rhymes with pith and myth).
This is an avowed pet peeve of mine, and by no means do all authorities agree with me on this punctilio, though many do. I believe firmly that in cultivated speech, with and words beginning with it—withal (with-AWL), withdraw, wither, withhold, within, without, withstand—should be pronounced with the “voiced” th of bathe, lather, and rather, and not with the “voiceless” th of path and bath. One advantage of following this rule is stronger, clearer speech. The voiced th is resonant; the voiceless th is lispy and weak.

I’m guilty of that last one…and several more.  My favorite pet peeves of pronunciation is Halloween… not Holloween as my friends all call it.

The complete list of 100 Beastly Mispronunciations

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