I total believe you're not in a weird magic cult winks

I've heard "chasm" pronounced as both "chaz-um" and "kaz-um"

PTSD flashback to my ESL little self always mispronouncing choir after they told me to join to practice my English.

Does he say "chaos" with a soft "ch" as well?

He also pronounces “tome” like “tomb”

My roommate in college did that. Drove me nuts, but the worst was that he rhymed "epitome" with "tome."

"kazum" is acceptable in my book. "Toom" is strange for a book though.

"My favorite rapper is Puff Daddy"

Like the post I saw once where a woman wrote she raped her little sister to help her sleep (with a picture of a baby wrapped in a blanket).

"English: if you can spell our words we'll literally give you a fucking trophy and a scholarship"

We have bees, and we also have really long, ancient words that no one uses or remembers like pulchritudinous, which means physical beauty or Myrmecophilous which is fond of ants.

Just the fact that we can have a whole contest around the idea, and that there's still room for words contestants haven't seen before, illustrates just how insane English is.

That's what happens when you mash several languages together. A lot of English terms have a Latin-derived and Germanic-derived word meaning the same thing.

Ahh, simplified and correct.

The pronunciation guide of a dictionary is pretty fuckin esoteric at this point.

I was educated in the 80s and they still didn't teach us how to pronounce words using the dictionary.

You can live your life to the fullest even if you don't know phonetic alphabet

*literally hundreds of years

The American Phonetic Dic-tionary of the English Language, edited by Dan S. Smalley, Cincinnati, 1855, has a unique interest. The oldest English dictionary to be printed in a "phonetic" alphabet

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/00335634209380758?needAccess=true

oh man, asking a kid in this era to look something up in the dictionary is quite the challenge.

In this book? why? why not just look it up online?

BECAUSE GODDAMNIT REASONS AND SHIT

how did you say it? Amelly-or-ate?

In fact I would wager almost any library would work for this. Librarians are by and large the most helpful and I judgmental people I have ever met. Every single interaction I've ever had with them has been positive.

Does that mean the game on PS4 is Bloodbin in Australia?

Yeah, that's my favorite girl scout cookie!

Typing requires thumbs; something only primates have.

...another thing that (some) primates have is an island where rich people go to molest children.

Some of these primates are greedy and/or terrible primates, and they don't want you to look up any connection between a primate named Trump and a primate named Epstein (spoiler alert, those primates rape underaged primates and brag about it to each other).

So many of the audio pronunciations are computer generated, I used to like IPA but then I stopped drinking so it doesn't really help any more.

I just wouldn't think to look up a word I assumed I was pronouncing correctly. I'm pretty good at this reading thing, and so I apply the standards, but words like epitome and ethereal are just here to fuck with us.

When I check the dictionary, it says in the US it's pronounced goo-dah.

Well ... what is it then? If you don't tell me I'm gonna keep pronouncing it with my Minnesotan accent!

I am American and I said "Gowda".

That right?

I loved The Expanse, and Jefferson Mays is amazing

But "jimbals" drove me crazy

For Ray Porter, his inability to pronounce "Archimedes" was bad enough they made him go back and re-record a book.

Did the same with misshapen. miss happen. My genius IQ gf was laughing her ass off!

"I look miss happen in that picture!"

"What?"