Mispronunciations that can get on your nerves

Sometimes some people really get on my wig. Just to let you know, I don’t wear a wig but I purposely said it to make a point. What I said was actually incorrect. What I meant to say was ‘wick’. This phrase basically means that something or someone is getting on your nerves.

But many folks will say wig and that mispronunciation does get on my wick. It’s not that commonly mispronounced but an awful lot of people do. And that’s not the only phrase or word that is pronounced or misused and some are more common than others.

The most irritatingly misused phrases are ‘you and me’ versus ‘you and I’. People are under a massive misconception that you can never say ‘you and me’ because they’ve been misled into believing that it’s incorrect. But whoever told them this is completely wrong. You can absolutely say ‘you and me’ when the context requires it. For example, which one sounds correct? ‘They gave it to my brother and I’? or ‘they gave it to my brother and me’? Dissecting the sentences will give you the correct answer. ‘They gave it to my brother’, ‘they gave it to me’ and ‘they gave it to I’. Clearly the first two are correct.

The next most commonly mispronounced word is etcetera. It’s often mispronounced ‘excetera’ even by the most high level news anchors. Maybe they don’t know how it’s spelt and think it’s spelt ‘excetera’. If they knew the correct spelling, they’d know that there’s neither a ‘c’ nor an ‘x’ after the ‘e’. Laying and lying are often misused by people in both written and verbal form. For example they’ll say ‘I was laying on the sofa’ instead of ‘lying on the sofa’. The second implies an act in which the person lies flat on the bed himself whereas the first implies that someone is placing something in a horizontal position. And it’s not ‘lay low’ but ‘lie low’.

One of my greatest pet peeves is what I feel is a gross misuse of the words ‘that’ and ‘who’. In my opinion, 99% of the English speaking population uses the word ‘that’ when they should be using ‘who’. For example, they will say ‘this is the man that saved me’ when the correct sentence is ‘this is the man who saved me’. If a chair or sofa had cushioned someone’s fall, the correct sentence would be ‘this is the sofa that saved me’. The difference is that the man is a human whereas the chair is not. Therefore, ‘who’ is always used when referring to a person and ‘that’ is used for everything else, including dogs, cats and chairs.

And it always gets on my nerves when people say ‘are you angry at me?’ when they should be saying ‘’are you angry with me’. It is, however, okay to say ‘are you mad at me?’ but people never seem to use ‘with’. And there are folk who say, ‘should of’ instead of ‘should have’ and ‘could of’ instead of ‘could have’ or ‘drawring’ instead of drawing’.

It’s almost as if they were never corrected by their English teachers at school. But there are some words that simply have a geographical or ethnic origin. Let’s take the word ‘ask’. We hear almost every person of colour across the UK and US say ‘arks’or ‘ax’ instead. We often think they are mispronouncing it but we’d be somewhat wrong. It sounds wrong today but it was a commonly used word by most people in the 1800s and is still prevalent today. That being said, most educated people of colour pronounce it ‘ask’ because the ‘arks’ or ‘ax’ now sounds uneducated.

And finally the words ‘aluminium’ and ‘dove’ which the Americans like to pronounce and use very differently. They seem to have dropped the ‘I’ altogether so the word to them is ‘aluminum’. It’s not incorrect to them anymore than is the use of ‘color’ instead of ‘colour’. But their use of the word ‘dove’ really is the oddest thing. To British people, ‘dove’ is a bird from the pigeon family but to Americans it is the past tense of ‘to dive’ into a pool, example.