Mum's the Word
Time for another story about my darling mother. She actually found the last one quite hilarious (she's a good sport) so I thought I would do another one.
My mother has troubles with pronunciation. It's a miracle I speak even half as well as I do after growing up listening to her speak. I can only figure she learned these terrible speech habits as a child, in school, since as far as I have noticed neither of her parents speak badly. My grandmother is actually a pretty accomplished wordsmith. She's into crossword puzzles and those elusive word jumbler puzzles in the paper. So here is a list of words my mother commonly mispronounces:
Library - "I just want to stop at the liberry on the way home." Yes, my mother says "liberry" like a toddler.
Breakfast - "The best part of going on vacation is going out to breffast every morning!" Replace the K with an F and you too can say "breakfast" just like Mom!
Pumpkin - "Are we having punkin pie?" Yep, another toddler-style pronunciation.
Bathing Suit - "I own 126 million bading suits." How does one "bade"? Why do you need a special suit to go "bading"?
Dungarees - This isn't actually a mispronunciation, but who still calls jeans dungarees?! Mother, that's who.
Flip-flops - She calls them "thongs". Sadly for her, a thong is now underwear and when she goes on and on about which thongs go with which bading suit people look at her funny.
Chimney - "Do we need to have someone come clean our chim-en-y?" We know where she got this one, and we're all looking at you, Mary Poppins..."Chim-chimeny, chim-chimeny, chim-chim-cheroo..."
Wheelbarrow - Up until a month or two ago, she thought this was a "wheel barrel".
Facade - Up until last week this was a "fa-kade".
And the classic Mother Mispronunciation Moment: she was playing Scrabble with my aunt and asked her to look up a word to make sure it was actually a word:
Mom: "It looks like a word...but I'm just not sure..."
Aunt: "Well what is it?"
Mom: "Mow-ve. M-O-V-E."
Aunt: "M-O...You mean MOVE?!"
 |
| Miss Thang Herself |
[Note: This list is by no means comprehensive. I'm sure I've forgotten some doozies and I'm sure she'll come out with something new any day now.]
