Pronownseeashun

"Hermione was now teaching Krum to say her name properly; he kept calling her 'Hermy-own.'

'Her-my-oh-nee,' she said slowly and clearly.

'Herm-own-ninny.'

'Close enough,' she said, catching Harry's eye and grinning."

-from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J. K. Rowling

I consider myself to be pretty good with words. I can write reasonably well. I'm an excellent editor. (Of other people's work, at least -- not so much with this blog.) I have a respectable vocabulary. However, there is one aspect of language with which I am miserable: pronunciation.

Sometimes, the root of the problem is simply that I've never heard a word before. If that's the case, my brain simply tries to pronounce every letter and take a guess at the stress syllables. These guesses are usually based on a word I know. It seems like a reasonable plan, right?

But it doesn't always work. I clearly remember reading the passage above, because up until that point, I had pronounced Hermione's name as Her-mee-OH-nee. Why? Because that's the only way I could figure out to pronounce all the vowels, and because her name looked vaguely like minestrone.

Other times, words are very long and my brain just gets overwhelmed. For instance, there is an outdoor market in Daley Plaza in Chicago every year at Christmastime. The name of this market is as follows: Christkindlmarket. It is pronounced just like it looks: krist-kin-dle-mar-ket. However, for some reason, my brain just cannot translate this word into sounds. I usually give up and say the some other words I know that are close: Kris Kringle Market. I'm sure the Germans are thrilled with the way I slaughter their language.

So, I can't pronounce unfamiliar words, and I can't pronounce long words. That doesn't seem so bad. But alas, there are occasions when words both short and familiar still come out wrong. Early in my editing career, I learned that the word "leading" is used to refer to the space between lines of text. Not knowing any better, I read this word as leed-ing. I figured it referred to one line leading to the next. Almost a year later, I found out that the word was led-ing, referring to lead parts of old printing presses. I know now that the word is led-ing, but if I am not concentrating, I still say leed-ing. I hate it, because it makes me seem like I don't know what I'm talking about. Curse you, English language! You AND your heteronyms.

You would think that hearing words before seeing them written would solve a lot of my problems, but that's not always true, either. Just as I can't always translate words into the correct sounds, I don't always assign the right letters to sounds that I hear. I can still remember an episode from 15+ years ago when I was playing Catchphrase, a game that requires you to describe words or phrases for your teammates to guess. My turn came, and this is the word I saw: quiche. Having never seen the word before, I tried to think of a word that sounded like those letters might be pronounced, and I came up with the word cliche. I spent my allotted 30 seconds trying to get my team to say cliche, and I failed. Somehow, it came out that the word was actually quiche. My teammates were annoyed, the opposing team found it hysterical, and I was monumentally embarrassed.

So, to everyone out there that has suffered from my terrible pronunciation -- people with unusual names, audiences at my presentations, and my teammates during Catchphrase -- my sincerest apologies. Next time I simply smile and nod, you'll know why.