Thanks for reminding me, Scrappy. They start renovating a Brooklyn brownstone on TOH this week. I have to put that on my DVR.

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Erythromycin is the one I always stumble over for no good reason.

That's the one I'm allergic to.

My mother, cannot, for the life of her, pronounce "tweezers." I mean, the woman has a better command of the English language than most native speakers, but perhaps it's because of the "z" followed by the "r" sound or whatever, but "tweezers" always comes out as "tweezles."

Drove me bats for years.

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to this day, my Mother says "Specific Ocean". There are others. But now that she lives in CA, she really needs to learn how to say it. Although, when I'm tired/stressed/hungry, my words get all discombobulated coming out of the mouth. In the head, works perfect. Not so much past the lips.

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My dad also can't say "Mitsubishi." I think the -sh in the last syllable trips him up and his brain (or tongue) makes it "MiSHubishi."

And the thing is, I know that correcting people makes me sound like a dick. And my reasoning of, "Well, *I'd* want to know if I was pronouncing something wrong," has ALSO been labelled as me being a rude, presumptuous dick. (Because, apparently, people are okay with mispronouncing words?)

So I try not to correct people, but it KILLS me.

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So I try not to correct people, but it KILLS me.

Hee! This is why I learned long ago to restrict my correction to immediate family members and to back off when my sister gets growly about the issue.

My vocabulary has always driven her around the bend, even when we were kids. I was obnoxious about it, using really big words properly when I was only six or so, and she'd just grind her teeth because I was showing off.

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I was so tickled by a common southern (mis)pronunciation of words like UMbrella and INsurance when I lived there that I have trouble sometimes dropping them.

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I stumble over words when I'm tired or anxious too and it's really embarassing when someone makes fun of me for it. I mean, I'm a professional word person!

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UMbrella

Rihanna has forver ruined me.

wanders off singing, "ella, ella, eh, eh, eh...."

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I stumble over words when I'm tired or anxious too and it's really embarrassing when someone makes fun of me for it

ya, anxious. Like a first date with a beautiful woman. And introducing her to your colleagues, and forgetting her name. Nope. Wouldn't know anything about that.

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I get all mispronouncing when I'm tired, too. Also, when I'm excited, I start talking really fast and a bit louder, so words might tumble out in mangled fashion more under such circumstances.

But my sister and mom still haven't given up needling me for the time we were driving to New England for our 1982 vacation, and I was waking up from a nap in the backseat to see fields of cows on the side of the road. In my half-asleep mumble, I said, "Look, horses!" They still, to this day, point out cows in fields and say, "Oh, look, Kathy--horses!"

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