My grandma's from Illinois...she says "warsh" And "pap" for "pop" and "Earika" (Phoenix has the most transplanted Chicagoans outside of Chicago.) So it makes me laugh when in romance novels we all talk like...prospectors or something.) In small towns, maybe.

My grandfather said "warsh," and he was from east Texas. But my grandmother doesn't, I don't think, and she's from the same place.

Misled is my word. How the fuck I got to university thinking "misle" was a verb--I should be ashamed of myself.

I did that with 'naked'. Not quite for so long, but still. 

I mispronounced 'segue' until very recently - I thought it was derived from French, not Italian. And my mother always told the story, we had a family friend called Judy Murphy who was a preschool teacher. When I was three I'd sometimes tag along when M had things to do, and during storytime I'd park myself at her shoulder and read along. And occasionally correct her. "That word's not 'mare', Jude-a-Murph, it's 'may-or'."

Apparently I've been mansplaining since I was a toddler. 

My BiL is really into Taoism, which he pronounces T aoism. I tried to convince him he was wrong, but finally gave up. Perhaps I'm the one who is wrong? Isn't it pronounced D aoism? At least, that's what my high school religions teacher taught me.

It's derived from the Chinese for "The Way", which in Mandarin is pronounced "Dao", so yes. 

St. John (totally Jane Eyre)

So this!

In this region of the midwest we have Milan: pronounced MY-lan, Cairo: pronounced Kay-roh, Nevada: pronounced neh-VAY-dah, Delhi: pronounced DELL-hie, I could go on, but it's painful!

Albeit always got me.

Even now I had to check the spelling. Stupid word.

My favorite mispronunciation comes from when I was working at a press clipping service, listening to a broadcast out of New York that was reading the papers for the blind. It took me the darnedest time to figure out that the MO-jayv Desert they were referring to was that big place to the south of me, the Mojave. It's been so long since I've been in an area that isn't saturated with Spanish influence that I forgot people don't know how to pronounce Spanish words. I have also met women whose names are spelled Wanita.

When I was three I'd sometimes tag along when M had things to do, and during storytime I'd park myself at her shoulder and read along. And occasionally correct her. "That word's not 'mare', Jude-a-Murph, it's 'may-or'."

I am completely charmed by Jude-a-Murph as a name.

I thought dilemma was dilemna for the longest time, and pronounced it that way. It's only the etymology that keeps me honest these days.

I probably would have garbled segue, except that it was one of the few words I remember hearing before seeing. I hung out with radio people in college who would punch from station to station just to hear the segueways between songs. In my youth, 50 minutes of music every hour would have constituted the dreadful sin of dead segueing. I miss someone telling me what the song is, and I would like to whack someone with my cane about it.

My theory is that any commonly used regional pronunciation is not wrong, and place names are pronounced the way the people who live there pronounce them. I'm not really eager for the day when we all talk like the man on the 6 o'clock news.

the segueways

I was just about to cite this as the biggest argument I got into about spelling/pronunciation in university. K just wouldn't accept that it would be pronounced segwayway. For someone who knew French, I just didn't get it.