As a kid I used to pronounce amoeba as “a-MO-ba” instead of “a-MEE-ba”.

When I was younger and listening to The Hunger Games, I thought the boy's name was Peter and my narrator just had an accent.

This was me as a 7 year-old, reading The Hobbit and LotR. 33 years, and many rereads later, I still pronounce Gollum as golem and Smaug as smog.

I wonder if by the same criteria the opposite also holds true. Are misspelled words dishonorable? And if yes does it matter if they're nouns or other functional words like there/they're/their ?

For me it's the word: ruffians

I still slip up and say roff-ians

This happened to me.... The word was hyperbole. I said it as hyper bowl ee.

The kicker is I've heard the word hyperbole before, pronounced correctly, and never knew what it meant, nor how it was spelled.

So I spoke to someone who was a bit more linguistically inclined, both verbally and written (hes also older than me by a few years, and more "into" art and culture)... And he said "you mean hyperbole?" And everything finally clicked. At the time I was embarrassed because I knew both the written and pronounced versions of it, but never put them together, so I felt like it was something I should have been able to figure out on my own and didn't.

Now? If someone made the same correction to something similar, I'd be like. Ohhhhhh. That makes more sense. Thanks! Instead, I basically exited the situation to go die in private from embarrassment.

I should not have been embarrassed.

I love learning new things.

My wife is Jewish. One day when she was little she and her mother were walking around the neighborhood and saw a Christmas wreath hanging somewhere. Having previously read the word in a book where it was spelled a lot like the word "breath," she asked her mother why they didn't have a "wreth" in their home.

In our household we now and forever pronounce it "wreth" on purpose because of how much I love that story.

Segue still gets me. In my head I still pronounce it like rogue.

Currently staying here for a week and I have no idea how to pronounce Etobicoke. I'm sure it's not "Et oh buy coke". I asked a couple of canadiens but that hasn't helped because what comes out of their mouth is so far removed from the spelling.