Just recently I was in a conversation with a number of UK mainlanders and we had a debate over what “tories” meant, apparently disproportionately ordinarily it refers to a political party and it’s not usual to use it as short for “territories” as I’ve used it (according to how the debate ended, it was half and half between them). And once again I’m reminded of how people feel to look back at their usage of a word/phrase over the years and cringe.
More tragically, me and a friend were embarrassed once upon realizing everyone was confusing “encephalitis” with “hydrocephalus” when talking to someone about their kid with hydrocephalus. Awkward because encephalitis is caused by HIV.
Oh in English – I used to say renumerate (numerate a second time) instead of remunerate (pay someone for a thing).
Me too!! I’m Italian and I used to say “renumerare” instead of “remunerare”.
If you’re curious, the verb comes from Latin “munus” = service/duty/tax
Yup, that makes sense!
I’ve cornered the market on Latin-Vietnamese cross-language humor though. Stay off my turf :P
holy… well, blow me.
I have never heard nor saw it spelled “remunerate”.
Yup, that was the case for me too. I think I only figured it out when I was like 30.
Man, I’m a voracious reader, my heads full of words I probably put the wrong emphasis on but it ain’t like when i was younger when i would completely and consistently mispronounce words i could spell, and no one would correct me, because they didn’t know either. But this one, I absolutely would have caught this one. Every author, reporter, newscaster, writer I can think of, has apparently spelled or pronounced it wrong and seems it’s in some dictionaries, i just learnt.
Ah yeah, that was me as a kid too. I read whatever I could get ahold of, which was mostly English and French from 50+ years ago (yay, secondhand books and copyrights expiring). So my vocabulary in both languages was (and occasionally remains) antiquated. My pronunciation fixed itself some time after university, but was weird in my youth.
I’ve since de-prioritized human language, for practical reasons. Communicating with machines efficiently is simply much more productive (and lucrative)! My shorthand also is it’s own language, where there is no distinction between letters and numbers, of which there are 16, and they phonetically map to English. Hexadecimal English, or Hexen for short. It’s optimized for writing quickly (every character is precisely 1 stroke).
Quite handy for taking notes around people I don’t want reading them, too.
Holy shit. You ever have that moment when you realize you’re talking to someone way the fuck smarter than you? I understand what you’re doing, good explanation, but I don’t want to play chess against you.