Support WBUR
Escape goats? Carpool tunnel syndrome? The science of mispronounced words
Here & Now host Robin Young has a confession: One time while she was live on air, she mispronounced the word ‘misled’ as ‘mizzled.’
Young isn’t alone. It turns out we all do it — sometimes we spend years or decades convinced we’re saying a word correctly until we find out we’re not.
We received a series of voicemails from our audience confessing their own mispronunciations: ‘awry’ as ‘ari,’ ‘archipelago’ as ‘arch-a-puh-lago,’ ‘Infiniti’ as ‘in-fin-eti,’ ‘Parmesan’ as ‘Par-mee-zhian.’
“ People are mispronouncing the words because they are reading them, creating a pronunciation based on what they're reading that is different than what we are saying,” says Ariel Goldberg of Tufts University’s Psycholinguistics and Linguistics Lab. “ The mispronunciation comes from the way that they assign a pronunciation to the word that they're reading.”
3 questions with Ariel Goldberg
Can you explain the role of English in mispronunciations?
“ The issue here is actually English represents sound using letters. For example, the sound F, right, we can use the letter F or we can use PH. So, there are a number of places in words where it might not be clear exactly how a letter is to be pronounced.
“Another thing is, we don't mark which syllable is stressed, and so in the case of ‘awry,’ it's not clear whether the first syllable or the second syllable would be stressed, and so that could lead to additional errors.”
A woman recently said to producer Karyn Miller-Medzon that politicians were turning people into ‘escape goats.’ Of course, she meant ‘scapegoats.’ But research showed the word ‘scapegoats’ came from an ancient Jewish tradition of sending a goat into the wilderness to atone for the sins of the people. It was a term coined in 1530 by a Protestant scholar William Tyndale, because Christian tradition acknowledged a goat was to be slaughtered for the atonement of the community, but the second goat — bearing the community's sins — was understood to have simply escaped. Tyndale named this goat the ‘escape goat,’ which then evolved later into ‘scapegoat.’
“ This actually illustrates a larger point that when we make errors, it's usually because we have knowledge of a system. It's kind of like pushing on a balloon. We have different sources of knowledge that may be pushing and what may come out may not actually be right.
“So what I think is really interesting about an ‘escape goat’ is that when we are hearing speech, there's no spaces between the words. So, what we're doing when we're hearing speech is we're hearing the stream of sounds and we have to try to figure out where the boundaries are. We have a little bit of uncertainty where one word ends and where another word begins and that provides a place where we might insert other kinds of knowledge, like ‘scape’ doesn't seem like much to us but the word ‘escape’ is meaningful.”
Should people carry shame about mispronounced words?
“ These are very common mistakes. English spelling does not represent sounds completely. And also one other reason why we should not feel upset is that this has happened in the course of the history of English, and we've actually kept some of those words.
“So for example, the word ‘apron’ came from French, and it used to be ‘napron.’ And you can see that when somebody would pronounce it ‘napron’ that could easily be thought of as being ‘an apron.’ And so it actually changed, the word changed into ‘apron’ because of this misunderstanding of how it's pronounced. And we keep it.
”What's going on with these errors is that language is a remarkably complex system. And we have patterns. Certain types of words have certain types of sounds in them. And we know all of this information unconsciously. And when we go to say something, this information is coming together at the same time, and so when we make mistakes, it's usually not because of some lack of knowledge. It's actually all of these patterns and systems that we have, working together to try to figure out what it is that we're hearing or going to say.”
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
More mispronunciations:
- Iowa Public Radio host Tony Saribia wrote us to say he meant to say ‘annals’ on air, perhaps of history, and instead said ‘anals.’
- Aida of the Metro Detroit area: “As a young student, I encountered the word spelled ‘rendezvous’ and with complete confidence read it out loud as ‘ren-dez-vis.’ And the teacher simply could not persuade me otherwise.”
- Susan of St. Petersburg, Florida: “When I was in college and I asked my boyfriend if he would help me move the ‘counch.’ He asked me to spell it. And I said ‘c-o-u-n-c-h.’ Yes, I had said ‘couch’ as ‘counch’ my whole life.”
- Gary of Bellingham, Washington: “In junior high school, standing with a big group of people. The pep squad, whatever, was standing there with us. And another boy and I got into an argument. And I called him ‘nave,’ but I meant ‘naive.’ Talk about vicious serendipity right in front of the girls. And of course, he caught me right away on it and corrected me. It was extremely embarrassing and I've never forgotten that, even though it's been over 50 years.”
- Annie of Chico, California: “My mispronounced word is ‘ethereal,’ which I've been pronouncing it in my mind as ‘et-re-al’ for the past five years. Me and my boyfriend read a lot of fantasy books. One day I was reading it out loud and he looked at me, he was like, ‘You mean “ethereal.”’ And I still think that ‘et-re-al’ sounds better.”
- Laura Wolpert wrote us that a friend who she was joining for lunch said to her, “I'll meet you under the ‘yawning.’”
- Tara wrote: “I mispronounced ‘self-deprecating’ — and said loudly twice — ‘self-defecating’”
- Kathleen thought determined was ‘dieter-mind.’
- This isn’t so much a pronounced word, but Young’s former colleague Doug Shugarts thought God's name was ‘Andy’ because in church, he heard the song, “And he walks with me, And he talks with me.”
Mispronounced words cheat sheet
This article was originally published on February 03, 2025.
This segment aired on February 3, 2025.
