The ‘Illiterate Boyfriend’ test

[spikepipsqueak]

I assure you, as a professional educator, than mispronunciations of "hyperbole" are not a phenomenon strictly found within one sex.

I can pronounce it just fine, and I don't even watch American football.

My claim was not that all people mispronounce the word, only that both men and women occasionally do; or to put it another way, that vaginas do not, in my experience, meaningfully prevent hyperbolic mispronunciation. As to whether or not you personally mispronounce the word in question, I would be quite surprised if our two great nations shared any clear common conviction as to its "correct" pronunciation to begin with. It has a few too many vowels for that to be hoped for.

Even in Greek, you're spoiling for a fight between modernists, Erasmisns and reconstructionist every time you hit an eta (the "y"). In rich kid grammar school, that's an "ey" sound. In modern Greek, an "ee". And historians debate between "ey" and "eh". So the original Greek pronunciation may well have been something like "Hepper Bow Lay". Which is all but unrelated to any "correct" English permutation.

I think you might have missed the joke.

 

[steve_bank]

Over the last 50 years American English has been thoroughly corrupted. New words created on the fly. Pronunciation and empasis varies.

Influencers online invent words and they catch on.

As to pronunciation, any of the younger generation in news TV seem to have a hard time with complete sentences and pronouncing words properly.


As to literacy and relationships there used to be a saying.

'The man should be slightly higher than the woman, and have a slightly higher IQ'.....

 

[Politesse]

I assure you, as a professional educator, than mispronunciations of "hyperbole" are not a phenomenon strictly found within one sex.

I can pronounce it just fine, and I don't even watch American football.

My claim was not that all people mispronounce the word, only that both men and women occasionally do; or to put it another way, that vaginas do not, in my experience, meaningfully prevent hyperbolic mispronunciation. As to whether or not you personally mispronounce the word in question, I would be quite surprised if our two great nations shared any clear common conviction as to its "correct" pronunciation to begin with. It has a few too many vowels for that to be hoped for.

Even in Greek, you're spoiling for a fight between modernists, Erasmisns and reconstructionist every time you hit an eta (the "y"). In rich kid grammar school, that's an "ey" sound. In modern Greek, an "ee". And historians debate between "ey" and "eh". So the original Greek pronunciation may well have been something like "Hepper Bow Lay". Which is all but unrelated to any "correct" English permutation.

I think you might have missed the joke.

Eh, I think my entire sense of humor may be lost on you.

 

[Bronzeage]

When a person pronounces a word the way it looks is could be said tells me they read a lot, but don't engage in conversation with the sort of people who know those words.

As a person who is admired for their elocutionary skill(references on request), I think it's fun to mispronounce words in casual conversation, so don't hog the horse doovers and the kanappies.