e. e. cummings - known for juxtaposing one word with another to see the subject in a new light...
all ignorance toboggans into know
and trudges up to ignorance again:
haha - juxtaposing!
My recent favourites that I tend to use are exacerbate, penultimate, cohort ( i work in education so this comes up a lot), and nomenclature. I'm still not sure I pronounce the latter correctly.
I have some words that I hate when they are pronounced in the British way, but I'm fine with the American pronunciation. (As an aside - I hate when people say
pronounciation instead of
pronunciation. That's a real bugbear of mine). Examples are: omnipotent, qualitative, quantitative, and there are numerous others which i forget right now.
I have a masters degree in applied linguistics so words and grammar interest me a lot. And I've lived in Aussie, USA and the United Kingdom so i have been exposed to lots of different variations on English words and their pronunciation. I also sometimes get confused as to pronunciation because of
(menopause) this exposure.
I recently did a creative writing course and we discussed some annoying/strange words there. One such word was 'plinth'. Anyway, I managed to incorporate this word into a poem that i wrote about our au pair we had when we lived in the UK - she was from Spain. The crew from the course loved the poem - although it may lose something in the reading. It is, after all, a performance piece ( bonus points if you spot the typo):
Patricia Rodriguez
(AKA Patrithia Rodrigeth)
No es RodrigESS,
She humphed
Es RodrigETH!
TH
She said it with a gentle pause,
A silence
An unfilled climax
TH
The tip of her tongue barely touching her teeth
I question whether she ever really said
TH at all.
We would say
thththththth
Like a slowly deflating balloon
Rodrig
ETHTHTHTH
Fa
ther
Mo
ther
First language interference
Therapeutic
Thrashing
Thermoluminescence
Thumbsucker
My
thical
Plin
th
thththththth
Anyway
My Spanish teacher was Costarricuense
Con acento Sudamericano
Where Z is an
ess and not a
th
And
I say Rodrig
ESS
Rodriguez