A Few Mispronunciations Never Hurt Anyone

I have several idiosyncrasies. I insist on eating yogurt and peanut butter with the tiniest spoon I can find - often the 1/8 teaspoon. I often make animal sounds; when I see a sheep, I bleat. Unfortunately, especially given my field of study, one of my more notable ones is that I tend to mispronounce words. It may have started in my 8th grade World Cultures class when I correctly located Mozambique on the map - but pronounced it with a "q" sound on the end. Then I failed again when I attempted to order my first quesadilla. "May I have a quas-a-dilla?"

Or there was the time that I was painting with friends, and having fought off several hornets, I sprayed one and loudly pronounced: "Look, it's writhing in pain." This looks fine in writing, but the "i" came out short rather than long. I still confuse this one.

These minor indiscretions happen only, of course, when I even bother to pronounce each syllable at all. I can't remember the last time I actually pronounced the "e" in my sister Valeria's name.

I'm not sure how this happened. And why did I think that snown was a word for the longest time? It makes sense grammatically. Of course, I also believed that "for all intents and purposes" was "for all intensive purposes" - as a teacher, I see this one a lot.

I like to think this "problem" makes me a more sympathetic writing teacher. I've only ever corrected grammatical issues in my students' writing; I don't think I could correct their speech. This may seem unusual, as I've stereotypically had several people, upon learning my career path, immediately say "Oh, I better watch my grammar."

But to be honest, I don't really notice. I know people who say "I seen it" on a regular basis, and I don't even flinch. The only person I ever correct is my sister, and only because it's a running joke for me to point out her use of "good" rather than "well." Which led to this conversation between us:

Having correctly used "well", my sister pointed out her accomplishment.
Her: I used "well" correctly.
Me: That's great!
Her: Yeah, I'm doing very good.
Ooops.

Ironically, I find that the people who do tend to correct one's grammar are those people who learned some "rule" a long time ago, and now they think it's their responsibility to hold people to that rule, however incorrect, irrelevant, or ridiculous. Or course, I may just be annoyed with this tendency because an ex's father, who had no trust for anyone with a college education, liked to immediately correct anyone who used "yeah" rather than "yes".

Yeah, it bothered me.