Do ❌NOT❌ Say These 5 Words Wrong!

The reason why so many words in American English  end up being mispronounced, even by highly  

educated native speakers, is because English isn’t  phonetic. Letters don’t have a 1-to-1 relationship  

with sounds. This word is ‘love’, Uh vowel. This  word is ‘move’ OO vowel. This word is ‘stove’,  

OH diphthong. Why? They’re all part of the  sequence OVE. This is how people get mixed up.

Or look at this. CH can be sh like in ‘chef’,  

or a K sound like in ‘choir’, or a  CH sound like ‘choice.’ Sh, k , ch.  

No wonder I found examples of people taking  this word, where it’s an SH, echelon,  

and pronouncing it like a CH, ‘echelon’ \

Who Xi Jinping brings into the  higher echelon of party leadership--

or a K, ‘ekelon’.

I don’t know if putting it  into the echelon of high dining  

necessarily does anything to the cuisine.

Lots of us learn words by reading, so if we’re  not hearing the pronunciation, well, we may  

guess wrong. Today I’m going to go over 5  words that people mispronounce or get mixed  

up in English. If you’ve mispronounced  one of these words, or a different word,  

please put it in the comments below!

This is not meant to insult people, but  more to say, look at this whacky language.  

It’s no wonder it’s so hard for people  to learn English as a second language.  

Not to mention the difficulties we native  speakers can face when it comes to spelling

First, this first one, I was definitely  mispronouncing before researching this  

video. It’s pronounced:

pathos

I was pronouncing it ‘pæ θoʊs. Why? Look  at this word. It’s common. Path. I know it,  

and I know the pronunciation. It has AA,  not AY. This is not ‘paith’. So I saw this,  

and I thought PATH-ohss. But this word is  [‘peɪ θɑs]. Or, less commonly, [‘peɪ θoʊs].

I went to Youglish to see, am I the  only one mispronouncing this? No,  

I was in good company. Lots of native  speakers were mispronouncing this.  

By the way, the phrase ‘in good company’ means to  be in the same situation as others you respect,  

in this case, I found other people  mispronouncing this word, just like me.

Story is an influential tool which  can mold the most obstinate of minds  

by means of appealing to an individual’s pathos.

So, acting as if you’re forever young means  you get this set of pathos and this fear--

Isn’t that crazy? I mean, these are people  giving talks. Planned speeches. And still,  

mispronunciations. Now, if so many people  mispronounce a word, does it start to become  

an acceptable pronunciation? Maybe. We’re going  to cover that later with another word in this  

video. Pathos means a quality that makes someone  feel pity or sadness. For example, the death scene  

in the play was full of pathos. The scene had the  power to make me feel really sad. Pathos. Uhuhhu.  

So sad.

Our next one also has a TH. It’s  this. What? How do you say it?  

It looks kind of like a tongue-twister,  Isthmus, but the TH is actually silent.  

It’s just Is-miss. Very simple actually. It’s like  ‘Christmas’ without the beginning ‘kr”. Isthmus.  

Well, okay. I did check 5 dictionaries and  one of them did list the TH pronunciation as  

an additional, acceptable pronunciation.  But the other four did not list it at all.

Isthmus

So, you could say

in the narrow isthmus of land  at the heart of the refuge--

This person did such a nice job pronouncing all  those sounds. But for my English language-learning  

students out there, I know the S-TH combination  is tricky, so just drop the TH. Simplify.  

What is an isthmus, anyway? It’s  a narrow strip of land with sea  

on both sides, connecting two large pieces  of land, like this, the isthmus of Panama.

One pronunciation of this word that I  noticed that you won’t see in any dictionary  

is to put the TH at the end, “is-muth”. 

--south of Panama, the Isthmus of Panama.

“is-muth” – I could not find any dictionary  where that was listed as a pronunciation.  

Stick with a silent TH.

Bonus word, okay. TH not very  common to have that be silent  

but there is another word with a silent th  that you may come across and it’s “asthma”.  

This is a condition where your airways become  inflamed and narrow making it difficult to  

breathe and it’s somewhat common. Ashtma,  asthmatic. Both of these have that silent th.

Asthma

The most common pronunciation for this S in  American English is a Z. Azzzz. Asthma.

Now this next word, it’s really a grievous mistake  

to mispronounce it. The word means to cause grief  or sadness, to be outrageous or oppressive. It’s  

grievous to mispronounce this word. I’m  just kidding, it’s not grievous, it’s okay,  

everyone mispronounces words sometimes. The word  I’m talking about, in case you hadn’t guessed yet,  

is "grievous". Several times I’ve heard  pronounced with three syllables,  

GRIEV-ee-ous . GRIEV-ee-ous instead of  GRIEV-ous. It’s just two syllables. Grie-vous.

Grievous

If you’ve been mispronouncing  it, you’re not the only one.

I’ve been reading a lot of studies lately that  

suggest that despite our  grievous unemployment figures--

As he continued to direct fire,  

he was struck again this time suffering  grievous damage to his abdomen.

He engaged in grievous immoral conduct  and was being counseled by Emma--

Color scheme to describe  the electoral landscape of  

the US it’s generally considered a grievous error.

not ‘griev-ee-ous’, three syllables,  but ‘grievous’, two syllables.

If you’re one of my students out there, learning  English as a second language, I hope you’re  

starting to see that it’s okay to mispronounce  or misspell a word. It doesn’t mean you aren’t  

bright, or that you’re failing at learning  English. We all mispronounce things sometimes.

And sometimes we start to  mispronounce things so much,  

that we start to misspell them too. That’s what’s  happened with this next word. The word is Sherbet.  

No silent letters. No letters doing weird things.  But somehow, many people’s minds have added  

an R. And so a lot of people pronounce  this Sherbert. Bert instead of bit.  

Sherbert. But there is no R there in the second  syllable. In fact, if you type it into google,  

it’s going to let you know that what you’re asking  about isn’t an actual word. What is sherbet?  

It’s a frozen dessert made with fruit juice  added to milk or cream, or egg white, or  

gelatin. Personally, I don’t like Sherbet. So many  people are saying ‘sherbert’, with that extra R.

Red roof orange sherbert popularized mad men--

I didn’t mind using that and a  little sherbert cup too that I had.

But it’s just “sherbet”.

Sherbet

When you’ve hear so many people  mispronounce a word for so long,  

it can be very hard to believe that that’s not  the pronunciation. I mean, here’s an example:  

Hank Green, on his channel "Crash Course",  teaching a lesson on sensation and perception.

The way we register the brightness of a  color the contrast between the orange of  

a sherbert and the orange of a construction cone--

Someone’s just told me that sherbert  doesn’t isn’t a word that exists.  

His name is Michael Aranda and he’s a dumb  head. Did you type it in the dictionary?  

Type it into Google. Ask Google about  sherbert. So sherbert is a thing.

Poor Hank. It is hard to learn that  you’ve been pronouncing something wrong  

the whole time. But wait. I did actually  find one dictionary that’s taken this common  

mispronunciation and its subsequent misspelling  and actually put it as an entry in the dictionary.

Sherbert

Merriam-Webster put it in as a variant. And  it didn’t say it was a misspelling. But from  

the research I’ve done it does seem clear that  the word ‘sherbert’ is just a mispronunciation  

and misspelling of the word ‘sherbet’.  This dictionary.com article says sherbert  

(pronounced “shur-bert”) is a common  misspelling of sherbet that resulted from  

a common mispronunciation. Its prevalence has  resulted in its inclusion in some dictionaries  

as an alternative spelling.” So there  you have it. If you’re interested in  

Hank’s actual lesson Sensation and Perception,  I’ll put the link in the video description.

So, there are some words that Americans  mispronounce, etcetera, etcetera. Wait. Etcetera.  

That’s another word, or phrase, that gets  mispronounced. You can spell it with a space or  

without. I, personally, prefer with a space. What  does it mean? It means other related things that  

you don’t name. For example, you can choose any  color you want: purple, blue, green, etcetera.  

In other words, all the other colors  too. So how does it get mispronounced?

If we look at the word in IPA we see a couple  different pronunciations. Some dictionaries say EH  

for the first syllable, some say IH. I say ‘eh’.  Et cetera. It can be four syllables with a Flap T,  

etce, dadadadada, that’s a flap. Etcetera.. But  if I make it three syllables, then we have a  

TR cluster, and Americans usually make that CHR.  Like in the word ‘train’, has the ch sound. Train.  

Etcetera. Chchch. Both of those pronunciations  Etcetera and Etcetra , you’ll find in the  

dictionaries. So where is the mispronunciation  happening? In the first syllable. I think because  

of the letter C, which can be kk, a K sound,  or sss, an S sound, like it is here, people  

want to put a K sound in that first syllable.  They say IKKKK-cetera, Ik-cetera instead of EETTTT-cetera, et cetera.

But the first consonant is definitely a T  not a K in all listed pronunciations.

Now, the difference is subtle, because T  and K are stop consonants, we don’t usually  

say the whole sound when the next sound is  a consonant like here. So the pronunciation  

I want you to use if you’re my student learning  English is: Et-sed-er-a. Et-sed-er-a. This is  

most common and that first T is a stop T:  et, that little quick stop of air, that’s what we hear as a T:  

et-sedera. The the rest of the word is smooth with that Flap T, et cetera. Second syllable stress:  

etcetera. So the next time you’re listing things  you can name a few and say “etcetera”.

If you’ve ever mispronounced a word, please share  the word and the story in the comments below  

or tell the story in a video, post it to your  Instagram stories, and tag me, Rachel’s English,  

so I can share it. It just normalizes it, you  know? English spelling and pronunciation is  

incredibly challenging! If you’ve mispronounced  a lot of words in your life, it probably means  

you’ve learned a lot of vocabulary from reading,  and that’s something that I think is pretty cool  

so kudos to you. If you love looking at the quirks  of the English language, please keep it going now  

with this video, and be sure to subscribe to my  channel with notifications on so you never miss a  

lesson. I love being your English teacher! That’s  it, and thanks so much for using Rachel’s English.