Pronunciation

One of the things that is just about guaranteed to drive me bananas is people mispronouncing words- and another is verbal tics that are used every sentence or two. One of the people I deal with on a regular basis does both of these things all the time – and, if I’m honest, it probably also doesn’t help that I really don’t like this person all that much for a variety of reasons that I can’t be chuffed to go into.

So every time she wants to say ‘specific’ or ‘specifically’, instead she says ‘pacific’. It’s not a difficult word to pronounce, is it? (Apparently, it is – Herself also does this one, so you’d think I’d be used to it by now. But oh no, not at all.) At least every other sentence starts with ‘Basically’, and every three or four is concluded with ‘Jergetwharramean?’ After a couple of hours, I’m chewing the walls.

The one that amuses me (at the same time as still making me want to kill) is ‘Divole publishing’. Considering that this person works in the realm of content management systems – and is involved in trying to sell them to clients – you’d think that she’d know that the term is actually ‘Devolved Publishing‘, where whole groups of people are involved in the writing and publishing of web content, rather than it just being within the remit of one or two people within an organisation.

As it is, I only have to deal with this particular person every few weeks – which I can only see as a good thing. I think if I were to deal with them on a regular basis, I’d be in serious trouble with the law…

And before anyone mentions ‘pot, kettle and black’, I know that I have plenty of my own verbal tics- I suspect everyone does- but at least I make sure that mine don’t involve mispronunciation, or using words entirely out of context. Let alone making them up out of thin air. ‘Divole’ indeed.