Only 70 silicon atoms wide
Aren’t a wry neck and a torticollis the same thing? Yes. Here I am trying to recreate the phenomenon where one thing is understood as two things, almost identical, but somehow discrete from one another. The best example of this is how as a teenager I didn’t join the spoken word “misled” and the written word “misled” together. When I read “misled” I thought “my-zelled” and thought it meant, specifically, “confused”. Which is clearly what I was. This issue was genuinely resolved by my purchase for 99p of Celine Dion’s minor hit, “Misled” as a CD single, an enjoyably out-of-character voyage into new jill swing by the Canadian balladeer.
When I was a kid, I didn’t connect the word “chaos”, which I came across fairly often reading comics and other things, and which I assumed was pronounced something like “chowce”, with the spoken word “kay-oss”, which my mother used fairly often. I don’t remember exactly when or how I discovered that they were the same word- I imagine someone read it to me at some point or something.
D&D sorted that for me fairly early on. I still have to stop and speak deliberately in order to pronounce “hegemony” correctly, though. “he·JEM·o·ny”, not “HEJ·e·mon·y”.
I didn’t encounter D&D until I was… 12, I think? 12 or 13. By that point, I knew “chaos” and “kay-oss” were the same word.
I first played D&D when I was 8 or so, with the Moldvay Red Book, back when the only alignments were “Lawful”, “Neutral”, and “Chaotic”.
I started with the blue Holmes set, plus the Monster Manual, which had just come out, so there were 5 alignments. When I got the Players Handbook it added 4 more.
In case this gets competitive, I started with a hooky photocopy (done at someone’s dad’s work) of the three beige-covered booklets from TSR, and possibly the first supplement (Greyhawk IIRC?). I do actually still have it lying around somewhere, flagrantly breaching copyright.
What?!
That was about hegemony, not D&D 😂
Well thanks for sorting THAT one out for me. HeJEMony, apparently!
Do you have any idea how many decades one can go without ever saying the word “hegemony”?
In addition to D&D, I played (play) a lot of Battletech, where the fictional future history includes a polity called the Terran Hegemony. And unlike “chaos”, I didn’t have anyone else around who knew the proper pronunciation of that one.
Somebody somewhere said that you should never mock mispronunciations of higher vocabulary, because it demonstrated that you were more widely read than your peers; you read words you never hear spoken.
I still have trouble with Morrisey’s rendering of “Wunderkind” to rhyme with “railway line” though. Among other things about him.
That’s…a great point. Thank you.
Depends. Do you find yourself humming along to Magazine’s “Model Worker” once every month or two?
I had to look that one up just now, thinking maybe there was another word to be added to the list of words I’d been assuming the wrong pronunciation for all of my life… but it turns out that dictionary.com, Wiktionary, and the Oxford English Dictionary all agree that “HEJ·e·mon·y” IS a valid alternative pronunciation, at least on this side of the pond. (This side of the pond being the opposite side of the pond from where John Allison lives.) I’m still surprised by the “he·JEM·o·ny” pronunciation, though, even if the way I always thought it was pronounced is also valid (at least according to my fellow u-phobic colonials)… I don’t think I’ve ever heard it pronounced “he·JEM·o·ny”, though if course it’s one of those words I don’t think I’ve actually heard pronounced much at all.
(Now, one word I DID assume the wrong pronunciation for for most of my life is “damask”… until one day I finally heard it said aloud, I’d always erroneously assumed the emphasis was on the second syllable…)
You are well justified in thinking that it was daMASK, considering that the name comes from DaMAScus.
As for hegemony, for me all possible English pronunciations are equally confusing, since in Spanish it is hegemonÍa, so I have to guess at random to which preceding syllable I should move the emphasis.
I don’t think I’ve ever said or heard it aloud, only read it, and so I thought it was pronounced heh-GEM-ony, with a hard G.
I’ve been pronouncing it with a hard G all my life. I don’t think I’ve ever heard it with a J sound!
I’ve never heard it with a hard G. Always with a J sound.
Spare a thought for my friend who married a man with the surname Chao. When we send them a Christmas card, it’s addressed to “The Chaos”.
In an alternative reality Celine is singing “Myzelled” and I really want to hear it.
I sense a disturbance in The Force…
And Bus 60 crosses over to the “other side”.
It took me far too long to realize that facade was not a distinct word “fack-aid” that meant more or less the same—a false front, either literal or metaphoric—as the word, “fassad” that I oddly never saw used in writing…
I had an ex who thought a yot and a yatch were different types of boat
Apparently it’s pronounced more reasonably in the U.K. (at least according to the online dictionaries I just consulted), but in the U.S. “solder” is for some reason pronounced like “sodder”, and I thought these were two different words with similar meanings until one day I asked a university professor what the difference was between the two* and he replied that one was a mispronunciation.
*That is, I asked him what the difference was between SOLE-der (as I assumed “solder” was pronounced, though in the U.S. it’s not) and SOD-er (which is how “solder” IS pronounced in the U.S., but which I thought was a different word that I for some reason assumed was spelled “sauter”).
I’m in the US Midwest and I’ve never heard someone say SOD-er. My grandfather was raised in the countryside and I have heard him pronounce it “SOJ-er”, but he had a mini-habit of intentionally mis-pronouncing words.
Hmm. I’m on the US East Coast, and I ALWAYS hear it “SOD-er”.
I’m on the West Coast, and spent my early life in the Midwest. Even while earning a degree in electronics, I never heard “solder” pronounced any other way than “sodder”. Hey, it’s English, innit? Lots of silent letters in various English words, right?
Sounds like you’re thinking of “soldier” as in army guy rather than “solder” what one does to a circuit board.
Ask not for whom the bus throbs…
I’m still on why the bus throbs.
It is on its way to the Church of Satan, Tredregyn. Tis why Claire doesn’t like that sort of Throbbing.
They broke the universe
Wouldn’t be the first time John Allison’s characters have done that. This might be the first time it has happened in Sheffield, though – I don’t know if any universe breaking happened in Giant Days.
I don’t know, but it would explain the recent crossover involving a billionaire who dresses as a flying mammal.
I’d assume the bus has hit a spacetime portal and is being transported to a distant and deadly planet, but the Doctor took care of that one already.
The road to alternate dimensions is paved with good intentions.
Love how the bottom corner of the last panel is going all wibbly-wobbly in sympathy with the story.
Maybe I should turn my screen a little to make sure Ol’ No. 60 doesn’t run me over as it emerges from my monitor…
I love that there’s confetti in their hair in the final panel.
Oh no! Having two powerful nuisance working together like this is causing a distortion in the space-time continuous that will destroy the universe!? It’s the only rational explanation! Seing them taking turns to talks is scary, so scary!!!
Maybe a swarm of bees has formed a vibrating ball around the bus.
Claire can tell them to stop, she’s obviously the queen
Oh no! It’s totally possible!
All I’ll be able to think of tonight is that a certain TV show should be called The Marvellous Mrs. Misled.
Well, that and the observation that a torticollis is land-based wry neck, and turticollis is the kind that lives in water.
I failed to connect epi-tome and e-pit-o-me for years
I only recently made that particular connection, after reading one of those “you’re doing it wrong” click-baity articles. I’m still not sure if it is more embarrassing that I actually clicked on it, or that they were right about me.
Snap!
Me too.
My initial mental pronunciation of ‘necromancer’ (as first encountered in The Hobbit at age 11) should not be spoken out loud for fear of summoning eldritch outer gods.
Chaos is simply a lack of order. It is the state of a date when you’re examining the menu, and trying not to look at your partner’s exposed cleavage because that’s not gentlemanly.
I thought it was my-zelled for many years.
Oh no! “My-zelled” is starting to sound… maybe… not so wrong.
…
Somebody help me!
How do you get my-zelled out of misled? I can only see maybe “m’sled”, or “missled”
How would you pronounce “mysle”?
(V. to be led stray about the pronunciation of a word.)
It makes me think of “measles”.
You ask like I would have an answer! Perhaps I didn’t like the sound of “mizzled”.
Sorry John! That question was actually aimed at GT Ogle above.
I had imagined that trying out different pronunciations for “mysle” would lead to the conclusion that “my-zell” or perhaps “my-sell” are not so far-fetched, so reading “misled” as “my-zelled” is at least halfway reasonable.
But I don’t know why I put in a “y” instead of an “i”…
…
Just ignore me. I’m crawling back under my rock now.
One of my relatives found out he’d been wrongly rhyming it with tousled all his life.
I was in the room when he finally realised; he was in his late 40s, after many years of being…an English teacher.
(I’d never heard anyone else admit to saying it that way until this thread, I’ll have to tell him. Me, I mispronouce thesaurus, hyperbole, and many more)
The Hyperbole is played a week after the game referred to as the SuperBowl.
As a child I spent many years confused about the connections between “bass” the instrument, the knob on the stereo, and the fish. At age nine I finally said the word aloud and was instantly corrected, yet somehow I carry the shame of that moment with me to this day.
This ends my contribution to the missed sled of bookish youngins and their struggles with misleadingly pronounced words.
I’ve yet to hear “eschewed” used verbally.
Or maybe I have been hearing it daily and never recognised it?
Oh no, I think I need to sit down.
Just explain that you’ve always eschewed your food thirty-two times.
When I finally eschewed obfuscation, I pronounced it ESH-shood (as in, Billie and Maggie Sesh-shooed when they eschewed alcohol). I have not been corrected on the pronunciation, but I cannot guarantee my company wasn’t simply too polite to say anything, especially if it’s a question of where the em-PHA-sis was placed.
The ‘wryneck’ thing threw me completely because I only knew it as the name of the bird. BTW, if you’ve not seen video of a wryneck living up to its name, you should check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAXQCjx2NHk
First thing I thought of as well.
Fun fact! Moore’s law has been faked for the last ten years or so. A “7 nm” chip has no transistors in it that are actually 7 nanometers in size.
I didn’t believe you at first! Good IEEE explainer: https://spectrum.ieee.org/a-better-way-to-measure-progress-in-semiconductors
Oh that’s a nice one.
For me it was ‘hyperbole’ which was an entirely separate word to the one I’d only ever seen written down and pronounced ‘Hyper-Bowl’ in my head.
And here comes the next problem to be solved…
How is it that Eddy keeps getting into the space-time continuum?
Bugs Bunny ruined “moron” and “imbecile” for many children (and possibly some adults). “What a maroon! What an im-bezzle!”
I didn’t realize until just this moment, reading your comment @D.Wilt, that Bugs was mispronouncing or parodying “moron” with “maroon.” I just thought it was his own personal insult. What a maroon! (Don’t recall hearing him say im-bezzle)
Should I go on here about the throbbing buses of my youth? The dread Leyland Atlantans?I feel I should be suitably attired first – anyone got a spare kimono handy? Extra fat bastard size?
Now that I’ve finished my victuals-vittles for the morning, I can read my webcomics.
I think I got to my mid-20s before I discovered that “awry” is not, in fact, AWE-ree, and likewise “fiery” is not FEER-ee.
“Awry” is definitely another of those words where, as a kid, I didn’t associate the written version with the spoken version.
I would suspect that the two adjacent generators of nuisance have set up some sort of harmonic resonance between them, were it not for the fact that I don’t think either of them is capable of any kind of harmony
They’re either resonating or forming some other concentration of power sufficient to warp reality. Either way, time for everyone else (who wants to remain in our spacetime) to get the heck off that bus.
Also, I’ve got to say, I’m really impressed by all the panels of Lottie and Claire physically interacting. Cuddles and embraces are really hard to draw, and you’ve got four in a row here (including last page) that are spot on.
As you well know, anti-matter contacting matter DOES release a passel of energetic particles.
Their harmonization is incredible, perhaps they are finding the.. brown note?
“Jill swing”?
New jill swing, as exemplified by En Vogue, or Karyn White’s exemplary “Romantic”. The feminine counterpart to new jack swing.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/new_jill_swing
I am obliged to you.
It’s a Chatty Harmonic Resonance! Hopefully they’re not going over a bridge right now…
I’m loving the atmosphere of dread that sets on as soon as the confetti stops. Also, who or what is in charge charge of the dispensing of confetti in the Bobbinsverse?
Um. I had the exact same experience with “misled”, and in fact only realized my mistake less than a month ago. I thought MYSSELED meant, confused or like, tricked. WHAT. Is this a Mandela Effect situation?
I thought myzelled was too mislead with extreme prejudice.
“perfect griping harmony” is a spectacular turn of phrase and first class word play.
I somehow missed this on the first read (read it as gripping), which is why your work is consistently worth multiple rereads and careful attention to detail.
Until my early twenties, I had both read and heard the name “Aloysius”, but never connected them
I was a huge Asterix fan when I was growing up (still am, tbh) and I always thought Obelix was walking around carrying a Manyhir on his back (Menhir just looks like it’s missing a vowel to me…)