Mispronounciations that are grating

So I was watching a feature demonstration video, and when they got to the Quality of Service portion the speaker said, "Now we'll configure Quality of Service, or kwaas."

I was under the impression that QoS simply had its individual letters said, "Cue-oh-ess", and that it wasn't generally turned into a word. It was so distracting that I just couldn't keep watching the video.

Other ones over the years have struck as odd too, like "ACL" being pronounced, "ack-ell", but at least with that one it's fairly easy to figure out what the original letters were. "kwaas" doesn't tell me that it has a Q in it.

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cyberguypr

"GIF" vs. "JIF". I don't care what Steve Wilhite says. I refuse to say it as JIF".

vanillagorilla3

People mispronouncing cache and chassis always bothered me.

Breadfan

I have no idea why this thread made me literally LOL...

I think I have worked too hard this week.

As for me it makes me cringe when people mispronounce ask as Axe...

iBrokeIT

LUN

L"uh"N vs L"oo"N

TWX

cyberguypr wrote: »

"GIF" vs. "JIF". I don't care what Steve Wilhite says. I refuse to say it as JIF".

I never got that either. The word for the first letter being "graphics", it feels unnatural.

vanillagorilla3 wrote: »

People mispronouncing cache and chassis always bothered me.

For that we can probably blame the differences between British English and American English. They pronounce "coupe" as "coupay". Not sure if that's because it's French-derived or for some other reason.

Breadfan wrote: »

I have no idea why this thread made me literally LOL...

I think I have worked too hard this week.

As for me it makes me cringe when people mispronounce ask as Axe...

Heh. When Mitsubishi and Chrysler Corporation were very close, bordering on merger, Mitsubishi took two car names that Dodge had historically used, "Colt" as in young horse, and "Lancer", as in a form of mounted cavalry, and applied them to Mitsubishi models. A few years later Mitsubishi jointly developed a coupe with Chrysler that Chrysler badged as "Conquest", while Mitsubishi branded as "Starion". Given stereotypes about pronounciation issues and the letters L and R, many joked that they'd intended to name the car "Stallion" but somewhere along the way a mistake was made an no one had to fortitude to correct them. Mitsubishi tried to play it off as a combination of "Star" and "Orion", but that excuse probably made it worse as it seemed like a total copout.

NetworkNewb

When users say "internet" when they meant "intranet". Never know if they are just reading it wrong, saying it wrong, or just don't know the difference.

networker050184

People who say "verf" instead of VRF (vee-are-efff) make me twitch.

NetworkNewb

TWX wrote: »

Mitsubishi branded as "Starion". Given stereotypes about pronounciation issues and the letters L and R, many joked that they'd intended to name the car "Stallion" but somewhere along the way a mistake was made an no one had to fortitude to correct them. Mitsubishi tried to play it off as a combination of "Star" and "Orion", but that excuse probably made it worse as it seemed like a total copout.

bahahahahaha! nice

tedjames

Let's not forget nucular!

E Double U

Had a guy asking me for help with the wireless rooter (router) lol.

I've been around Europeans that call Wi-Fi "wee fee" haha.

NVLady

I knew a guy that prounced cache as "catch". I wanted to smack him everytime he did it!

thomas_

More of a spelling thing, but it drives me crazy when people use insure when it should be ensure(especially in technical documentation. There's another word that I've been seeing a lot lately, but I can't think of it right now.

Then there is always when people say "NIC card" or "WIC card" and quite a few others.

kohr-ah

networker050184 wrote: »

People who say "verf" instead of VRF (vee-are-efff) make me twitch.

It is call Mipples (MPLS) right?

renacido

McAfee is my pet peeve.

People seem to think there are two A's in it. They pronounce it "MAAAAACK ah fee". Used to grind my gears every time. Now I'm trying to learn to pronounce it wrong like everyone else. If you can't beat em, join em.

But you don't order a Royale With Cheese from MAAAACKdonalds. Captain Kirk didn't cruise the galaxy with Bones MAAACKoy. The skinny nerd from Superbad didn't have an ID card with the name "MAAACKlovin". You get my point.

McDonalds. McCoy. McLovin'. McAfee.

iBrokeIT

kohr-ah wrote: »

It is call Mipples (MPLS) right?

No, it's called Minneapolis

jofas88

My wife calls Mozilla Mogzilla, drives me up a wall. I refuse to support her.

iBrokeIT

jofas88 wrote: »

My wife calls Mozilla Mogzilla, drives me up a wall. I refuse to support her.

Is that the company that makes FoxFire?

bermovick

A guy at my last job always pronounced Symantec "semen-tech". It didn't exactly bother me, but I had to suppress giggles every time he said it.

scottishkiwi

just to add my favourite shudder word..

Niche... I believe it should be pronounced as "neesh" as per the original French pronunciation (i.e. where the word came from) however many people like to pronounce this word as "nitch".

hiddenknight821

I was comfortable spelling out, SQL, until my friend in web development corrected me, saying it's really 'sequel'.

bermovick

I've been thinking of starting to call it "squeal" instead, just to see if it catches on.

alan2308

networker050184 wrote: »

People who say "verf" instead of VRF (vee-are-efff) make me twitch.

A lot of people try to say every 3 or 4 letter acronym as a single word.

For whatever reason, mispronouncing Linux with a long i really grinds my gears.

TWX

Pronouncing "router" as "rooter" is actually not incorrect. The choice of the word "route" was a reference to roads and junctions, as in "Route 66", which us usually pronounced "root". This is a guess, but since UNIX systems superuser is "root" already it would have been less clear in conversation having "root" and router-as-rooter to talk about.

The pronunciation of "Linux" is complicated for three reasons. I've always heard UNIX pronounced "you-nicks", with the long vowel on the U, and the short vowel on the I. IF Linux is pronounced in the same fashion syllable-for-syllable it become Lie-nucks. If one attempts to pronounce the individual vowels, regardless of their new position, as they were pronounced, it tends to come out like Lynn-nicks or Lynn-necks as Lynn-noox doesn't work well. But, it's further complicated, because while Lie-nucks is most like the English pronunciation of Linus, Mr. Torvalds' name in his native language is pronounced more akin to "Lean-us". I've never heard an English speaker pronounce the OS as Lean-ucks.

I guess the one that I once heard that was really stupid was someone calling the dollar sign "money" when referring to how Windows handled file sharing. "see-money" for C$ or "eye-pee-see-money" for IPC$. He claimed that this was normal, but I'd never heard it referred to that way, always as "see dollar-sign" or "see-dollar". Given that money is a general concept that includes currencies from every country including those that don't use the dollar, it just seemed dumb.

OctalDump

SQL - go read the Wikipedia article, it dives into the pronunciation thing quite deeply - 'es cue el' is more correct. I prefer it, since it just feels less proprietary. But I also say MS SQL and not SQL, since SQL is more than just Microsoft's particular offering.

The other one, and this seems to be a US vs UK English thing, is router. Some people pronounce it to rhyme with outer (as in the Outer Limits), others to rhyme with shooter. Etymologically, it comes from French (funnily it's a cognate of road) and the pronunciation should be closer to rhyming with shooter than shouter. This also means route rhymes with root.

Now in Australia, the outer pronunciation is predominate when talking technology - also exclusively. But when talking generically, like "which route did you take to get here", it's probably half and half, maybe even tending towards root. So...
Strangely, that song "Route 66" is nearly always sung root 66.

To confuse things even more, there's a wood working tool (also used with other materials) for cutting grooves into wood called a router, which is almost always, everywhere pronounced like outer. Although this has a different etymology, etymologically the pronunciation is basically the same, just somehow it got changed along the way.

The Linux thing is interesting. Linus Torvalds has given the "definitive" answer. However, it's based on his name Linus which is pronounced differently in Swedish. It's a longer i, almost like lean-es. The official pronunciation has a shorter i.

I try not to get too hung up on how other people pronounce it - if you can understand what is meant, it's usually not a problem. Language is a funny thing.

thatguy67

I guess Kerberos. I first heard it was "kur-burr-ohs" but apparently it can be "kur-burr-aws". Not really sure. Nobody seems to care either way haha.

I heard someone call tracert "tracer-tee". lmao that was some script kiddie on YouTube though.

fmitawaps

Is it data center (datta center) or data center (day-ta center)? I feel like "datta-center" is right, but every training video or video I see referring to datacenters always says "dayta-center".

tedjames

It bugs me when people say "SISP" or "SIS-P" instead of spelling out "CISSP" and "SISSO" instead of spelling out "CISO." I don't know why, because I'm neither. It also bugs me when people use "what" when they should really be using "which." Having worked as a technical writer for so many years has made it difficult for me not to cringe when people use bad grammar or don't bother to edit their own emails or posts. That said, I'm not going to edit you unless you pay me.

beads

/rant on

Some acronyms are just better pronounced as just that - acronyms. My peeve would be "nist" for N-I-S-T. I talk to far too many "experts" that also likewise never heard that NIST 800-53 is not a complete framework but only 20% of the American governments security framework. So your really using a modified N-I-S-T framework.

The idiots will argue both.

Thanks for the catharsis, TWX. Much appreciated.

- b/eads

/rant off

Reibe

Side note: According to the MySQL documentation, it is pronunced "My S.Q.L.".

Ones that grind my gears:

EIGRP as "E.I.Garp or E.I.Gerp"
VLAN as "Vlan" (similar sound as Vlad)
ACL as "ackle"
Qos as "Kwoz, or Coss"
Cisco's IOS as "Eye-Oss"

Mike-Mike

Reibe wrote: »

ACL as "ackle"

I was reading most of these posts thinking, eh, that's not so bad.. splitting hairs... then I saw this one..... I know people who do it .......I want to hit them with a keyboard