Pro-nun-see-a-shun

"Try to pronounce these pairs differently: our/hour, hole/whole, Hu/who, your/you're, so/sew, cot/caught, bow/bough, night/knight."

David Weekly posted that line on his twitter stream, and I just had to laugh.

Aside from the fact that "Kris" and "Chris" have different pronunciations (no, not really), I actually DO pronounce cot and caught, as well as bow and bough diffferently. Cot is prounounced with an "ah" sound, with caught pronounced with an "aw" sound.

I'm told that's a Midwestern drawl that causes those words to be different, a lesson I learned way back at Amerigon when the telephone call speech recognition system never recognized my "call" keyword to initiate a call. I had to use "phone" to initiate a call.

They call it a drawl. I call it speaking correctly.

I've managed to correct some of Kris' speech patterns over the last decade. He forwarded an email from a friend who had written "one" instead of "won" in the email. He was laughing at the typo, even hours later when he arrived home. I asked him to pronounce the two words, one and won, only to be mortified as he pronounced "won" as "Juan".

It was my turn to laugh.

I have since fixed Kris' speech problems. He done do talk purdy now.