• @dgilbert@lemmy.ca
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    2111 months ago

    I read somewhere that you should never look down on anyone for mispronouncing a word because it means they learned it by reading.

    As a childhood bookworm, that lesson stuck with me.

    • Apathy Tree
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      711 months ago

      Thank you for this.

      I used to get picked on a lot by my family because I was made of books (by hs I was going through 1000 pages a day on average), and often mispronounced words I’d never heard used…

      In college I took a linguistics course and learned a similar lesson about speaking and both pronunciation and word choice, and how it’s not only highly regional and always evolving, but also influenced very heavily by native tongue and socioeconomic status (how many years of education, for example, or languages spoken at home), so judging people for being imperfect speakers or writers is pointless. They are doing this wildly difficult thing, communicating, and as long as what they are conveying is understood, it was a successful exchange! Yay!

      • @Meltrax@lemmy.world
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        411 months ago

        How on earth were you reading 1000 pages a day of anything? Even if you read at the extremely fast rate of 45 seconds per page of a book, that’s still 12.5 hours a day of actively reading to get to 1000 pages.

        • Apathy Tree
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          411 months ago

          Exactly that; I spent essentially all of my time reading. In class, between classes, after school. I had no friends because I’d changed schools and was close enough to graduation to not be worth making new friends I wouldn’t keep contact with. So I read a lot. The librarians even gave me another card so I could inter-library-loan more stuff.

    • I thought it was “for all intensive purposes” until I finally came across it while reading, and I was reading a book a week for well over a decade at that point. That’s just the way it’s pronounced down here.

      • @Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz
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        111 months ago

        One step closer to the origin: “to all intents and purposes”. If I use that, people are definitely going to look at me weird.