© 2025 New Hampshire Public Radio

Persons with disabilities who need assistance accessing NHPR's FCC public files, please contact us at publicfile@nhpr.org.
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations
Donate today to help protect the future of public radio.

Why We Mispronounce Words: From Carpool Tunnel Syndrome To Mute Points

Virtually everyone has one – a word you find out you’ve been mispronouncing. (artbystevejohnson/Flickr)
Virtually everyone has one – a word you find out you’ve been mispronouncing. (artbystevejohnson/Flickr)

Have you been known to tell your friends, “well that’s a mute point!” or perhaps you’ve started a sentence with “for all intensive purposes.” If so, you’re one of the millions of us who occasionally mispronounces, misspells or misunderstands a word or phrase.

As part of our occasional series about words and how we use them, Here & Now’s Robin Young talks to Ariel Goldberg, director of Tufts University’s Psycholinguistics & Linguistics Lab about what goes on in our brains when we undertake the complex task of speaking.

Here are 10 of our favorite responses on Twitter:

— Kristin Williams (@ckwilliams22) July 9, 2015

@hereandnowrobin Until a few years ago I thought posthumous was pronounced post humous. It really makes more sense, right?

— Mallory Righter (@maux_maux) July 9, 2015

— Jonathan Spencer (@JonASpencer) July 9, 2015

@hereandnowrobin I mispronounced “faćade” until my exit project advisor in college corrected me. I was a landscape architecture major…

— Bert Manning (@clemsontgr84) July 9, 2015

— Joey Renken (@JoeRenken) July 9, 2015

@hereandnow one of my instructors in the #USAF used the word ‘nayvet’. I asked him what that means. He pointed to the word naïveté… Lol

— Lars Bruchmann (@pilotlars) July 9, 2015

— katherine cooper (@kcooper1203) July 9, 2015

@hereandnow As a kid, I pronounced ‘niches’ as ‘neetches,’ like some sort of creature from a Dr. Seuss book.

— Amy Clark (@TheatreGeekAmy) July 9, 2015

— Wolf Wackeroth (@wlfmw) July 9, 2015

@hereandnow UNKA-knee [uncanny]

— boygobong (@boygobong) July 9, 2015

Guest

Related

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

You make NHPR possible.

NHPR is nonprofit and independent. We rely on readers like you to support the local, national, and international coverage on this website. Your support makes this news available to everyone.

Give today. A monthly donation of $5 makes a real difference.