I had a boyfriend once who used to pronounce the word “innovative” with the emphasis on the second syllable instead of the third syllable, which always made me laugh and him, embarrassed.
It wasn’t until years later that I would occasionally hear other people, even radio announcers, pronounce it the same way.
Another time, when my children were small, our nanny mentioned conger eels, and again I laughed. Congers were lines of people doing a dance at a late stage of the evening at weddings and other events where it’s customary to drink too much and make a fool of yourself. Nothing to do with aquatic creatures. She blushed and appeared mortified. After all, I was the university educated one; she had never even finished high school.
This must have been before the days of simply Googling things on your phone because Uh Oh! I hope she was mortified at my stupidity rather than at the possibility that she’d been wrong all these years.
What has put these long ago events into my mind? It was reading this passage in my Agatha Christie today:
I had a friend at medical school from Gisborne, and one day she used this phrase rather than “a ghost walked over my grave” which was the phrase we all knew. Of course, being insufferable know-it-alls, we teased her mercilessly over it, referring to the sensation of chills as “the Gizzy Goose” for years. And now I see she hadn’t got it wrong after all, here the phrase was, in use by one of the greatest English writers way back in 1916. Help! Have I ever been right about anything, ever, in my entire life? Not to mention, why am I so awful? SMH.