01/06/03’s illustrious band:

Readbumps

Brought to you by deadpan comedian Steven Wright, who claimed to have been injured in a bizarre speed-reading accident when he hit a bookmark.

I’ve always been an avid reader, and I’ve had my share of speed-reading accidents. However, most of mine have occurred (and still occur) without the benefit of speed. I just plain misread things. For instance, for years I misread the word talisman as tails-man. I could figure out from the context what the word meant, so I never bothered to look it up. Fortunately, I heard someone else say it out loud before I tried it myself and was spared the embarrassment of a public mispronunciation.

But I do mispronounce things in my head all the time. Before I heard the word infrared said -- it’s in-fra-red (meaning below or beneath red’s wavelength in the spectrum of visible light) -- I used to believe it was in-fraird, two syllables. I thought it was the past-tense form of the verb infrare, so I followed the rules I had learned in school about what the vowel sound should be in a word ending vowel-consonant-e. I also thought, for a short while, that the apostrophe on a classroom display of punctuation marks was an ap-o-strof. And I thought that the name Ian, which is Ee-an, was I-an until I actually met someone with that name.

I’m sure we’ve all been guilty of mentally mangling foreign words, phrases and names. (But at least we have some sort of excuse when it’s a foreign language.) Years before I took high school French, there was a character in a favorite book of mine named Georges Mordreaux -- George Mor-dro, with that French zh sound replacing the Gs. But my flat Midwestern twang turned him into George-ess Mor-dree-ox in my head. When I reread the book after I’d learned some French pronunciation rules, I had a terrible time remembering what to call the poor guy.

(On a completely unrelated note, except that I seem to be on the subject of men’s names here, I used to believe that President John F. Kennedy had a brother named Jack, and that they must be twins because the president’s actions were often ascribed to Jack. I didn’t realize that Jack was a nickname for John, and I still don’t see how that works.)

Conversely, having been exposed early to Spanish spellings and pronunciations, I couldn’t understand why the Texas city of Amarillo was called (by ignorant Americans, at least) Am-a-rill-o instead of the correct Spanish pronunciation Ah-mah-ree-yo, in which a double L is voiced with a Y sound. I also don’t see why Minnesotans call New Prague New Prayg instead of New Prog like the European city. English is so goofy!

Tell me about your own favorite readbumps and mental malapropisms. Convince me that I’m not alone.