conuly | Ana is sleeping, the baby is eating a muffin, and I have only one thing to say.

It drives me nuts too - also the one where people use "persay" when it should be "per se".

What about people pronouncing "forte" (as in one's strong point) as "fortay"?

For someone who doesn't speak French, "FOR-tay" isn't a bad approximation of how forte is pronounced.

...but it's not a French word. Nor an Italian word.

I just had a look, and it appears that I was wrong, too (I though that "fort", like the thing you see in Wild West films, was the correct pronunciation). M-W (http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/forte), at least, says that the word "has no entirely satisfactory pronunciation".

It notes that in French, one would use the masculine form, "fort" (pronounced roughly like English "for"), not the feminine, "forte", in the noun sense.

And in Italian, the pronunciation would be roughly "fortay", so that pronunciation is acceptable for the musical term (which is borrowed from Italian), but not really for the "strong point" definition, which didn't come from Italian but via French, or so it seems.

"So," as M-W continues, "you can take your choice, knowing that someone somewhere will dislike whichever variant you choose."

I lose.

Not that it's something that matters terribly except to pedantic nit-pickers.

The documentation is vague enough that you also win. I speak neither French nor Italian except for a few words in both, and most of those are food-related (and in Italian, a few musical terms).

In a way, I like pedants. I learn from them, and appreciate the opportunity to do so. Thank you for the discussion :)

Not that it's something that matters terribly except to pedantic nit-pickers.

That'd be me! I'm the only person I know who skips off the e at the end. I understand why people say it with an -ay sound, and I feel vaguely hypocritical to be telling them off for it... but it really irks me anyway.

Ohhh people saying walla, or wah-la or whatever is SUCH a peeve of mine.

I shouldn't be as surprised as I am by that. But I realized it's probably because I have NO IDEA what people are trying to say when they horribly misspell it.

Seriously, peeps, viola and voila are two different words. They're not even homonyms or homophones. A "viola" is an instrument you play; it's a noun, pronounced vee-OH-la. "Voila" is an expression that means "Ta-da," pronounced vwah-LAH. You can't sensibly say "I played the voila," nor can you sensibly say "Viola!" when you mean "There you go!"

Just because Firefox's spellcheck pings on voila doesn't mean it's right!

</rantypants>

Viola is also a plant, but you say it differently.

oh i saw someone write wah-la in a post fairly recently and it took me a while to even figure out what they meant. then once i did figure it out, it drove me crazy that they spelled it like that.

Yeah, but if you comment to tell them they've made a very embarrassing (and somewhat confusing) mistake, and could they kindly learn to spell, they get offended.

If this works for you, do you think you could pop over to my journal and give it a go with "then vs. than"? All of my attempts have failed spectacularly thus far.

;)

I have a friend who graduated high school AND college and is, in general, a fairly intelligent person. He didn't even know "than" was a word.

I have a fairly intelligent friend who is about to graduate with her Master's and seems totally unaware of the existence of the word "you're."

Spelling I can forgive, but when people SAY wah-la it drives me up the wall.

That and similar misspellings & mispronunciations drive me nuts.

I just saw someone refer to something going "a-wall" today. Ummm, wow.

Well, If they didn't know that was an acronym for absent without leave, they might be forgiven.

I know, but since knowing the acronym is how you know that it means that something has gone missing, then how could you... AACK!

Yeah, I know. I'm not even a language/grammar/spelling geek yet something inside me cringes when people do that crap. My 15 year old was taught to say wah-lah by his well-meaning teacher(among other cringe-worthy malapropisms) and needless to say, he drives me nuts.