only two more sunday nablopomo posts
And thank dog, because trying to spin my day of laundry into a blog post is a task that would make Rumpelstiltskin throw his hands up in defeat.
A funny thing did happen this morning, though. My word-of-the-day email from m-w.com came through and it was “ennui.” I was surprised to see that I had been pronouncing it incorrectly for many years. It’s ahn-WEE, no en-YOO-i. I took a few minutes being retroactively embarrassed of all of the times I may have used it in front of someone who was either too kind or too smug to correct me. Then I spent the rest of the day trying to make a joke out of the situation, coming up only with, “I’ve been pronouncing ‘ennui,’ incorrectly. Meh. I’ve got to change.”
ba-dum-dum-ching
November 16th, 2009 at 6:27 pm
thank goodness you put the link in so I could look up that word. For the record, you could have pronounced it any old way you wanted to. It would have been lost on me, and I consider myself to have a fairly decent vocabulary!
November 16th, 2009 at 11:58 pm
i, for one, am very glad that you posted this since i have also been pronouncing it incorrectly for at least the last 20 years. upon my exclamations of, “oh my god ennui is pronounced AHN_WEE!!!! WTF!!!” my wife smugly said, “you can’t be serious,” followed by “This is why I learned to pronounce words from people and not from reading books.” This is, in all fairness, my problem. I learned words like ennui (and a million others) from reading and not from conversation, so i inevitably pronounce them wrong.