Mispronunciations

“… and if you’re school is near by, …”

Apostrophes, Common English Blunders, Contractions, Mispronunciations, Possessives, Pronouns

My wife got this in an email message recently.

Problem:
The word “you’re” is incorrect here.

Explanation:
The complete sentence in the message was “Please contact me and if you’re school is near by, I may be able to deliver them to you.”

The word “you’re” — spelled Y-O-U-APOSTROPHE-R-E — is a contraction of “you are”.

Clearly, the message writer did not intend to say “… and if you are school is near by, …”; that would be nonsensical.

Instead, the writer was referring to the reader’s school, so he should have used the possessive pronoun “your” — spelled Y-O-U-R.

I believe that the common English blunder of confusing the contraction “you’re” with the possessive pronoun “your” is due to the fact that many American English speakers mistakenly pronounce these two words in the same way.

Solution:
“… and if your school is near by, …”

“Pronounciation”

Common English Blunders, Mispronunciations, Misspellings, Nouns, Verbs

I frequently hear this and occasionally see this.

Problem:
“Pronounciation” is a misspelling and mispronunciation that makes the writer or speaker sound dumb.

Explanation:
“Pronounciation” is an ignorant conversion of the verb “pronounce” into a noun.

For fun, I searched Google for each of the following words (with the quotation marks, to avoid variations) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:

  • “pronunciation” — 20,700,000 matches
  • “pronounciation” — 1,130,000 matches

This tells me that Web authors have written the correct word vs. the incorrect word by a ratio of 18.3-to-1, which is not good, especially given more than a million matches for the incorrect word.

Solution:
“Pronunciation”

“The hands that install rooves …”

Common English Blunders, Mispronunciations, Misspellings

I heard this repeatedly across multiple airings of a Barack Obama television ad in the past two days.

Problem:
The second noun was mispronounced, and I misspelled it to match the mispronunciation.

Explanation:
The TV advertisement was for U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama, and it focused on energy issues.

The complete sentence was “The hands that install rooves can also install solar panels.”

I wondered whether I misheard the voice-over announcer, so I carefully listened to him say “rooves” in the second and subsequent airings.

It is a fairly common English blunder to pronounce the plural of the noun “roof” as “rooves”.

Solution:
“The hands that install roofs …”