Thursday, April 05, 2012

Lacking active conscious knowledge or awareness...

My coworker was poking fun at her 40 year old niece who uses the wrong word in a sentence from time to time. Nora finds it so amusing that she often doesn't correct her anymore. The entertainment value is just too high.

For example, her niece has been known to say the following:

RM: "Puerto Rico is just so nice and warm and topical."

(As opposed to tropical)

...And...


[On fighting with her mother] RM: “I guess we are just alike in that asset.”

(As opposed to aspect)


But the best part of this story was at the end: Nora commented that her niece “is oblivious”. Except she pronounced it o-bliv-ill-us instead of obliv-vee-us. She had no idea that she had been pronouncing it wrong. For five decades. No one had ever corrected her before.

The whole thing just had fabulous written all over it.

Aside: It is really hard to pronounce a word correctly after you intentionally mispronounce it for several days.

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