this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2024
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It has gotten to the point where the people I know just wholly believe almost everything I say, unless I preface or follow up with “I’m pretty sure that’s right but now I’m gunna double check” (and if I’m wrong because of new info, or I misremembered something, I totally own it, and read the correction from someone else out loud)
I could so very easily horribly mislead all the people I know, because I’m a random information machine, but I almost never say things I’m not entirely sure about without the preface or follow up combined with actively looking it up and setting the record straight. If I turned evil, it would take them years to realize it was intentional.
New people are fun. They challenge me a lot on things I don’t need to preface or follow up. Never works out that well for them, but we get to learn about each other!
My sister likes to think that way, and constantly tries to tell people they're mispronouncing words even though they are not because she can't figure out how to properly use the pronunciation guide in a dictionary and takes the god damn TTS system Google uses that is mispronouncing words as the gospel truth.
Haha, I totally understand. I don’t trust those guides at all.
I’m a language lover myself (I like learning, but after trying for many years with multiple languages, I’m not super into practice ;) so I learn about how languages work instead!) and if there’s anything I’ve learned about language it is this:
It does not matter how you sound or what you actually say as long as the message you intended to get across actually gets across to whomever you mean to hear it. If people mispronounce, it is usually either regional (and thus correct for them) or something they read and have never heard anyone say. If they use the wrong word but it’s kinda right, they are probably language learners.
This was galvanized for me when I took an art history class as a general education credit in college. I learned that clerestory is pronounced clear-story. I’d only ever read the word before that, and thought it was more in line with modern patterns to be CLE-rest-ory, which is embarrassingly wrong. I’d been reading it that way for years.
Your sister sounds like a language prescriptivist, and they are always wrong, because language simply doesn’t work like that.