lhrhappy

A "filly steak" is a sandwich, for Pete's sake.

aquamarinesteph

This is a great thread!

We flew into Dublin once and were headed to Drogheda. Now clearly I mangled the pronunciation to the cab driver who stared at me as if I must have two heads. So I pulled out something and pointed to where I needed to go. (Yes, it was a costly cab ride, but that's an entirely different story.)

Long story short - the entire three days we were in Drogheda, I kept asking - as the American - and how DO you pronounce the name of the city? I swear, no two people ever gave me the same pronunciation.

So heads up if you ever come to Nashville and need to go to Lafayette Street. While we honor the French general Lafayette, the street in Nashville is pronounced L' FAY - ette.

And back to flying first class/business class. I generally point (politely, I hope) and smile. It makes my life so much easier when I know that I can't pronounce something to someone else's satisfaction.

StuckinITH

You need to spell it "Philly steak".

StuckinITH

FWIW, on US airlines, they don't understand my wife when she asks for "Champagne". Some get it and say: "Champaign?"

lhrhappy

I don't ordinarily spell things out between handfuls of caviar in my F suite.

CPH-Flyer

Apparently my ability to spell the word does not go hand in hand with my spelling.

StuckinITH

Your F suite is better than my wife's flight on the BA Concorde where no caviar was to be found. However, when my mother-in-law was flying in F on Air France, they had caviar "a volonte" (with the accent on the "a" and the accent on the "e" but I cannot find how to do those).

And let me know what airline you are flying, because BA did not have any caviar in F between LHR and PEK and back.

Lomapaseo

will the horses ovaries be served before or after the Mo-ette?

lhrhappy

Vanishingly few airlines still serve caviar. I'm not sure BA ever has. But I can dream.

lhrhappy

Is that an amuse-ovum?

Annalisa12

Don't tell Aussies all about how great your fanny pack is!

darthbimmer

That reminds me of an experience years ago flying to a small city nearby. Flights to several small cities were being served out of a bargain-basement sort of waiting area, with one gate attendant calling a different city every 5-10 minutes.

"WOO-stah," she announced. Nobody stood.

"WOO-stah!" Still nobody rose.

"It's printed on your ticket as 'War-chest-er'" she added with sarcasm, and half a dozen businessmen jumped up raising their hands.

chrisl137

One of my favorites isn't mine, but comes from my dad's second wife. She was a phone agent for Eastern (til they went away), and told about some of the calls. Someone called and wanted a ticket to "MIN-deanapolis". This was back before the time they spend on calls was tracked to the millisecond, and they were trained to try to get the correct city out of the person without correcting and possibly embarrassing them, so she asked "Which state is that in?" "MIN-desota" came back the reply.

Living in LA, I often manage to confuse myself whether to use italian, spanish, or spanglish pronunciation of things. I always want to use a "K" sound for chorizo, for example. And then there's Los Feliz...

Detroit is full of crazy pronunciations, too. Schoenherr => "Shaner", Gratiot => "Grashit" are probably two of the more extreme cases.

I got burned by pain au chocolat in a very french part of Montreal of all places. I was in a big french bakery/cafe with my multi-lingual girlfriend, who by that point was being ID'd as quebecois when she spoke English in neighboring US states (she's a native English speaker). She ordered various things, including a pain au chocolate, and instead of a flaky pastry with a chocolatey center, we got a bread that was basically a sweet bread dough with chocolate swirled in, basically an american chocolate bread. It was good, but it wasn't what I was expecting.

All of Massachusetts seems to be like that. You might as well be in England for the lack of correlation between spelling (or even number of apparent syllables) and sound.

Low Roller

For the most part, pronunciation is just tied to regional dialects. There are many words that Americans and Canadians pronounce very differently, like foyer and roof. A person is not necessarily mispronouncing something just because they aren't saying it like the locals do. In fact, tourists often sound ridiculous trying to sound like a local - you're not fooling anyone. If you're not from Boston, don't ask for "chowda" - you'll just sound pretentious. Be yourself. Unless you are a pretentious jerk, and then try to be someone else.

ajGoes

A friend once named that dish as she served me some bruschetti, mispronouncing the word as above. I apparently winced very hard, because she asked me "What's wrong?"

I think I reacted more strongly than I normally would because she'd spent a week in Italy a few years earlier and for some reason I thought she'd learned the very simple rules of Italian pronunciation.