I’ve always pronounced the word “Southern” to rhyme with howthurn. I know most people say it like “suthurn” instead. I didn’t realize that the way I pronounce it is considered weird until recently!
I’ve always pronounced the word “Southern” to rhyme with howthurn. I know most people say it like “suthurn” instead. I didn’t realize that the way I pronounce it is considered weird until recently!
I don’t personally do this, but many people in my family say the days of the week with “dee”. Like “Sundee”, “Mondee”. I think it’s charming, but one of their children said they were weird for saying it that way.
Also, as a programmer, there are some words that programmers use that are abbreviated which I refuse to pronounce the way that others pronounce them because I think it’s weird, but virtually everybody pronounces them different to me.
For example, there is a common keyword in programming languages called “enum”, and most people I know pronounce it as “EE-num”, like it rhymes with “ME dumb”. But “enum” is short for “enumeration”, so I pronounce it as if it’s the first two syllables of “enumeration”, like “ee-NUUM”. Although I think the normal pronunciation is weird, I don’t say anything to people. I just pronounce it the way that I think it should be pronounced. But on multiple occasions, other programmers have called me out for it and asked why I pronounce it “wrong”.
There are several other programming terms like this, but they don’t immediately come to mind. Enum is the most common example.
sudois spokensoo-dooin my house. Where I live alone.I pronounce it the same as you, and by the way, that’s also the pronunciation listed on Wikipedia.
But I can’t remember how other people that I’ve worked with pronounce it. I’m sure it’s come up, but I just don’t recall.
I think the fact that its configuration file is called sudoers is fairly decisive that other pronunciations are wrong.
Over time I switched to saying it like you. It’s more internally consistent for me to pronounce all abbreviations the same as the words being abbreviated. That applies to enum, char, var, serde, num, regex, etc.
My first English teacher in Germany taught us this way as well. She was horrible. Calling kids stupid and such.
One of my biggest pet peeves in programming, hell even language in general, is when people sound out abbreviations. Like they say url instead of U.R.L. Or sequel instead of S.Q.L. Or in Star Wars when they say at at instead of AT-AT. The funniest one is smück for CMYK.
Squeal.
I knew somebody (not a programmer) who pronounced HTML as “hotmail”. I normally let people pronounce things however they want, but I had to beg her to pronounce it differently because I simply couldn’t deal with it pronounced like that.
How old were they? Because this (top left) may be the reason…
I signed up for a Hotmail account in 1997. I told my mom and she freaked out. She heard hot-male.
I think “hotmail” (the email service) is actually called that after HTML.
“I’m very skilled at C pound”
Still better than “C hashtag”.
I’m a purist. It’s “C octothorpe”
I like saying mumorperger for MMORPG because Yahtzee Croshaw said it that way in one of his review videos once.
Oh, yeah, that one is also on my whitelist.
And Laser.
I had a specific experience where I couldn’t understand a client request the first time around because they kept talking about some guy named Earl.
I can’t really express how jarring that pronunciation is - you just need to genuinely experience it sometime without warning to truly grok the oddness.
Url and at-at are solidly initialisms. SQL has a solid enough argument for being an acronym that I’ll accept either.
I’ve never met anyone in tech who’s pronounced it any way other than “sequel”, and some of those folks were DB admins since the 80’s.
What about FAQ?
Most everyone I know says F.A.Q. But I like saying ‘fack’, as in it’s the page where you find the facts.
Reminds me of my highschool computers teacher who pronounced “modem” as “mo-deem”. Because it’s short for modulator/demodulator.
One I can’t stand is pronouncing regex as “rej-ecks.” I’ve also heard Redis pronounced “red-iss” which also sounds gross to me.
But that’s “regular expressions”, which shortened is rej-ecks. How else would you say it? “Rejects”?
“reg-ecks” with a g sound as in “get”, after all that is how “regular” is pronounced
I think they mean the first syllable is pronounced “reg” like in “regular”, not “rej” like in “reject”. I’m in the rej camp personally. Saying reg is some gif jif shit that feels wrong
Reggecks.
Fortunately, although “rej-ecks” is common, so is the correct pronunciation.
As for “red-iss”, I think that may be a losing battle. Wikipedia even lists that as the correct pronunciation. I think the rules start to fall apart when it is a project name, and when it smooshes together multiple words.
Do you pronounce “char” like “care”?
I do, especially in VARCHAR as vare-care where everyone else is on the varr-carr train.
I typically pronounce “char” as “character”. Honestly, I rarely have any reason to talk specifically about chars, so it doesn’t come up often.
The next logical question is, then, why don’t I pronounce “enum” as “enumeration”? And the answer is that I often do. But I do say it both long and short.