Latest news with #etymology
Yahoo
19-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Revealed: The secret code words being used to beat online censorship
Youth slang has always been an ephemeral, shape-shifting thing, arriving as if from nowhere, taking over the lexicon, and then fading out, to be replaced by other popular words and phrases. But since the advent of social media, words no longer spread organically through a population. Those that catch on tend to be artificially and often cynically disseminated by a power we cannot see but are very much guided by: the algorithm. As etymologist Adam Aleksic writes in his engaging and readable new book Algospeak, 'We're entering an entirely new era of etymology, driven by the invisible forces behind social media and its algorithms.' Aleksic is young and perpetually online himself. Aged 24, he's just two years out of Harvard University, where he studied linguistics. Since graduating, he has built a multi-platform empire making catchy short-form videos about etymology and now, a book. The stated mission of Algospeak is to reveal the bigger social story of how language shapes us, just as much as we shape it. What it hones in on, however, is how language is used and spread on social media, how politics is affected (of which more later), and how younger users are getting past keywords and topics that are increasingly censored or outright banned on social media platforms. Using 'seggs' instead of sex, for instance; 'unalive' instead of kill or suicide; or emojis, such as the watermelon, to talk about Palestine (a Six-Day War reference). 'The censorship force is causing language change to happen faster,' explains Aleksic. But why? This censorship, he says, exists partly to avoid incentivising things such as suicide or eating disorders. But, unsurprisingly, it's not simply ethically motivated. 'A lot of the rest of it is what's going to make [the social media platforms] money… and we have a little bit of banality of evil going on there,' he says. In the UK, there will soon be another block on certain content reaching children on social media: under the Online Safety Act, from this month algorithms will have to filter out content deemed harmful, or else face large fines. Content creators will presumably respond as they have done before: by finding imaginative new ways around this. It's a process Aleksic refers to as linguistic Whac-a-Mole, and illustrates the difficulty of effectively policing this democratised medium. Social media researcher Emily van der Nagel calls it 'Voldemorting', which in practice means avoiding typing certain keywords, just as wizards in the Harry Potter books avoid saying the name of the evil Lord Voldemort. This, in the social media age, is how 'taboo' topics are discussed, and it has given rise to an explosion of semiotic workarounds: Donald Trump goes by '45' or '47' (the 45th and 47th president of the United States), 'the Cheeto' or 'orange man', and now, the taco emoji (standing for the acronym of Trump Always Chickens Out); the corn emoji may be used as a replacement for 'porn'; and so on. As soon as a platform bans a keyword, a human user will find linguistically innovative ways to get past these barriers. 'We're able to figure out new ways to talk about what we want to talk about. Humans are good at circumventing these algorithms,' says Aleksic. Raised in Albany, New York, he is the son of two Serbian immigrants, both atmosphere research scientists. 'So I was the oddball for being the humanities person,' he says. His passion for linguistics started as a teenager, when he came across a book on the subject. He became hooked, and started a blog called The Etymology Nerd, which then snowballed into @etymologynerd. He's sitting in front of an exposed brick wall, a background that appears in many of his TikTok videos. These consist of him explaining – at breakneck speed to hold his viewers' attention – the origins and meanings of words or phrases, or interesting features of the way we use language. He speaks almost as fast and excitedly during our chat, so it's unclear where his online persona ends and his offline self begins. A false distinction, perhaps, for a content creator such as Aleksic, who's immersed in the digital world with 1.5 million followers on Instagram, 744,000 on TikTok, 630,000 on YouTube and a Substack newsletter with 57,000 subscribers. As such, he knows exactly how to pull in an online crowd. 'It helps that I'm literally studying how influencers talk [and] what are the tricks,' he says. 'If you want to do well in the algorithm, you've got to predict how people think. It definitely helped that I was studying the tactics.' One of which is his million-words-a-minute talking speed, because there's a real risk that if you pause for breath, your audience will grow bored and scroll on. Aleksic is open about how he uses these tricks to bring linguistics to a broader audience. He is also canny about his subject choice, often discussing slang words and phrases, such as 'skibidi' (which has no real meaning), to appeal to his young, digitally minded audience. His TikTok post on the phrase 'he's cooked' (meaning he's in trouble or exhausted) received almost 120,000 likes, suggesting the TikTok generation is especially interested in having its language explained to itself. That he has managed to interest millions of followers in etymology is in itself impressive. That he's using his platform as a digital content creator to critique the media he's built his career on is perhaps even more so. There are processes Aleksic wants his audience to be aware of where language and social media is concerned. As an etymologist, he is naturally concerned with where words come from, but so should their users be too, he suggests. Slang words appropriated from online or offline subcultures are used in harmless ways by others who have no idea of their origins. But what if you knew that some of those strange slang words your children and grandchildren use – known as 'brainrot' among the initiated – come from online incel culture (the term for a subculture of men who consider themselves unable to attract women and therefore hostile in their attitudes to women)? 'Mewing', for instance – a jaw exercise that supposedly improves facial bone structure – hails from the incel playbook, which centres on the belief that some men are discriminated against for not being good looking (or a 'Chad', to use their term). While plenty of youngsters use these words simply to connect with each other, and with no intention whatsoever of spreading incel culture, Aleksic argues that incel culture has nevertheless found its way into the mainstream by way of its slang and memes. 'There's middle-schoolers talking more like incels… The ideas get Trojan-horsed through the meme[s],' he says. 'I do think the words have an ability to shift what I call the 'consensus reality'. It makes it more palatable to accept these ideas about lookism, the [incel] philosophy.' Incel slang words spread online initially because people find them funny, he suggests. Other types of language and content spread online because they are extreme and so provoke emotion – often anger – which drives engagement, which in turn makes money for the platforms. The collateral damage, arguably, is nuance, objectivity and moderate opinions. 'We're just fed this extreme version of reality,' says Aleksic. 'In the US, you're more likely to get far-Left or far-Right perspectives because the middle doesn't go viral. There's nothing attention-grabbing or spectacular about the middle, and nothing that will be pushed farther by the algorithm.' This, he believes, helps explain the re-election of Donald Trump as president. Just as the telegenic John F Kennedy was better suited to the TV age than Richard Nixon in the 1960 presidential election, Trump is better suited to the social media, or algorithmic, era, Aleksic argues. 'What works with algorithms? Memes and trends. Trump is extremely meme-able,' he says. The language Trump uses lends itself to what Aleksic calls 'remixable sentences': Make X Y again; this is the greatest X in the history of Y. 'There are no good memes coming out of the progressive side [of politics], and that's a very important thing to pay attention to,' he says, 'because it shapes… our perception of what's happening.' Still, Aleksic is chipper and at pains to present all this not as the end of civilisation as we know it but as a continuation of existing phenomena. It's the medium that's new, he stresses, not the behaviour: in his 1948 novel The Naked and the Dead, American author Norman Mailer replaced every use of the F-word with 'fug' to get it past his publisher (just as I am calling it the F-word here because this is The Telegraph). Social media is something of an equaliser, Aleksic suggests. The old rules of language aren't policed in the way they once were. The traditional linguistic gatekeepers, such as newspapers – or, in repressive regimes, the government – don't control how we express ourselves on the platforms, where we're free to use endlessly inventive slang and censorship-avoiding tweaks to regular words. He doesn't want to sound like a 'doomer' (a term he doesn't need to explain). 'The main takeaway is everything is the same except it's happening way faster and… [is] compounded by human-algorithm interactions,' he says. Older readers may see it differently. Never before in human history have we lived our lives through a screen we carry in our pockets, with an algorithm, rather than humans, curating, dictating and shaping our world view, how we relate to each other, and how we experience life on this planet. Maybe, actually, that is the scary part. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more. Solve the daily Crossword
Telegraph
17-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Revealed: The secret code words being used to beat online censorship
Youth slang has always been an ephemeral, shape-shifting thing, arriving as if from nowhere, taking over the lexicon, then fading out, to be replaced by other popular words and phrases. But since the advent of social media, words no longer spread organically through a population. Those that catch on tend to be artificially and often cynically disseminated by a power we cannot see but are very much guided by: the algorithm. As etymologist Adam Aleksic writes in his engaging and very readable new book Algospeak, 'We're entering an entirely new era of etymology, driven by the invisible forces behind social media and its algorithms.' Aleksic is young and very online himself. Aged 24, he's just two years out of Harvard University, where he studied linguistics. Since graduating, he has built a multi-platform empire making catchy short-form videos about etymology and now, a book. @oliversoxford Please don't censor this it's educational we promise #etymology #linguisticsmajor #linguistics #languageevolution ♬ original sound - Oliver's Oxford The stated mission of Algospeak is to reveal the bigger social story of how language shapes us, just as much as we shape it. What it hones in on, however, is how language is used and spread on social media, how politics is affected (of which more later), and how younger users are getting past keywords and topics that are increasingly censored or outright banned on social media platforms. Using 'seggs' instead of sex, for instance; 'unalive' instead of kill or suicide; or emojis, such as the watermelon, to talk about Palestine (a Six-Day War reference). 'The censorship force is causing language change to happen faster,' explains Aleksic. But why? This censorship, he says, exists partly to avoid incentivising things like suicide or eating disorders. But, unsurprisingly, it's not only ethically motivated. 'A lot of the rest of it is what's going to make [the social media platforms] money… and we have a little bit of banality of evil going on there,' he says. In the UK, there will soon be another block on certain content reaching children on social media: under the Online Safety Act, from this month algorithms will have to filter out content deemed harmful, or else face large fines. Content creators will presumably respond as they have done before: by finding imaginative new ways around this. It's a process Aleksic refers to as linguistic whac-a-mole, and illustrates the difficulty of effectively policing this democratised medium. Social media researcher Emily van der Nagel calls it 'Voldemorting', which in practice means avoiding typing certain keywords, just as wizards in the Harry Potter books avoid saying the name of the evil Lord Voldemort. This, in the social media age, is how 'taboo' topics are discussed and it's given rise to an explosion of semiotic workarounds: Donald Trump goes by '45' or '47' (the 45th and 47th president of the United States), 'the Cheeto' or 'orange man', and now, the taco emoji (for Trump Always Chickens Out); the corn emoji may be used as a replacement for 'porn'; and so on. As soon as a platform bans a keyword, a human user will find linguistically innovative ways to get past these barriers. 'We're able to figure out new ways to talk about what we want to talk about. Humans are good at circumventing these algorithms,' says Aleksic. Raised in Albany, New York, he's the son of two Serbian immigrants, both atmosphere research scientists. 'So I was the oddball for being the humanities person,' he says. His passion for linguistics started as a teenager, when he came across a book on the subject. He found himself hooked, and started a blog called The Etymology Nerd, which then snowballed into @theetymologynerd. He's sitting in front of an exposed brick wall, a background that appears in many of his TikTok videos. These consist of him explaining – at breakneck speed to hold his viewers' attention – the origins and meanings of words or phrases, or interesting features of the way we use language. He speaks almost as fast and excitedly during our chat, so it's unclear where his online persona ends and his offline self begins. A false distinction, perhaps, for a content creator like Aleksic, who's immersed in the digital world with 1.5 million followers on Instagram, 744,000 on TikTok, 630,000 on YouTube, a Substack newsletter with 57,000 subscribers. As such, he knows exactly how to pull in an online crowd. 'It helps that I'm literally studying how influencers talk [and] what are the tricks,' he says. 'If you want to do well in the algorithm, you've got to predict how people think. It definitely helped that I was studying the tactics.' One of which is his million-words-a-minute talking speed, because there's a very real risk that if you pause for breath, your audience will grow bored and scroll on. Aleksic is open about how he uses these tricks to bring linguistics to a broader audience. He is also canny about his subject choice, often discussing slang words and phrases, like 'skibidi' (which has no real meaning), to appeal to his young, digitally-minded audience. His TikTok post on the phrase 'he's cooked' (meaning he's in trouble or exhausted) received almost 120,000 likes, suggesting the TikTok generation is especially interested in having its language explained to itself. That he's managed to interest millions of followers in etymology is in itself impressive. That he's using his platform as a digital content creator to critique the media he's built his career on is perhaps even more so. There are processes Aleksic wants his audience to be aware of where language and social media is concerned. As an etymologist, he is naturally concerned with where words come from, but so should their users be too, he suggests. Slang words appropriated from online or offline subcultures are used in harmless ways by others who have no idea of their origins. But what if you knew that some of those strange slang words your children and grandchildren use – known as 'brainrot' among the initiated – come from online incel culture [the term for a subculture of men who consider themselves unable to attract women and therefore hostile in their attitudes to women]? 'Mewing', for instance – a jaw exercise that supposedly improves facial bone structure – hails from the incel playbook, which centres on the belief that some men are discriminated against for not being good-looking (or a 'Chad', to use their term). While plenty of kids use these words simply to connect with each other, and with no intention whatsoever of spreading incel culture, Aleksic argues that incel culture has nonetheless found its way into the mainstream by way of its slang and memes. 'There's middle-schoolers talking more like incels… The ideas get Trojan-horsed through the meme[s],' he says. 'I do think the words have an ability to shift what I call the consensus reality. It makes it more palatable to accept these ideas about lookism, the [incel] philosophy.' Incel slang words spread online initially because people find them funny, he suggests. Other types of language and content spread online because they are extreme and so provoke emotion – often anger – which drives engagement, which in turn makes money for the platforms. The collateral damage, arguably, is nuance, objectivity and moderate opinions. 'We're just fed this extreme version of reality,' says Aleksic. 'In the US, you're more likely to get far-Left or far-Right perspectives because the middle doesn't go viral. There's nothing attention-grabbing or spectacular about the middle and nothing that will be pushed further by the algorithm.' This, he believes, helps explain the re-election of Donald Trump as president. Just as the telegenic John F Kennedy was better suited to the TV age than Richard Nixon in the 1960 presidential election, Trump is better suited to the social media, or algorithmic, era, Aleksic argues. 'What works with algorithms? Memes and trends. Trump is extremely meme-able,' he says. The language Trump uses lends itself to what Aleksic calls 'remixable sentences': Make X Y again; this is the greatest X in the history of Y. 'There's no good memes coming out of the progressive side [of politics] and that's a very important thing to pay attention to,' he says, 'because it shapes… our perception of what's happening.' Still, Aleksic is chipper and at pains to present all this not as the end of civilisation as we know it but as a continuation of existing phenomena. It's the medium that's new, he stresses, not the behaviour: in his 1948 novel The Naked and the Dead, American author Norman Mailer replaced every use of the f-word with 'fug' to get it past his publisher (just as I am calling it the f-word here because this is The Telegraph). Social media is something of an equaliser, Aleksic suggests. The old rules of language aren't policed in the way they once were. The traditional linguistic gatekeepers, such as newspapers – or, in repressive regimes, the government – don't control how we express ourselves on the platforms, where we're free to use endlessly inventive slang and censorship-avoiding tweaks to regular words. He doesn't want to sound like a 'doomer' (a term he doesn't need to explain). 'The main takeaway is everything is the same except it's happening way faster and… [is] compounded by human-algorithm interactions,' he says. Older readers may see it differently. Never before in human history have we lived our lives through a screen we carry in our pockets, with an algorithm, rather than humans, curating, dictating and shaping our world view, how we relate to each other, and how we experience life on this planet. Maybe, actually, that is the scary part.
Forbes
30-06-2025
- Science
- Forbes
Stuck? Your Creative Environment Might Be The Problem
Feeling stuck? Creative blocks don't necessarily mean that something's wrong with you. Maybe it's ... More your place. Stuck. Stuckness. While working on the opening of this article about the creative environment, my mind became fixated on those two words: stuck and stuckness. What do they actually mean? Being the kind of girl who used to read the introductions to dictionaries—and loves etymology enough to subscribe to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED)—I had to look it up. According to the OED, the sense we're after for the adjective stuck is the fourth definition, which comes after: And finally, the fourth meaning, split into two: If you're feeling stuck, it might be due to your physical creative environment. I bet you're thinking, 'Okay, Renae, so… what does all of that tell us?' No worries; I had to ask myself the same question. After ruminating on it a bit, I was finally able to capture in words what I intuitively sensed. Being stuck isn't just about mood or motivation or discipline. It's not about something inside you. It's not about you. The adjective's very definition points to being held, trapped, unable to move. It implies something acting on us rather than something we're failing to do. If stuckness can be caused by external forces, then it's worth asking: Could one of those forces be our surroundings? Could the space itsel—thee lighting, the clutter, the layout, the energy—be what's holding us fast, keeping us stuck? 'Eureka!' I thought. That's the shift. When we stop assuming that being stuck in a creative block is always an internal issue, we can start looking around us, outside us. And if we do, we may very well find that our creative environment is out of sync with the kind of thinking, feeling, or making we're trying to do. What science tells us about the creative environment Creativity doesn't always come from within. Sometimes it comes from without, or the physical, ... More sensory creative environment. Researchers have long explored how physical space shapes thinking, feeling, and performance. And though creativity is intensely individual, a growing body of evidence shows that the creative environment—the physical, sensory, and even symbolic features of a space—can either stimulate or stifle the process of idea generation, problem-solving, and expression. In one literature review, scholars identified several environmental variables that significantly affect creativity: lighting, noise, temperature, layout, materials, and natural elements. The authors emphasized that the most productive creative environments tend to offer a balance of stimulation and freedom, spaces that let us focus without monotony and let us experience openness without overload. Other research shows that creativity isn't always about inspiration. It's about inputs. Research confirms that a change in physical setting—even something as small as adding plants, improving lighting, or moving to a new room—can alter your cognitive processes and improve the fluency and originality of your ideas. There's also evidence that our physical surroundings can influence the emotional tone we bring to our creative work. One study of sense of place among students found that emotional attachment to the environment we learn in directly affects our motivation, confidence, and willingness to experiment, all key elements of any creative practice. The research points to a deceptively simple insight: Where you are shapes how you think. And when your space doesn't match your current creative reality, the mismatch can show up as frustration, restlessness, or that familiar fog of stuckness. When your creative environment no longer fits I've long known that I need a clean space if I want to have a creative environment. I've always known that place and space are essential to my well-being. I work from home, and I feel agitated and annoyed when my house is messy—when the kitchen counters are cluttered or the sink's full of dishes. I need visual calm. I always clean before I travel so that a clean space welcomes me home. That reset matters to me. When I first started working from home, I went all out decorating my office—art, color, creative energy everywhere. It's still the same today, lively and full of my personality. A peek into my old creative environment — my home office. These days, you'll find me creating on my ... More recliner in the family room because the energy of this space no longer works for me. But as the type of work I did shifted away from selling my card deck and courses back to freelance writing and editing, the space began to feel wrong. I didn't want to be in it. It no longer felt like me. These days, I use my office just to pay bills, and have plans to completely rework the space so my husband can use it for his real estate business. I now work from a recliner in my family room—my favorite room in the house. It's bright and full of green and feels grounded. There's a fireplace. French doors. Plants that make the space feel alive. Art that's truly a extension of who I am. The space doesn't just feel pretty. It feels good. I enjoy working in it. A creative environment might be just what you need to overcome stuckness. A few years ago, I discovered that my love of place and space matters more than I even knew. In the Human Design system (a blend of astrology, the I Ching, the Kabbalah, the chakra system, and quantum physics), I'm known as a Mental Projector—supposedly the most sensitive type to their physical environment. That revelation explained everything. I wasn't just quirky about needing clean spaces or being drawn to plant- and art-filled nooks. I was responding to environmental cues that, quite literally, helped or hurt my ability to think creatively. A shift in setting equals a shift in inputs when it comes to your creative environment As I spoke about this idea with my husband, he added even more depth and insight. He said that when you live in a place for a while, you become used to the repeated sensory inputs of that environment. Just by physically moving—your desk, your chair, your body—you change your perspective. You disrupt the default patterns. You make it possible to think differently. That's why we like to work from coffee shops when we can. It's also why I love working while traveling—from cafes, coffee shops, hotel lobbies, and even from cruise ships! To me, there's something truly magical about earning money while watching the sea slide by. For me, there's nothing like a creative environment for creative work like the deck of a cruise ... More ship. Even a different room in the same house can do the trick. When the setting changes, so do the inputs. And, invariably, changed outputs follow. What your creative environment might be trying to tell you If your ideas feel sluggish… if your energy feels dim… if you've been blaming yourself for being stuck, it might not be you. It might be your creative environment. Of course your environment doesn't have to be picture-perfect. But it does have to match what your mind needs now. You might need more light. Less noise. A view. A different chair. A simpler space. A wilder one. The point isn't to follow my rules or anyone else's for that matter. The point is to pay attention. Your body and your brain will tell you when something's off. So if you're feeling stuck, ask yourself this: What's my current creative environment? How does it make me feel? And if the answer is anything less than energized, clear, or inspired, maybe it's time to change your space, not your self. Like this story? Get more like it by signing up for Beyond Copy, my newsletter about advanced content marketing and writing techniques, as well as interesting insights like this one about your creative environment.
Telegraph
30-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
‘It's shed-ule, not sked-ule': The mispronunciations that annoy us the most
When Susie Dent, Countdown 's etymology guru, declared on Wednesday that the common mispronunciation of 'mischievous' as 'mischiev-i-ous' should now be considered acceptable, she caused a stir not just at the Hay Festival but among traditionalists across the country. The reaction to her intervention highlights the extraordinary capacity of mispronounced words to irritate the listener – and how everyone has their own particular bugbears. Here, Telegraph writers and editors identify the pronunciations that grate the most – and confess to some of their own errors. 'Haitch' – Christopher Howse, assistant editor In The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, the heroine is obliged by American Puritans to wear a big red A to show she has been caught in adultery. I'd like to see a capital H worn by anyone caught pronouncing it 'haitch'. Admittedly 'aitch' is a funny name for a letter. Q and R are funny too, but you don't hear people saying 'rar' instead of 'ar'. 'Haitch', though, is a case of hypercorrection and genteelism. It's like saying 'to my wife and I' because it sounds more polite than 'to my wife and me'. Children used to be told not to drop their aitches. The mistake is to think an aitch belongs at the beginning of 'aitch'. Last year I was impressed by the bravery of Amol Rajan, the Today presenter, who, after 40 years alive and a Cambridge degree in English, announced he was now going to start pronouncing 'aitch' correctly. Bravo. In 1862, Punch, in its class-conscious way, mocked the aspiration of 'aitch': 'She could not bear hoysters until there was a haitch in the month.' But I'm afraid it's a class-marker still, and we condemn our children to a life of social degradation if we let them say 'haitch'. Jeremy Butterfield, the editor of Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage, thinks 'haitch' will prevail, 'unspeakably uncouth though it may appear'. Against this final assault by Chaos and Old Night, Amol and I will die in the last ditch, in which we may find room for you too. 'Wrath' – , royal editor The royal world is full of words ready to trip you up, from the lord lieutenants ('left-tenants', of course, rather than 'lew-tenants') to equerries. Even Princess Eugenie has to explain she is a 'YOO-jenny' with the handy comparison to 'use-your-knees'. That's before you even get to the aristocratic titles, names and homes. Cholmondeley pronounced 'chumley'; Belvoir Castle pronounced 'beaver'; Buckingham Palace without stressing the 'ham'. Earl Spencer has largely given up the struggle for the traditional pronunciation of Princess Diana's childhood home Althorp. The old 'áwltrop' has now been overtaken by 'all-thorp', the version commonly (and understandably) used by visitors. If you haven't grown up in that world, you haven't got a hope. So I try not to be snooty about people getting things wrong, as I've done quite a few times myself. There is only really one word that I notice every time: wrath. In 2004, when I was a bright-eyed young fresher, a clearly better educated young man at university corrected my misuse of 'wrath' in the middle of a story I was telling. I had said the American version, rhyming with 'Cath' or the northern UK pronunciation of 'bath', rather than the correct British version, 'roth'. It has annoyed me ever since – mostly because he was right. I always notice it in others and have been known to gently, privately point it out to spare others the same social embarrassment. It's a good job I changed my ways. That fresher who corrected me? Reader, I married him. 'Harassment' – Lisa Markwell, head of long reads My mother has always had a lot to say about pronunciation – or rather, mispronunciations. It's definitely rubbed off on me. In my youth, a boyfriend was quickly dispatched (by me, I should add, not her) because he said 'hyperbowl' rather than 'hi-per-bol-ee'; it was his second offence after 'epy-tome' rather than 'ep-it-o-mee'. In adulthood, what I have trained myself to do is never to correct, but to try and use the word with the correct pronunciation as soon as possible in the conversation. It's kinder that way. It comes from an annoying waiter sneering at me ordering scallops. 'Do you mean scoll -ops?', he intoned, snootily. But the creeping Americanisation of words really grinds my gears. The changing from noun to verb is now, appallingly, well established – but that's a rant for another day. The way in which words become their most base selves in the way they are spoken just feels wrong. Yes, British English (if we can call it that), is full of idiosyncrasies, but it's always been like that. Take lieutenant: who knows why it is pronounced 'left-tenant' but it very much is not 'lew-tenant'. See also, 'har-ass-ment' when it should be 'harass-ment' – that's one of the words my mother still gets exercised about to this day. Then there's 'schedule' which, for the avoidance of any doubt, is 'shed-ule', not 'sked-ule'. Any number of YouTube videos and US dramas will not change my mind. But if I'm honest, 'privacy' is the one that catches me out and I am furious that it turns out I've been getting it wrong all this time. It's 'prih-vacy', not 'pry-vacy'. Please respect my 'prih-vacy' at this difficult time. 'Espresso' – Kamal Ahmed, The Daily T presenter and director of audio An admission. I am a self-hating mispronouncer. And my big one is ' espresso ' – which I pronounce 'expresso'. Just like most other people. When it should of course be 'e-spresso', as there is no 'x' in the word – literally (a word I insert into sentences for no apparent reason, another bugbear). But if you do actually say 'espresso' with an Italian flare you sound a bit ridiculous. Like saying 'panino' in an Italian deli when you want one sandwich with prosciutto (try pronouncing that properly) and buffalo mozzarella. And no-one says Paris like they are French, do they? Unless they are, literally, French. 'Twenny' – Poppy Coburn, acting deputy comment editor The resurgence of the regional accent has a lot to answer for when it comes to linguistic bastardisation. Familiarity breeds contempt, and so I reserve my deepest distaste for the Essex drawl. Born in Southend and raised in Braintree, I experienced the full breadth of the cockney-ish interpretation of the English language, from 'shut uppp' to 'innit' to (oh God) 'reem'. Words would become needlessly elongated by a refusal to vocalise 'er', and so 'proper' became 'propaaa' and 'water' turned to 'wor-arrrrr'. But by far the most objectionable trend was the dropping of consonants, with 'twenty' morphing into 'twenny'. I once made the mistake of saying 'twenny' to my grandmother, a Norfolk-born ex-headteacher who took great pride in her parents having arranged for her to take elocution lessons. I soon found myself an unwilling pupil in her pronunciation lessons. My sister and I now have completely diametric accents and articulate words so differently that we often seem to be speaking other languages. I may have been mercilessly teased at school for sounding like the Queen, but I've come to appreciate my slightly posh voice. It certainly helps when I'm trying to be understood over the phone or talking to a non-native speaker. 'Archipelago' – Mick Brown, features writer A friend of mine has a singular way of pronouncing the word that describes a group or chain of islands within a body of water. As we all know, the word is 'archipelago' – pronounced 'arki-pel-ago'. She pronounces it as 'archie pel-ago', as if she's talking about a 1930s music hall act. This is a result of pronouncing a word as you read it, not as you hear it said. I can understand that. Archipelago is not a word you hear in everyday speech. And who am I to correct her? For years I pronounced 'epitome' as 'epi-tome', rather than the correct pronunciation, 'e-pit-omee'. And I still struggle with the word hummus. Although I don't think there is consensus over the correct 'British' pronunciation, I do know that Delia Smith and I are both wrong. Delia was once caught on camera for a cookery show, standing at a supermarket shelf apparently buying something called 'who-moose', as if it were a subspecies of the large North American mammal. While, for some reason, I got it into my head a long time ago that it was pronounced 'hommus', and I still can't stop. That's the problem with mispronunciations, they're like earworms. Once they're lodged in the brain it's almost impossible to get them out. I don't think I'm alone in stumbling over the word 'mispronunciation' itself. A common complaint is that American pronunciations have infiltrated the English language. To hear Americans talking about 'erbs', with a silent 'h', is like fingernails screeching on a blackboard. And who is this famous artist they are constantly referring to as Van Go? A friend in America recently sent me a list of the three hardest things for an American to say: 'I'm wrong', 'I need help' and 'Worcestershire'. Just keep them guessing. What mispronunciations annoy you the most – and which are you guilty of? Let us know in the comments.
