Take-home message for efficient readers If you don’t care about the details, let me state very bluntly that both Porsh and Porshuh are incorrect from a German point of view and do not match the pronunciation used by Porsche in their English commercials. This does not mean that you can’t use these pronunciations in English,
In the past, I have had a few posts on the topic of company names or advertising slogans that, strictly speaking, make use of incorrect English. A good example is the slogan “Cheat legal” used by a company called SKINS, see here. As in the famous case of Apple’s “Think different“, one may argue that
Although I have previously mentioned that quite a few non-native speakers tend to incorrectly pronounce letters of the English alphabet (see here), including the X in x-ray, I believe that my recent observation warrants a separate post. Specifically, I noticed that it is common for German (and likely other) native speakers to pronounce the X
At a recent conference, I witnessed a speaker talking about paralyzing various computer codes for better performance. If this sounds confusing, you are absolutely right. The speaker was merely pronouncing the word parallelize incorrectly. The OED includes the following meaning for the verb paralyze: to prevent something from functioning normally and its pronunciation as (listen
A colleague recently made me aware of the widely used yet incorrect expression on-premise for software that can be run on a customer’s servers rather than in the cloud. If you look out for it or ask your favourite search engine, you will see just how many people make this mistake. In hindsight, I have
If gives me considerable shame and delight at the same time to have only recently learned about ghoti. If that word looks fishy to you, read on. The word ghoti was constructed by Alexander J. Ellis in 1845 [see here] to highlight what is wrong with English pronunciation. It is still often invoked to argue
While listening to an online lecture about software engineering presented by a German, I noticed a systematic, incorrect pronunciation of the words notify and notification. The correct pronunciations are readily found online, for example in the Oxford Learner’s Dictionary: notify: [ˈnəʊtɪfaɪ] (BE), [ˈnoÊŠtɪfaɪ] (AE) | listen here notification: [ËŒnəʊtɪfɪˈkeɪʃn] (BE), [ËŒnoÊŠtɪfɪˈkeɪʃn] (AE) | listen here
Have you also noticed that many non-English speakers pronounce the adverb as just like ass? This embarrassing mistake is the result of not distinguishing between a voiced s (phonetic spelling [z])Â and a voiceless s (phonetic spelling [s]). Even though as has two different pronunciations, referred to as weak and strong, the s is always
Linkedin is a widely used platform for online networking. Personally, I believe that part of its popularity is partly due to the fact that it is often accessible at work whereas other social media websites are typically blocked. Regardless of personal opinions regarding the widespread overselling of personal skills and achievements on Linkedin, this post
The word lounge is commonly used in several languages. For example, in English and German, you may talk about a lounge at the airport or in a hotel. Despite its common use, you may soon realize (after reading this post) that quite a few people get the pronunciation wrong. Actually, this post is very much
In a physics paper I recently read for work, the German authors mixed up the words exhaustive and exhausting. Contrary to good scientific practice, I will not provide a reference in order to give them some anonymity. The sentence that made me chuckle and motivated this post was “For exhausting discussions concerning the […] methods