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
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), [ˈnoʊtɪfaɪ] (AE) | listen here notification: [ˌnəʊtɪfɪˈkeɪʃn] (BE), [ˌnoʊtɪfɪˈkeɪʃn] (AE) | listen here
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
This week’s seminar speaker (German, but currently working in the US) made several interesting pronunciation mistakes. Most notably, he kept pronouncing the verb interpret so incorrectly that I did not even recognize it immediately. To understand what went wrong, we best look at the phonetic spelling. The are actually several pronunciations of interpret that are
At a physics conference I attended last week in Berlin, I came across yet another example of tricky distinctions to master. Several speakers confused the words monotonic or monotone with monotonous. While these words can be used interchangeably in some situations, only monotonic and monotone are correct in a mathematical context. The Oxford online dictionary
A python is not just a rather dangerous looking animal. It also gave the name to a very powerful and popular programming language — Python. Having heard different people pronounce Python in different ways, I decided to look up its pronunciation. This is what I found. In British English, Python is pronounced as [ˈpaɪθən], whereas
I find the incorrect pronunciation of the word parameter in English (and of Parameter in German) both annoying and fascinating. Remarkably, the mistake is made both by professionals who use it almost every day, and people who haven’t used the word parameter since they distanced themselves from mathematics after high school. The OED gives the
Are you an engineer? Even if not, you may want to find out about the correct pronunciation of the word engineer, because many people are not aware of it. The pronunciation is tricky because it differs from that of the word engine in terms of stress. While engine is usually pronounced correctly, namely as [ˈendʒɪn]
I recently came across a scientific paper in which the authors (who struggled with the English language quite a bit throughout the text) used “to testify” instead of “to test”. However, the meaning of these two verbs is very different. According to the OED, to testify means either 1. to make a statement that something
In my experience, many German native speakers (including myself) tend to mispronounce the noun worm, referring to a long thin creature with no bones or legs, that lives in soil. The mistake usually made is to pronounce worm as [wɔː(r)m], just like the word warm, listen here. However, the correct pronunciation of worm is [wɜː(r)m],