Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

For the generations that grew up with only three TV networks (plus PBS), this was a familiar problem:

The Trouble With Words We’ve Read but Not Heard

My high school classmates and I may have developed reasonably large vocabularies and become good spellers, but unless we heard the words spoken aloud in the classroom or on TV, mis-pronunciation was a common “fox pass."

The dictionaries were not much help with their pronunciation keys:

Vowels
                as in…
i              fleece /flis/
i              happy /ˈhæpi/
ɪ              kit /kɪt/
ɛ              dress /drɛs/, carry /ˈkɛri/
æ            trap /træp/
ɑ              father /ˈfɑðər/, lot /lɑt/
ɔ,ɑ          hawk /hɔk/, /hɑk/
ə              cup /kəp/, alpha /ˈælfə/
ʊ              foot /fʊt/
u              goose /ɡus/
ɔr            force /fɔrs/, north /nɔrθ/
ər            nurse /nərs/

If you know how to sound out the symbols in the left column, you were a better student than I.

When a prominent person misspeaks publicly -- for example, when President Obama mispronounced corpsman as "corpse-man" in a speech --it not only lowers our estimation of the person but we also feel pained empathy from remembering our own similar embarrassments.

Mine was in high school, when I spent days crafting a speech on moral philosophy. It would have been pretty good had I not pronounced mores like the marshmallow sandwich (S'mores) instead of the eel (Moray). Of course, I wasn't aware of the error until the teacher interrupted with the correct pronunciation.

It's not the million dollar words but the simplest ones that can trip you up.