As I get older I find I’m getting annoyed by more and more things that people do. Apparently that’s quite normal, so I’m not going to worry about. And as I always planned on being a grumpy old man, you could say that I’m fulfilling my goals, so why feel guilty?

Right now, I’m getting more and more annoyed by the way some people pronounce (or rather, MISpronounce) some common words. There are some classic repeaters, and those will probably top my list, and then there are ones that just come up occassionally enough to warrant their inclusion.

So here’s my current list of the most annoying mispronunciations.

* PROBABLY. This word has 3 syllables: Prob-ab-lee. I’m sick of hearing “probbly” (rhymes with “wobbly”).

* PARTICULARLY. A total of five syllables in this one. That means that you don’t pronounce it “particyully”. Wrap your tongue around both of those Ls properly and clearly pronounce each one – “par-tick-yew-lar-lee”. And the Y is at the end, not in the middle (it’s not “particyully”). And very closely related is …

* REGULARLY. Four syllables here, but like the previous one it’s usually mispronounced as either “regyully” or “regyewly”. Both wrong. It’s reg-yew-lar-lee.

* FEBRUARY. This one has been irking me for a while. It’s got 4 syllables: Feb-rew-air-ee. There are three common mispronunciations: “Feb-yew-air-ee”, (as immortalised in the Killers’ song “Somebody told me”, which I hate purely because of this) which at least has four syllables, but it misses the important first R, “Feb-yew-ree”, at three syllables, and then the god-awful “Feb-ree”, a mere two syllables.

* SAYS. As in “Simon says touch your nose”. I can’t believe some people still pronounce this so that it rhymes with “rays” or “pays”. This is one of those quirky english words that breaks the rules, and it should correctly be pronounced so that it rhymes with “fez”.

* Anything ending in “L”. The letter L seems to be suffering from the laziness of most people. Because they couldn’t be bothered putting their tongue on the roof of their mouth, L comes out as W. Listen next time someone says “people”, or “final” and you will probably actually hear “peopew” and “finaw”. Similarly, we drink “alcohow”, strive to be “legaw”, or even to be “coow”. Pathetic. It’s also now creeping into the Ls in the middle of words, like “filler” coming out as “fiwwer”. If this keeps up, the english language will end up as a long series of primitive-sounding vowels.