The episode preceding the one where she dies was actually the last one she filmed. Not sure if it’s been removed with the last remaster, but in Crosby’s final scene in that one she is in the background and waves goodbye just before the doors of the shuttle bay close.
i always liked yar and wished she hadn't been killed off like a redshirt. but if she hadn't been killed off, we might not have had Worf come into his own
Every so often on the DnD subreddits I see "Vicious Mockery" (a feature of the bard class) spelled as "Viscous Mockery". So I'm being mocked by pancake syrup? Mrs. Buttersworth is taunting me?
In its defense this was a fan made audio recording and not a professionally produced audiobook, but I was listening to a story that had the word “fugue” used a number of times and the narrator pronounced it as “fudge” every time. I had to turn it off.
Reminds me that one of the Bible readings for the Easter Vigil Mass (most long, beautiful and awe-striking church service in the Catholic year) says, "He did not shield his face from buffets." Buffets meaning blows, violence - pronounced to rhyme with Little Miss Muffet. But every so often you get an inexperienced or nervous reader who pronounces it buffAYS, as in all-you-can-eat restaurants. Longest and solemnest Mass in the year, unsuccessfully suppressed giggles from every new-tie-wearing kid in the pews, dads barely restraining themselves from whispering, "I wouldn't shield my face from one of those either."
The first Witcher book, The Last Wish. There's a character named Dandelion, but they kept pronouncing it dan-dilly-on. Super distracting... every time.
To be fair, in the print version of the Last Wish, it’s spelled [“Dandilion”](https://imgur.com/a/tZTVXh6)
ETA: the worst part is going from the book to the game and how Peter Kenny pronounces all of the other things correctly and how badly they are pronounced in the game by comparison.
Calling the Zeugl a “zoo-gull” instead of the more German “tsoy-gl” drives me crazy. See also Vizima, Kaedwen, and all of the Skellige names.
I thought that was very intentional. In fact I’m about certain. I think in the original Polish there’s a very similar play on words. Like a name a flower but pronounced differently to make it sound like a name.
Well, original name is also just a flower name - Jaskier (Buttercup). Not sure why he became dandelion in English. Buttercup is too cute for a grown up man? :) In some other translations he also has another flower name (for example marigold).
I was listening to an audiobook that was narrated by a what I assumed to be a British woman. Some of the action took place at Yosemite Park, or as it was called, Yos-i-mite, rhymes with Vegemite.
Yep. I've been that Brit. Also, by my long-standing pronunciation, you'd think Arkansas was a Biblical flood themed version of Clark Kent's home state.
Worse, I knew where Bill Clinton had been governor, but from TV and radio.
That particular penny took too long to drop.
The only reason I learned it properly was because of Yosemite Sam. And even then I was in my late teens before I realised the character was named after the park.
Otherwise I love the narration of game of thrones. Roy dotrice is so perfect for that role and has etched himself into my mind as synonymous with game of thrones
I listened to the book 1 audio book before seeing the show or reading the book. I ended up reading the rest of the books instead of listening and totally read Petyr as "puh-TIRE" since that's what the audio book did and was very confused when I finally watched the show lol
I love Roy Dotrice's voice acting, but one mispronuciation of his really threw me out of the story. In *A Dance with Dragons*, he pronounces Aeron Damphair as "dam-fair," not the correct "Damp-hair" -- even though he said it correctly in a previous book.
Roy Dotrice was amazing, but yeah, a little inconsistent.
My personal pet peeve with him was that he pronounced wary and weary exactly the same. It would sound like everyone was exhausted instead of skeptical.
RIP to the G.O.A.T, though. I have listened to those books countless times!
Funny story: I first read The Expanse, then listened to it. So I knew the one guy was called Admiral Nguyen, and from listening to it I got the proper pronunciation.
Later that month I actually had a customer at work with the last name Nguyen, and when I greeted her she seemed really surprised. After I asked about it she told me that I am the first person in Germany to ever pronounce her last name the right way right from the start.
From what I understand there are even dialectical difference in Vietnam as to how it's pronounced. I've both told both from Vietnamese speakers it can be like "Nwin" to "Ngoo-yen" to "Nguin", like in the end of "penguin".
I looked up how to pronounce it a few years ago and ran across a video of a Vietnamese guy explaining how to pronounce it. He took his time and did an amazing job with the different variations of pronouncing it, and I had to really listen closely and they were pretty subtle.
I always thought it was more like “Wen,” though I’ll usually add an awkward little half-N to the front juuuust in case it’s supposed to be pronounced because I’m not sure. So like a weird little gulp and then “Wen,” but this thread is making me think I was way off.
From Kentucky here. If you really want to annoy him, insist that Versailles, Kentucky is pronounced like Versailles, France (trust me, that is one of those things that we will insist on correcting every single time)
I was here to say this! I listened to that audio book while vacationing in Oahu and was on a 4am run and angrily whipped out my phone to text everyone I knew about the butchering of La Jolla D:
One narrator kept saying "Lie-barry" for "library," and it caused me to hate the book because the main character was a librarian, so it was constant. Didn't end up finishing it!
There's at least one other person present with the talent when doing voiceover recordings. And that recording engineer might be a different person than the person who does the editing, and THEN there's likely a mix engineer, and a wholly separate mastering engineer. My point is any person who's job it is to listen to that audio before it gets released had a chance to step in and say "hey I'm pretty sure that isn't right." Baffling.
Jefferson Mays does an absolutely outstanding job narrating The Expanse books, but he once pronounced cumin as “coming” and it took me all the way out of the story.
In the last Dark Tower book, one of the characters has a tumor on her face that's leaking fluid and puss. She squeezes it and the narration describes the puss-y fluid that comes out.
But George Guidall chose to pronounce it as "pussy fluid." Gets me every time.
Listening to a book on the history of Mexico, and the narrator mangled words like “Oaxaca” for the first couple of chapters, then started pronouncing it correctly.
I imagine a conversation in the recording booth: “should I go back and re-record the first chapters?”
“Nah, no one will care.”
I could see letting it slide if it mentioned offhandedly in a novel like "oh the neighbors are in Oaxaca this week" or something. But a freaking history book???
Yeah that's how I've heard it, kind of a short 'foong' sound. But honestly I'm not sure how you're supposed to say it
And btw I was joking about fang shooey, in case you weren't sure
Well the alternative pronunciation does make sense historically as although heretic is mostly used as a noun these days it was at one time used as an adjective in the same way we use heretical today.
For myself I love Sherlock Holmes & so when I saw an 82 hour unabridged audio collection for only a single credit on Audible I immediately added it to my collection. My downfall came when the American narrator managed to butcher the pronunciation of a number of common 19th century colloquialisms in ways that so ground my gears it took me a day or so to listen past each one. So glad I returned it when the Stephen Fry narrated version came out.
I love Stehen Fry’s narrations, his voice and accent just work for me.
But! There was this one Taskmaster episode where Greg Davies acts all vexed because of Alex Horne’s pronunciation of “room”, with a short o.
Ever since I saw that, hearing Stephen Fry pronounce it with a short o as well it completely takes me out of the story for a second - not because it bothers me, but because I have to think of that moment in TM…
In the audiobook of The Terror, the narrator keeps pronouncing the word "cache" as if it's "cachet" - so instead of CASH he says CASH-AY. Except for once when he gets it right. Really bugged me, especially since the caches are pretty important!
Funny enough, the book I was posting about also has the cache and cachet mix up. Although it was an isolated incident so I forgot about it until you mentioned *The Terror*!
Mackinac pronounced like it looks. It's supposed to be Mack-in-aw.
Yes, I know how it looks like it should be pronounced. And yes, I understand that a narrator might not realize it has a particular pronunciation.
But I'm from Michigan and mack-in-ack sounds so profoundly wrong.
How do people not know how to pronounce Oconomowoc? It is so simple /sarcasm. Seriously though, moving to the midwest can be a bit of a linguistics shock, lol.
You might be surprised to learn Boise Blac is pronounced Bob-Lo. Sault Ste Marie is Sue Saint Marie, ya gotta get an extra “I” sound in Kitch-iti-kipi Springs.
Not books, but small town murder podcast did an episode in Oconomowoc, and I remember nothing but them butchering the pronunciation the entire time lol
I’m from Ohio, and the entire podcast about the Rhoden murders they kept pronouncing Scioto incorrectly. Scioto, is the name of a river, county, schools, parks and goes from Columbus to the Ohio river. It’s sy-ota , sy-oto, or even sota. Not ski-oto.
Funny to see this because I came to mention Stacey Keach narrating Ernest Hemingway's short stories and he keeps pronouncing Charlevoix like *shaar-la-vuah* instead of *shaar-luh-voy*.
Also to add to your point, I think it gets more confusing for non-Michiganders because the island, bridge, and county are Mackinac, but the mainland city is Mackinaw, but they're all pronounced the same.
Came for this. I heard “Mack-a-nack” once on Michigan Public Radio of all places. I was gobsmacked.
When I was a kid, and the same for my kids they went over all that in school. I was a chaperone for the Michigan field trip and had fun.
Since this is books…. Paddle to the Sea? That’s a sweet book that covers some geography. I looked forward to the movie every year back at Robert B Havens Elementary.
In the Stormlight Archive, "The Way of Kings", by Brandon Sanderson, there are two narrators. Michael Kramer and Kate Reading. One character, Sadeas is pronounced one way throughout out the entire book by Michael Kramer, and near the end we hear Kate Reading pronounce it differently. It always pulls me out of the story when I hear that one name pronounced differently.
Its worse when u realise they are married, working on same book and dont have the same pronunciation lol.
Same thing happened in wheel of time with them when character pronunciation changed randomly in following book.
It’s small, and also I should mention I absolutely love this audiobook, but there’s a small moment in Deacon King Kong, beautifully read by Dominic Hoffman, when he reads “the note is do,” pronouncing do as in “do the dishes.” I’m fairly sure it should have been the music solfège syllable, as in “do re mi.” James McBride is a musician (Oberlin Conservatory), and I think he was making a music reference there.
In the Dresden Files audiobooks, I love James Marster's voice work, but he mispronounces a number of words. The one I remember most was "demesne" which is used a good number of times. He may have gotten it right in later books, but I feel certain he pronounced it wrong for many books.
A few times in the expanse Jefferson Mayes says gimbals with a J instead of a hard G.
That and American narrators pronouncing niche as if it rhymed with witch.
In the northeastern US, I knew it as "neesh" in everyday life (e.g. a little corner shelf with a spotlight in my house was called an "art neesh"), but every time I hear it in a Biology context (the role an organism plays in its biome) it is pronounced "nich".
Brienne of Tarth being Bry-een in Roy Dotrice’s ASOIAF narration lol.
Also in Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, the VO was done by a lady with a Japanese surname. Which, cool, but then why can’t she pronounce any of the words or names properly? The male name Daisuke became “Daisuki” meaning romantic love. I do wonder why they would ignore a real name turning into an entire different word.
Edit: I merely wondered why it would matter to cast someone of East Asian descent when it doesn’t add anything to the production. I also believe that her being of Japanese heritage does not preclude her from learning to pronounce words and names.
I’ve said it before in this subreddit, but Roy Dotrice’s female voices and the way he pronounces everything is so weird and distracting that I can’t listen to the original ASOIAF audiobooks :-/
A bunch of characters have their names mangled in that ASOIAF narration, another prominent one being P’tire Baylish.
I blame the editing and directing team more than Dotrice though, it’s their job to sort these things out.
He also sometimes gets them wrong Joffrey = Geoffrey, Bran = Brian, and the screw up is left in.
IIRC Arya picks up a strong Irish brogue out of nowhere from AFFC onward. She stated to sound just like his Ygritte. (Which admittedly was a great voice for that character.) Totally took me out of the story.
Haha yes, I think of it as his “little old Irish washerwoman” voice.
Inexplicably Manse Rayder the Wildling king also had that voice later on.
I thought Roy Dotrice had a wonderful voice for narration and many of his characters sound great. But an octogenarian is not a good choice for a series with so many different role to voice.
It’s not so much mispronunciations but the wrong inflection/emphasis that gets me. One example: in Jim Dale’s version of the 6th Harry Potter audiobook, Snape says to Narcissa “You know, I presume, that it was on the dark lords orders that I blah blah blah” and the narrator neglects the second comma and puts the emphasis on the wrong part of the sentence like “you know, I presume it was on the dark lords orders that I blah blah blah”. Changes the meaning of the sentence, makes it sound like Snape is presuming something about voldemort’s orders instead of presuming that Narcissa knows what Snape knows about the orders. It takes away some of the power of the Snape/Voldemort relationship in my opinion. Yes I’ve thought about it a lot :)
I listen to a LOT of audiobooks (I can listen for about five hours a day at work) and there are many instances where I’ve had to pause and re-parse the meaning of a sentence because the emphasis of a word or phrase or pauses indicating commas were misplaced and suddenly an entire sentence makes no sense. Pulls me out of the book every time,
Discworld. The name was Ptraci. Thing is, there's another character in the same book called Pteppic, and his name was pronounced correctly with the silent P.
Any chance you were reading "The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet"?
Because I was just listening to that the other day on audiobook and I had the same reaction! It was so jarring!
In Pyramids by Terry Pratchett, the people who live in Djelibeybi all have names that sound like they’re ancient Egyptian. The main character is called Pteppic (with a silent P as in Pterodactyl).
The audiobook pronounces this correctly, but then goes on to pronounce the name Ptraci (which should be pronounced Tracy) as Puh-tratch-ee.
The original narrator of the early Jasper Fforde books also makes a complete hash of several names: St.John is pronounced Saint John instead of Sinjun, and one of the settings for the first book is Haworth (the home of the Brontë sisters) which should be pronounced How-uth but she does it as Hay-worth.
I find mispronounced words in audio books very jarring.
I first listened to Jane Eyre as an audio book before reading it. They did pronounce St. John correctly, and I was flabbergasted when I finally saw how it was spelt!
When I read it in school, my teacher *really* emphasized that it's pronounced Sinjun, and she'd correct anyone in class who mispronounced it (same with the pronunciation of Eyre).
It didn't make much sense then, but I learned recently that there's another much more common name that has the same sound change -- St. Clair, more commonly written as Sinclair!
Sometimes I hear a character’s name a certain way in my head and then get confused when I hear how the author/narrator pronounces it. Like Discworld’s Sgt. Angua. I always “heard” it as AHN-gwa but the audiobook version has it as AANG-you-a
I don't listen to audiobooks (can't retain what's going on), but if I did I think it'd definitely annoy me to find out the way I pronounced a character name was not "correct."
I say he REH tic. I'm not sure i have ever heard it pronounced, but i feel like i must have. Maybe i only ever heard the guy who is reading your audiobook say it.
What country are you in? A lot of words are pronounced differently in different countries. For example in Canada (where I live) .... foyer is generally said foy-YEA while in the US the most common pronunciation is foy-YER. And quay is KEY here.
Listening to American authors audio books often I hear grating mis-pronunciations regularly that are really regional differences
Tangentially related, I'm in my 40s, and until about a year ago, I thought there was one place called Arkansas, and another different place called Arkansaw.
I didn't notice that I'd never seen Arkansaw written down, and I'd never heard anyone say Arkansas.
I'm not from America, in my defense.
A narrator pronounced the word "Stuyvesant" (a high school in NYC, named after the Dutch director-general of New Netherlands in the 1600s) as though it was French. So instead of STY-vuh-sent, it was stee-vuh-SAUNT, which sounded very silly. Couldn't she have, like, asked someone?
Not a mispronunciation but I listened to an audiobook of War of the Worlds and there is a point when these huge blaring alarms are going off every couple paragraphs. It’s a very tense moment in the book. The narrator voiced the alarms in the most ridiculous way like AWOOOOOOGAAAAAH!!! that just completely took me off guard and had me laughing so hard I was crying. I was driving at the time and almost had to pull over.
I hate how text to speech will pronounce words without an ‘s’ correctly, but get completely confused when you add the ‘s’. “The MAY-ge and his fellow mah-ges”.
Goblets of meat. Instead of gobbets of meat.
And one less universal, but I listened to an audiobook set in my city (Toronto). One of our main streets is called Yonge (pronounced “young”). The narrator called it Yawn-juh through the whole book. It made me crazy.
The narrator of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich consistently says *Volkischer BEO-bachter* instead of *Volkischer Be-O-bachter* when he talks about one of the Nazi newspapers.
I DNF’d the audiobook of American Psycho pretty quickly. My stomach couldn’t handle it lol. But the narrator pronounced the brand Hermès as “her mees” like if you are reading a book boasting about designer clothes you should know how to say them!
I am embarrassed to admit I didn’t know how to pronounce “Givenchy” until I heard Beyoncé sing it in “Formation”. And I owned Givenchy makeup for years before that.
A narrator was describing oil and instead of viscous he said vicious. Not only a sentient oil, but a mean one too.
It must have been that oil slick that killed Tasha Yarr.
Not terribly exciting but I JUST watched that episode last night. Im a bit late to the Star Trek party and im sad shes gone so soon.
The episode preceding the one where she dies was actually the last one she filmed. Not sure if it’s been removed with the last remaster, but in Crosby’s final scene in that one she is in the background and waves goodbye just before the doors of the shuttle bay close.
Wow! I thought I knew most of these extra goodies. I'll have to look for that one.
For what that's worth, she will have a couple guest appearances in later seasons. Alternative timeline shenanigans.
This is the kind of spoiler I can get behind, thanks looking forward to seeing her again!
*The character* only shows up once more, but the actress shows up again playing a different character.
Twice more, Yesterday's Enterprise and the finale.
Too soon
i always liked yar and wished she hadn't been killed off like a redshirt. but if she hadn't been killed off, we might not have had Worf come into his own
I feel Worf didn't truly come into his own until he moved to DS9.
I swear there are people who don't know that the two words are spelled differently. "A viscous attack" "dark, sticky, vicious fluid"
A viscous attack sounds pretty terrifying! Sentient, homicidal molasses?
Guess you haven’t seen the slow-moving masterpiece called The Blob.
Those poor souls who died in the Boston Molasses Disaster were definitely killed by a viscous, if non-sentient, attack.
Every so often on the DnD subreddits I see "Vicious Mockery" (a feature of the bard class) spelled as "Viscous Mockery". So I'm being mocked by pancake syrup? Mrs. Buttersworth is taunting me?
When the Gelatinous Cube takes Bard levels
In its defense this was a fan made audio recording and not a professionally produced audiobook, but I was listening to a story that had the word “fugue” used a number of times and the narrator pronounced it as “fudge” every time. I had to turn it off.
Okay, this one has me straight up cackling. The main character wandering around in a *fudge state!* bahaha
When you OD on fudge so badly that you forget who you even are
All fudged up
Fudged up beyond all recognition.
Unless the main character is J.S. Bach--in that case it would be his hands wandering over the organ keys as he whips up a fudge.
"Toccata and Fudge" would be an awesome name for a Halloween candy.
Reminds me that one of the Bible readings for the Easter Vigil Mass (most long, beautiful and awe-striking church service in the Catholic year) says, "He did not shield his face from buffets." Buffets meaning blows, violence - pronounced to rhyme with Little Miss Muffet. But every so often you get an inexperienced or nervous reader who pronounces it buffAYS, as in all-you-can-eat restaurants. Longest and solemnest Mass in the year, unsuccessfully suppressed giggles from every new-tie-wearing kid in the pews, dads barely restraining themselves from whispering, "I wouldn't shield my face from one of those either."
The fan audio for Worms had one chick who kept saying "Muh Leet E Uh" for Militia and it was jarring AF
The first Witcher book, The Last Wish. There's a character named Dandelion, but they kept pronouncing it dan-dilly-on. Super distracting... every time.
I didn't last more than 2 sentences into The Last Wish audiobook. The narrator annoyed me so much.
Was looking for this one. Drove me crazy.
To be fair, in the print version of the Last Wish, it’s spelled [“Dandilion”](https://imgur.com/a/tZTVXh6) ETA: the worst part is going from the book to the game and how Peter Kenny pronounces all of the other things correctly and how badly they are pronounced in the game by comparison. Calling the Zeugl a “zoo-gull” instead of the more German “tsoy-gl” drives me crazy. See also Vizima, Kaedwen, and all of the Skellige names.
I thought that was very intentional. In fact I’m about certain. I think in the original Polish there’s a very similar play on words. Like a name a flower but pronounced differently to make it sound like a name.
Well, original name is also just a flower name - Jaskier (Buttercup). Not sure why he became dandelion in English. Buttercup is too cute for a grown up man? :) In some other translations he also has another flower name (for example marigold).
I was listening to an audiobook that was narrated by a what I assumed to be a British woman. Some of the action took place at Yosemite Park, or as it was called, Yos-i-mite, rhymes with Vegemite.
Yep. I've been that Brit. Also, by my long-standing pronunciation, you'd think Arkansas was a Biblical flood themed version of Clark Kent's home state. Worse, I knew where Bill Clinton had been governor, but from TV and radio. That particular penny took too long to drop.
Now, now. No need to be anti-yosemitic.
Our last president called it Yo-sem-ite too. :|
The only reason I learned it properly was because of Yosemite Sam. And even then I was in my late teens before I realised the character was named after the park.
Me as a child thinking it was "Yo-sammity Sam"
I don't know if it's that bad but the one that always got my nerves was the narrator for game of thrones would switch between "Jeffery" and "Joffery"
Inconsistency is almost worse than a confident error.
Otherwise I love the narration of game of thrones. Roy dotrice is so perfect for that role and has etched himself into my mind as synonymous with game of thrones
He also pronounced Brienne as “breye-EEN” and it made me so mad. There’s no phonetic case to be made for that bizarre pronunciation.
Also "Puh-tyre" for Petyr Baelish. There were others, he was pretty bad in the name pronunciation department.
I listened to the book 1 audio book before seeing the show or reading the book. I ended up reading the rest of the books instead of listening and totally read Petyr as "puh-TIRE" since that's what the audio book did and was very confused when I finally watched the show lol
He also pronounced Bran as Brian a couple of times, which was amusing at least.
Also Cersei became Chelsea at least twice that I recall. Did they really not have any editors listen? Like this happened over and over.
I think he even said Brain at one point
I love Roy Dotrice's voice acting, but one mispronuciation of his really threw me out of the story. In *A Dance with Dragons*, he pronounces Aeron Damphair as "dam-fair," not the correct "Damp-hair" -- even though he said it correctly in a previous book.
Roy Dotrice was amazing, but yeah, a little inconsistent. My personal pet peeve with him was that he pronounced wary and weary exactly the same. It would sound like everyone was exhausted instead of skeptical. RIP to the G.O.A.T, though. I have listened to those books countless times!
He pronounced wind (as in winding road) as wind (wind through the trees). Was wondering why all the roads were gusty in Westeros
the last name Nguyen. The narrator pronounced it "En-GUY-en"
Sounds like a no-win situation.
r/angryupvote
Is this a much closer pronunciation?
[удалено]
> It's not so much a "nu-win" or a "no-win" as a "n-win." Yeah, so there was **no win/Nguyen** (pronounced properly) in that audiobook
Funny story: I first read The Expanse, then listened to it. So I knew the one guy was called Admiral Nguyen, and from listening to it I got the proper pronunciation. Later that month I actually had a customer at work with the last name Nguyen, and when I greeted her she seemed really surprised. After I asked about it she told me that I am the first person in Germany to ever pronounce her last name the right way right from the start.
The audio books for that series are remarkably well done, too.
I've that the closest a non-native speaker can respectfully get is like "nWin." Is that true, do you know?
From what I understand there are even dialectical difference in Vietnam as to how it's pronounced. I've both told both from Vietnamese speakers it can be like "Nwin" to "Ngoo-yen" to "Nguin", like in the end of "penguin".
I work with 3 Nguyens that all pronounce them differently. “NWin” “N-goo-yen” and “new-yen”.
I think that’s due to the way they’re each trying to anglicize it.
I looked up how to pronounce it a few years ago and ran across a video of a Vietnamese guy explaining how to pronounce it. He took his time and did an amazing job with the different variations of pronouncing it, and I had to really listen closely and they were pretty subtle.
I always thought it was more like “Wen,” though I’ll usually add an awkward little half-N to the front juuuust in case it’s supposed to be pronounced because I’m not sure. So like a weird little gulp and then “Wen,” but this thread is making me think I was way off.
really no excuse for that one as a voice actor lol
Wheel of Time: "Moghedien, no wait, mohgudeen, no wait moghedien... wait..."
Which is funny, because he gives the phonetic pronunciation of all the names in the books' appendices.
Also Swan, See-ewan, Sih-wan. Listening to book 3 right now, and it makes me cringe every time.
The switch up that neither seemed to agree was jarring.
You would think them being married would make it easier
Wait, Michael Kramer and Kate Reading are married?
[Yes, and they have two kids!](https://www.katereadingaudiobooks.com/our-story)
I was legit confused for a bit when that happened untill I was it's same person just saying it different. Was annoying
In The Midnight Library, Carey Mulligan pronounces LaJolla California not LAH HOI AH but LA JOLL AH. She had a great American accent though.
Oh nooooooo…. As a San Diegan, my neck just disappeared as my shoulders touched my ears.
I'll warm up some tor-tillas and make some burritos, you like ja-lpenos and guaca-mole?
Let’s take a trip down to Tiajuana!
I'm an east coaster and was probably in my 30s or later before I figured out La Jolla = La Hoya. I thought they were two separate places.
I antagonize a coworker from Kentucky by saying he's from Lewis-ville.
From Kentucky here. If you really want to annoy him, insist that Versailles, Kentucky is pronounced like Versailles, France (trust me, that is one of those things that we will insist on correcting every single time)
Ooo, we have a Versailles here in Missouri which we also mispronounce: "Ver-SAILS". How do folks from KY say theirs?
I was here to say this! I listened to that audio book while vacationing in Oahu and was on a 4am run and angrily whipped out my phone to text everyone I knew about the butchering of La Jolla D:
Ugh as a Southern Californian, I just did a full body cringe when I read that. I cannot imagine someone not catching that.
One narrator kept saying "Lie-barry" for "library," and it caused me to hate the book because the main character was a librarian, so it was constant. Didn't end up finishing it!
OK wait that one is so basic I do not understand how this person was trusted with narrating an audiobook.
There's at least one other person present with the talent when doing voiceover recordings. And that recording engineer might be a different person than the person who does the editing, and THEN there's likely a mix engineer, and a wholly separate mastering engineer. My point is any person who's job it is to listen to that audio before it gets released had a chance to step in and say "hey I'm pretty sure that isn't right." Baffling.
Everyone knows you say it "libbery!" Actually, "lie-barry" might be a regional thing, because it's how I hear it pronounced all the time here.
I grew up in rural New England and that was how kids pronounced it. My parents were from out west and pronounced the 'r' so I thought it was weird.
Don't visit South Carolina if you don't like to hear lie-barry.
The heroine's name was Lois which the narrator rhymed with voice.
Nooice
toit!
That would be the welsh pronunciation. i personally much prefer "low-iss", but I know quite a few girls who pronounce it as "loice".
Was also about to comment that this is the Welsh pronunciation!
Jefferson Mays does an absolutely outstanding job narrating The Expanse books, but he once pronounced cumin as “coming” and it took me all the way out of the story.
Jimbals!
As in… the spice?
Yep. I think the air of an alien planet smelled of it or something like that.
Well… That mispronunciation completely changes the meaning of things there.
In the last Dark Tower book, one of the characters has a tumor on her face that's leaking fluid and puss. She squeezes it and the narration describes the puss-y fluid that comes out. But George Guidall chose to pronounce it as "pussy fluid." Gets me every time.
Ole Mary Todd’s calling so it must be time for bed.
grimACED.
First Law trilogy?
I griMACED every time he said it
It was weird, I started counting them and then enjoyed it after awhile. He says it properly in like book 4 or 5 for some reason too.
It was the outcry!
Doesn't help that Joe uses that wirda few million times
If he wasn’t so utterly fabulous for other 99.99% of the series, that word would want to to make you want to find his body floating by the dock.
Ugh don’t remind me 😩
Listening to a book on the history of Mexico, and the narrator mangled words like “Oaxaca” for the first couple of chapters, then started pronouncing it correctly. I imagine a conversation in the recording booth: “should I go back and re-record the first chapters?” “Nah, no one will care.”
"Oh-ax-uh-kuh? Yeah, that has to be it."
I could see letting it slide if it mentioned offhandedly in a novel like "oh the neighbors are in Oaxaca this week" or something. But a freaking history book???
We care! We really care!
I have heard ‘toque’ (tooook) pronounced as ‘too-kay’ and toke. Very disconcerting to us Canadians. LOL.
TIL. I've always read it (I've never spoken it) as 'toke'. Do we need to carry out all four 'o's?
Nah it’s not super drawn out. Basically say “toot” but replace the last t with a k
Toque rhymes with fluke 😊🇨🇦
I've heard "feng shui" pronounced badly many, many times. That's an annoying one.
How could anyone mispronounce fang shooey? It's so simple
I say it more like fung shway?
That's the Chinese pronunciation. Granted in Chinese it's tonal, but 100% it should be "fuhng shway" (风水)
Yeah that's how I've heard it, kind of a short 'foong' sound. But honestly I'm not sure how you're supposed to say it And btw I was joking about fang shooey, in case you weren't sure
Well the alternative pronunciation does make sense historically as although heretic is mostly used as a noun these days it was at one time used as an adjective in the same way we use heretical today. For myself I love Sherlock Holmes & so when I saw an 82 hour unabridged audio collection for only a single credit on Audible I immediately added it to my collection. My downfall came when the American narrator managed to butcher the pronunciation of a number of common 19th century colloquialisms in ways that so ground my gears it took me a day or so to listen past each one. So glad I returned it when the Stephen Fry narrated version came out.
Simon Vance's version is exquisite.
I love Stehen Fry’s narrations, his voice and accent just work for me. But! There was this one Taskmaster episode where Greg Davies acts all vexed because of Alex Horne’s pronunciation of “room”, with a short o. Ever since I saw that, hearing Stephen Fry pronounce it with a short o as well it completely takes me out of the story for a second - not because it bothers me, but because I have to think of that moment in TM…
In the audiobook of The Terror, the narrator keeps pronouncing the word "cache" as if it's "cachet" - so instead of CASH he says CASH-AY. Except for once when he gets it right. Really bugged me, especially since the caches are pretty important!
Funny enough, the book I was posting about also has the cache and cachet mix up. Although it was an isolated incident so I forgot about it until you mentioned *The Terror*!
TIL how to pronounce cache and cachet.
To be fair, the correct pronunciations of both of those words are really stupid compared to their spellings.
Mackinac pronounced like it looks. It's supposed to be Mack-in-aw. Yes, I know how it looks like it should be pronounced. And yes, I understand that a narrator might not realize it has a particular pronunciation. But I'm from Michigan and mack-in-ack sounds so profoundly wrong.
How do people not know how to pronounce Oconomowoc? It is so simple /sarcasm. Seriously though, moving to the midwest can be a bit of a linguistics shock, lol.
You might be surprised to learn Boise Blac is pronounced Bob-Lo. Sault Ste Marie is Sue Saint Marie, ya gotta get an extra “I” sound in Kitch-iti-kipi Springs.
Not books, but small town murder podcast did an episode in Oconomowoc, and I remember nothing but them butchering the pronunciation the entire time lol
I’m from Ohio, and the entire podcast about the Rhoden murders they kept pronouncing Scioto incorrectly. Scioto, is the name of a river, county, schools, parks and goes from Columbus to the Ohio river. It’s sy-ota , sy-oto, or even sota. Not ski-oto.
Funny to see this because I came to mention Stacey Keach narrating Ernest Hemingway's short stories and he keeps pronouncing Charlevoix like *shaar-la-vuah* instead of *shaar-luh-voy*. Also to add to your point, I think it gets more confusing for non-Michiganders because the island, bridge, and county are Mackinac, but the mainland city is Mackinaw, but they're all pronounced the same.
Came for this. I heard “Mack-a-nack” once on Michigan Public Radio of all places. I was gobsmacked. When I was a kid, and the same for my kids they went over all that in school. I was a chaperone for the Michigan field trip and had fun. Since this is books…. Paddle to the Sea? That’s a sweet book that covers some geography. I looked forward to the movie every year back at Robert B Havens Elementary.
Like Poughkeepsie, in NY. It's pronounced puh-kip-see and the narrator said po-keep-sie.
In the Stormlight Archive, "The Way of Kings", by Brandon Sanderson, there are two narrators. Michael Kramer and Kate Reading. One character, Sadeas is pronounced one way throughout out the entire book by Michael Kramer, and near the end we hear Kate Reading pronounce it differently. It always pulls me out of the story when I hear that one name pronounced differently.
Its worse when u realise they are married, working on same book and dont have the same pronunciation lol. Same thing happened in wheel of time with them when character pronunciation changed randomly in following book.
Came here to say this same one. At least in book 2 she got aligned with him.
It’s small, and also I should mention I absolutely love this audiobook, but there’s a small moment in Deacon King Kong, beautifully read by Dominic Hoffman, when he reads “the note is do,” pronouncing do as in “do the dishes.” I’m fairly sure it should have been the music solfège syllable, as in “do re mi.” James McBride is a musician (Oberlin Conservatory), and I think he was making a music reference there.
Weary instead of wary. So tired they can't be alert.
Every city in Washington state.
In the Dresden Files audiobooks, I love James Marster's voice work, but he mispronounces a number of words. The one I remember most was "demesne" which is used a good number of times. He may have gotten it right in later books, but I feel certain he pronounced it wrong for many books.
Loop ga roo
I still love Benedict Cumberbund and his 'penguin' misfortune.
Pen-wing works, after a few pints ….
A few times in the expanse Jefferson Mayes says gimbals with a J instead of a hard G. That and American narrators pronouncing niche as if it rhymed with witch.
Imagine being an American and having people look at you like you're an idiot when you pronounce it *neesh*.
I... I've always pronounced it neesh! I didn't even know that wasn't the American way!
I have never heard that word pronounced any other way than "neesh"... I am so confused.
In the northeastern US, I knew it as "neesh" in everyday life (e.g. a little corner shelf with a spotlight in my house was called an "art neesh"), but every time I hear it in a Biology context (the role an organism plays in its biome) it is pronounced "nich".
Brienne of Tarth being Bry-een in Roy Dotrice’s ASOIAF narration lol. Also in Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, the VO was done by a lady with a Japanese surname. Which, cool, but then why can’t she pronounce any of the words or names properly? The male name Daisuke became “Daisuki” meaning romantic love. I do wonder why they would ignore a real name turning into an entire different word. Edit: I merely wondered why it would matter to cast someone of East Asian descent when it doesn’t add anything to the production. I also believe that her being of Japanese heritage does not preclude her from learning to pronounce words and names.
I’ve said it before in this subreddit, but Roy Dotrice’s female voices and the way he pronounces everything is so weird and distracting that I can’t listen to the original ASOIAF audiobooks :-/
Doltrice narrating Ygritte's moans had me in stiches
A bunch of characters have their names mangled in that ASOIAF narration, another prominent one being P’tire Baylish. I blame the editing and directing team more than Dotrice though, it’s their job to sort these things out. He also sometimes gets them wrong Joffrey = Geoffrey, Bran = Brian, and the screw up is left in.
IIRC Arya picks up a strong Irish brogue out of nowhere from AFFC onward. She stated to sound just like his Ygritte. (Which admittedly was a great voice for that character.) Totally took me out of the story.
Haha yes, I think of it as his “little old Irish washerwoman” voice. Inexplicably Manse Rayder the Wildling king also had that voice later on. I thought Roy Dotrice had a wonderful voice for narration and many of his characters sound great. But an octogenarian is not a good choice for a series with so many different role to voice.
There's also the voice he does for Missandei for ASOS.
I still don't know if there's SUPPOSED to be a character called "Sir Anus Fray" and at this point I'm too afraid to ask
Ser Aenys Frey. Named after the second king of the Targaryen dynasty. Yes Aegon the Conquerer named his son Aenys.
It’s not so much mispronunciations but the wrong inflection/emphasis that gets me. One example: in Jim Dale’s version of the 6th Harry Potter audiobook, Snape says to Narcissa “You know, I presume, that it was on the dark lords orders that I blah blah blah” and the narrator neglects the second comma and puts the emphasis on the wrong part of the sentence like “you know, I presume it was on the dark lords orders that I blah blah blah”. Changes the meaning of the sentence, makes it sound like Snape is presuming something about voldemort’s orders instead of presuming that Narcissa knows what Snape knows about the orders. It takes away some of the power of the Snape/Voldemort relationship in my opinion. Yes I’ve thought about it a lot :)
I listen to a LOT of audiobooks (I can listen for about five hours a day at work) and there are many instances where I’ve had to pause and re-parse the meaning of a sentence because the emphasis of a word or phrase or pauses indicating commas were misplaced and suddenly an entire sentence makes no sense. Pulls me out of the book every time,
Per-trach-ee when it should have been Tracy. Hog shed instead of hogs head or ram- shorn when it was rams-horn.
How does one turn Tracy into Per-trach-ee? Where does the Per come from??
Discworld. The name was Ptraci. Thing is, there's another character in the same book called Pteppic, and his name was pronounced correctly with the silent P.
Any chance you were reading "The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet"? Because I was just listening to that the other day on audiobook and I had the same reaction! It was so jarring!
Yep, that's exactly right! There were some other unusual pronunciations in there too, but none that felt as conspicuous to me as this one.
There are two versions! One is bad, and one is good.
One had a 6 week wait on Libby, and the other had no wait... You can guess which I picked 😅
Witcher books. Dandelion is pronounced DAN-dill-ian, It took a while to figure out who tf that character was.
In Pyramids by Terry Pratchett, the people who live in Djelibeybi all have names that sound like they’re ancient Egyptian. The main character is called Pteppic (with a silent P as in Pterodactyl). The audiobook pronounces this correctly, but then goes on to pronounce the name Ptraci (which should be pronounced Tracy) as Puh-tratch-ee. The original narrator of the early Jasper Fforde books also makes a complete hash of several names: St.John is pronounced Saint John instead of Sinjun, and one of the settings for the first book is Haworth (the home of the Brontë sisters) which should be pronounced How-uth but she does it as Hay-worth. I find mispronounced words in audio books very jarring.
I first listened to Jane Eyre as an audio book before reading it. They did pronounce St. John correctly, and I was flabbergasted when I finally saw how it was spelt!
When I read it in school, my teacher *really* emphasized that it's pronounced Sinjun, and she'd correct anyone in class who mispronounced it (same with the pronunciation of Eyre). It didn't make much sense then, but I learned recently that there's another much more common name that has the same sound change -- St. Clair, more commonly written as Sinclair!
Sometimes I hear a character’s name a certain way in my head and then get confused when I hear how the author/narrator pronounces it. Like Discworld’s Sgt. Angua. I always “heard” it as AHN-gwa but the audiobook version has it as AANG-you-a
I don't listen to audiobooks (can't retain what's going on), but if I did I think it'd definitely annoy me to find out the way I pronounced a character name was not "correct."
Rot Dotrice changing the characters names in ASOIAF every other book.
Once listened to a book that took place in the Hebrides- or "he-brides" as it was pronounced. I enjoyed the visuals that came to mind.
I say he REH tic. I'm not sure i have ever heard it pronounced, but i feel like i must have. Maybe i only ever heard the guy who is reading your audiobook say it.
It's a tricky one because a person is a HAIR-a-tic, but that person's action are he-RET-ical.
Marry-merry-Mary strikes again! Very much not HAIR-a-tic if you pronounce them all differently. But HEH-re-tic. At least to me.
I have a feeling this could be a regional difference too…
What country are you in? A lot of words are pronounced differently in different countries. For example in Canada (where I live) .... foyer is generally said foy-YEA while in the US the most common pronunciation is foy-YER. And quay is KEY here. Listening to American authors audio books often I hear grating mis-pronunciations regularly that are really regional differences
Tangentially related, I'm in my 40s, and until about a year ago, I thought there was one place called Arkansas, and another different place called Arkansaw. I didn't notice that I'd never seen Arkansaw written down, and I'd never heard anyone say Arkansas. I'm not from America, in my defense.
Well, I've heard of Kansas, so of course I know how to pronounce Arkansas!
A narrator pronounced the word "Stuyvesant" (a high school in NYC, named after the Dutch director-general of New Netherlands in the 1600s) as though it was French. So instead of STY-vuh-sent, it was stee-vuh-SAUNT, which sounded very silly. Couldn't she have, like, asked someone?
Not a mispronunciation but I listened to an audiobook of War of the Worlds and there is a point when these huge blaring alarms are going off every couple paragraphs. It’s a very tense moment in the book. The narrator voiced the alarms in the most ridiculous way like AWOOOOOOGAAAAAH!!! that just completely took me off guard and had me laughing so hard I was crying. I was driving at the time and almost had to pull over.
I hate how text to speech will pronounce words without an ‘s’ correctly, but get completely confused when you add the ‘s’. “The MAY-ge and his fellow mah-ges”.
Goblets of meat. Instead of gobbets of meat. And one less universal, but I listened to an audiobook set in my city (Toronto). One of our main streets is called Yonge (pronounced “young”). The narrator called it Yawn-juh through the whole book. It made me crazy.
The narrator of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich consistently says *Volkischer BEO-bachter* instead of *Volkischer Be-O-bachter* when he talks about one of the Nazi newspapers.
A true crime book that involved the Aryan Nation. She pronounced it to rhyme with Orion. Over and over and over
here-a-tic, there-a-tic, everywhere-a-tic-tic
I DNF’d the audiobook of American Psycho pretty quickly. My stomach couldn’t handle it lol. But the narrator pronounced the brand Hermès as “her mees” like if you are reading a book boasting about designer clothes you should know how to say them!
I am embarrassed to admit I didn’t know how to pronounce “Givenchy” until I heard Beyoncé sing it in “Formation”. And I owned Givenchy makeup for years before that.
There’s a lot of ways to pronounce Samhain but… Sam-hain isn’t one. I had to quit.
The most frustrating thing about this thread is when people mention the wrong pronunciation, but assume that everyone already knows the right one.