Well that’s embarrassing.
A reporter just used the word “heterogeneous” and he pronounced it in a way I never would have imagined.
He said “Hetero-genius,” as if he was describing Einstein’s sexual preference.
Stupid reporter, I thought, he’s going to get tweets about that. It’s Het-er-AH-Jen-us.
Then, I remembered the banal facade incidents and I looked it up, and damnit, DAMNit, it’s hetero-genius.
Thankfully, I don’t remember ever saying heterogeneous out loud. But I know I have said homogeneous out loud. And I looked that up and damnit, damnit I have been wrong all my life. It’s homo-genius, not hon-MAH-Jen-us.
But wait, I thought, there is that extra “e” that I attributed to British/American spelling. Maybe hetero/homo-geneous vs genous are entirely different words.
Oh, Jesus, they are entirely different words with different pronunciations that mean the same thing, but for a nuance. That extra e gives the word a scientific slant. So it’s ho-MAH-Jen-ized milk if you’re in the grocery and ho-mo-geneized milk in the food lab? No. Because homogeneized isn’t a word.
So you know how I will pronounce heterogeneous/heterogenous in the future? “Di-VERSE.”.
6 responses to “Heterogeneous”
I just laughed very hard at the fuk-ade.
For many years when I was younger I thought awry was pronounced awe-ree instead of a-rye. I knew that a-rye was a word, I knew they both meant basically the same thing. I don’t know how I thought the a-rye word was spelled, but in my head they existed as two distinct words (with the exact same meaning). Kind of like homogen(e)ous.
Although not a mispronunciation, my favourite of these types of missteps was from someone I knew who used to use the term “bolivious” rather than “oblivious”. The irony was the best part. “Oh you know Susan, she’s just so bolivious”.
Hah! bolivious! That is great! And yes, I could see ah-ree as a word, even more than a-rye.
Ah-ree is probably how it’s pronounced in Scots dialect? 🙂 (am not googling in case I am wrong…)
I knew they said agley (see: the best-laid plans of mice and men), but I vaguely hoped that, perhaps, they also said ah-ree, sometimes, in lighter moments. 🙂
(also! I have found glorious pronunciation nerds on the awry topic! http://phonetic-blog.blogspot.com/2012/05/going-awry.html )
KC – evidently, Scots don’t say awry, they say agley.
KC – wow that pronunciation blog is a challenge. All I know is the schwa. Many other sounds in there.