What are you trying to say?

  

Fifi [FEE-fee]
noun
A dish of Italian origin consisting of a flat, round base of dough baked with a topping of tomato sauce and cheese, typically with added meat or vegetables

Ah, the older child.  All her life since beginning to speak, she has had her own ideas on how the English language is pronounced.

Take for instance when she was a toddler.  We asked her what she wanted to eat, to which she replied "fifi."  Having no French poodles to fry up, we ignored her request.  She was quite put out.  Fast forward to a trip to the grocery store.  Browsing through the frozen foods, Sandis points to the frozen pizzas and exclaims, "fifi!"  Yes, "fifi" meant pizza. How could we not know?

Preschool she moved on to some new and interesting pronunciations.  She added syllables and emphasis was always, always on the second syllable.  Some notables include:

wolves - wolf-is
iron - eye-wren
Saturn - Sat-er-in
pattern - pat-er-in

This was before she could read, mind you, so she'd only ever heard these pronounced correctly.  Still, she pronounced more or less phonetically.  (Ironically, she did not learn to read phonetically.) 

Then there was her Boston accent phase.  This was after learning to read, and after pronouncing words more or less correctly up until this point.  Yes, Sandis would be off to the shouw-wah to get clean after which you could find her drawring a picture.

Now, at nearly 11 years old, she still hasn't gotten over her mispronunciation, and associated inability to actually say it correctly when she tries.  Lately, the sherpa lining in her sweatshirt is made of shepra or shepra and Pecos Bill's name is Pea-cos. 

In her defense, I think she might get it from me (with the exception of the Bostonian part, not sure where that's from.)  When I was a toddler, I dubbed the living room the "knicker."  My parents say there was no know reason for this and as I got older I just dropped the word.

And I often make up pronunciations for words I don't know which are not even close to what they should be.  Why? Well, because phonetics makes absolutely no sense to me.  How any one can sound out cuh-ah-tuh and get cat is beyond my comprehension.  Besides, if I can read it in my head and know the definition, it doesn't matter what it sounds like unless I actually have to say it.  And, it probably won't come up in conversation otherwise I would have heard it, in which case I would know how to say it.  Right? Yes.  I'm going with yes.

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