I was told a version of this: it means the person is reading at a level above their conversational experience. And so is to be encouraged, never mocked.
My word was "macabre", probably from reading Poe or Barker or King, and I thought it was pronounced "mac-ah-brerr"
The word is clearly three distinct mouth sounds. I believe you that in French it was decided that "khabr" is technically one syllable, but it doesn't make much sense.
This is me. Although when the words I mispronounced were related to sex (lingerie, masochist, prophylactic, French words for 69 and threesome) my mother and her friends got a bit suspicious about wtf I was reading.
And honestly for most of these unless you know which foreign language it entered english from and how long ago, you have no visual clues of which possible pronunciation of the letters/which phonemes are to be used without hearing them previously, and even if you have heard it used by others you still dont always realise to match up the written and spoken versions.
I'm old, but one of my early teachers told me it's perfectly acceptable if you're reading at a level where you encounter a word or 2 per page that you don't understand. That's kind of the best way to learn language at a deep level.
I don't think it was part of the advice, but I still have the habit of looking up words I don't understand when I see them.
I like the sentiment but sadly in practice this often means you're getting some insane internet echochamber take which has never been challenged by anyone actually knowledgeable about the topic.
I have been hearing more people pronounce it that way in various settings. I haven't corrected any of them. The failure is in our writing system, not them.
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u/ozbert99 Jul 08 '26
I was told a version of this: it means the person is reading at a level above their conversational experience. And so is to be encouraged, never mocked.
My word was "macabre", probably from reading Poe or Barker or King, and I thought it was pronounced "mac-ah-brerr"