this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2024
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Science Memes

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[–] ptz@dubvee.org 32 points 6 months ago (23 children)

When I was in elementary school, one of my classmates pronounced it "thermo meter" and I had to watch the science teacher struggle for a good 30 seconds to decide if he was going to correct him or not.

[–] bstix@feddit.dk 32 points 6 months ago (17 children)

For anyone confused.

Most other languages do call it a thermo meter or similar. People who are not native English speakers will pronounce it wrongly when speaking English, because the word is the same - it's just pronounced weirdly in both British and American English. The British and American pronunciations are not exactly the same on this, but they're both ~~wrong~~ different from any other languages, except Greek.

The English pronunciation is caused by English inheriting the Greek way of stressing the third last syllable on words of Greek origin. It makes no sense in my mind why they do it on compound words though. Meter is not Greek. It's English, so they could've chosen differently, but they obviously chose the most annoying way to pronounce it.

There's a few other words like that, but I don't remember which..

[–] Ageroth@reddthat.com 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Pedometer is the first one that comes to mind for me.

[–] bstix@feddit.dk 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I don't even want to know how that's pronounced correctly. It's obviously two words. Foot and meter. Wtf is a Dom?

Circumference is pretty bad too.

[–] Ageroth@reddthat.com 5 points 6 months ago

I think it's the same as ther-MOM-iter. Pe-DOM-iter

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