You Say "Axed Him," and I Say "Asked Him."

I'm going on the record...are you ready for this? My name is Topher Huckaby, and I can't spell. There, I said it. My biggest weakness, presented for the world to see. Judge me if you will; I can take it. Everyone has a fatal flaw, and mine is the inability to put letters together to form actual words. Why do I have a blog you ask? Thankfully my readers ignore all my missed punctuation, poor spelling, and horrible grammar (and spell check is the greatest tool for people suffering from this disorder called Cantspellitis.) But before you start casting stones in your glass house, I ask you to reflect on your life and see if you are truly without vocabulary-sin.

What brought this on was a movie review I was reading last week. As I was going over movies in 2012 to make my list of top 10, I stopped at Cabin in the Woods to read some reviews. I am a hardcore Joss Whedon fan. Talking ill of Joss Whedon to me is translated into "fightin' words" in my head. Say what you want about me, but leave Joss out of this. He didn't do anything to you. (As I was writing this, an image of me in smeared mascara and tears in my eyes like Chris Crocker, screaming "LEAVE JOSS WHEDON ALONE," came to mind .......... I should do something like that one day. Mental note. Where was I? Oh yeah.) So I am reading one of the two negative reviews of Cabin in the Woods, and the guy writes: "This was not a good movie, let me be pacific." That's when my brain shut down. See, everyone is entitled to their opinion, as long as you're not being "pacific" about it.

At first I thought he was auto-corrected, which many of us with iDevices experience on a daily basis. My favorite auto-correction to date is: "We should have stuffed baked prostitutes! (That was supposed to say "potatoes"). I know it was not auto-correct because he latter used the word "pacifically" to explain where the ending "went wrong." This is the part where you slap your hand to your face at the ignorance.

It's no surprise that people mispronounce words. I'm guilty. For the longest time, I thought it was pronounced "supposebly." This continued all the way to high school where I learned I was misinformed. No, it wasn't in class or from a teacher, but rather from the source where I got 70% of my knowledge in my youth: the TV. That's right. Chandler, from Friends, had dumped a girl because she had mispronounced "supposedly." And as his roommate Joey checked his own grammar to see if he too was guilty of mispronouncing it, a light bulb went off in my head. Not literally. Supposedly has a "D," not a "B." I cannot tell you the amount of joy I feel right now that at least one of you is realizing this for the very first time. Today my friends...I am imparting wisdom upon you.

Since my Friends enlightenment, it has been my mission in life to stop mispronouncing words so I don't look like a fool "pacifically." Now I am not talking about words like tomato and potato, where the placement of the emphasis can be either (don't even get me started on that damn word). I am talking about words that are COMPLETELY mispronounced. Case in point, "asked." I am sure this has happened to you where you're listening to a story that someone is telling you, picturing all the details you can in your mind, when all of a sudden they say, "and then I axed him . . ." This situation happened to me. One minute I am having a pleasant image of my friend having a conversation with their boss, and the next, a axe appears in their hand as they begin to chop down their boss like they were Lizzie Borden. Not a pretty picture, but whenever somebody says "axed him," I can't stop my mind from seeing a swinging axe and a smile appears on my face. This is one of the many reasons why I till people I have problems. Someone wielding an axe should never result in a smile.

The most common place I find people mispronouncing words is at work. I understand at Olive Garden they use Italian words (shocker) that some people have no clue how to correctly pronounce. Most of the time, I got people who just don't know how to read. They would think that the Tuscana soup was pronounced Tucson, like it came from Arizona instead of Italy. I did have the occasional guest who would break up words to miss pronounce them like: mine-strone, mer-lott, and filet mig-non. My favorite was when they would refer to the Pasta e fagioli soup as "pasta-E-fag-E-oli." Every time someone asked for this I would reply with a "What did you call me?" Those were good times.

Working at Starbucks, you get used to people saying small, medium or large instead of tall, grande and venti. But the most commonly mispronounced word is not caramel, but espresso. Attention Starbucks patrons: There isn't an "X" in espresso. It is not "expresso." Every time I hear people say this, I think of the store Express and Expresso should have been the name for Express for Men. I tell this to Jason every time he drags me there. The look on his face is never amusement.

Some other fun mispronounced words are:

irregardless - try using the word regardless.

sherbert - sherbet

orientated / oriented

For all intensive purposes / For all intents and purposes

Lions in the Street / Islands in the Stream - This is something people love to make fun of me for. When I was five, I thought Kenny Rodgers and Dolly Parton were in fact singing about Lions in the Street. I could write a blog just about misheard lyrics. Hmmm. A plan is forming.

Yestaday / yesterday

Schrimps / shrimp

Scall-lops / scallops - Thank you Maitland family. ;-)

MacDonalds / McDonalds - While we are on the subject, they are not called MacNuggets either.

Oriental / Asian - Oriental is a rug, not a culture.

So if you or anyone you know has been mispronouncing any of these words, kindly point them to this blog. And if you also sing about Lions in the Street, remember . . . That is what we are, with no one in between, how could be wrong?

(If anyone would like to add to this list, please post all comments at the bottom. I have fixed the comment portioning of my blog . . . . I think.)