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Comment by grecy | Hacker News Reader

English is my first language, I've spoken it all of my 33 years, and I am an Engineer.

I have no idea what "contumely" means, or how to pronounce it. You're doing great :)

contumely means an insult, it almost exclusively comes up in Shakespeare. 99% of people on the street would not know that word

I'm guessing 99% of people wouldn't know what "beatify" meant either, and a significant number would think it was a typo for "beautify". Those two words also rather nicely express the vagaries of English pronunciation (the latter is pronounced to rhyme with "pew", the former "bee-A...", which almost feels like it deserves a diaeresis, except we don't do those in English).

I leave the gentle reader with the English place name Beaulieu, which probably isn't pronounced anything like you'd expect, or how it should be.

There's a lot of Catholics out there. They might not know how to spell it, but most of them would know what beatify is about. To be fair, beatify is more 'Catholic jargon' and less 'standard English' - I wouldn't expect anyone unfamiliar with Catholicism to know it.

As for names, my favourite wtf is Featherstonehaugh, pronounced fan-shaw. Then there's Chalmondley (chum-lee)...

If you use Chromium (or Google Chrome), you can use this extension. It has helped me greatly with my pronunciation.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/english-dictionary...

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