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Comment by protocolture | Hacker News Reader

I find a lot of people in IT and adjacent areas picked up a lot of their vocab by reading, without any guidance on pronunciation. I tend to let them get to 3 goes before correcting them.

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I interviewed someone once for a network engineering job and, while talking about multicast routing, he mentioned Rendezvous Points[0], only he pronounced rendezvous as "Ron-divi-us". I asked him to describe RPs in a bit more detail (but pronounced rendezvous correctly[1],) and he said "oh, that's how you say that? That makes sense..." He had heard (and used) the phrase rendezvous point before - in the Army -- but didn't make the connection to the weird spelling he encountered with the multicast documentation.

0 - in Protocol Independent Multicast Sparse-mode routing, an RP is the root of the shared tree of participants for a given multicast group. See RFC 2362.

1 - for an English speaker, anyway. I imagine a native French speaker could pick apart the way we pronounce rendezvous.

Indeed, this is a very common occurence IME. It's happened to me a couple times (especially the word "contiguous" which to this day I don't think I've heard another person pronounce out loud other than myself, and I find the word confuses people), but I hear it constantly. Even the word "Linux" (you often hear pronounced "Lie-Nix") often gets people. Then considering all the acronyms which don't have a standardized pronunciation, it's an interesting time.

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