• Admiral Patrick
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    531 month ago

    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
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      431 month ago

      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…

    • 👍Maximum Derek👍
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      221 month ago

      I like to do that with a lot of the o’meters, just for fun.

      Acceler-o-meter and seis-o-meter are my favorite. Weirdly least fun: kil-o-meter.