I’m shocked. Yesterday, I discovered a word I’ve been mispronouncing for my entire life.
“Apossle” is the correct way to say what I’ve always expressed as “aposTle”. The ‘t’ is in the spelling, not the telling. But when hearing people heard me make that lovely tick of a t-sound, why did no one tell me?
In fairness, my crowd isn’t a church-going one, so ‘apostle’ seldom turns up in daily speech. But if it did, someone could have corrected me and once we got through the argument, which I would have lost, I could have started saying ‘apossle’ like everybody else.
I’m grateful when my pronunciation is corrected, especially after the sting of embarrassment wears off. When I was in my 20s, a friend and I were ordering a pizza. She yelped suddenly, “I can’t take it anymore! It’s peeT-za, not peez-a!” I had been leaving out the ‘t’ which for some stupid reason replaces a ‘z’.
Words and speech matter to me. I’m a writer and public speaker so this stuff is important. I am not shy to ask if I’m pronouncing a word correctly, especially words with sibilance, which are the hissing sounds like ‘s’, ‘z’, ‘ch’, or words with often-silent letters like ‘r’, ‘l’, ‘t’ or ‘n’. But I thought I had apostle nailed, yet not one person had the kindness (or bravery) to say, “Gael, it’s not ‘aposTle’, like we say aposTrophe. It’s ‘apossle’, kind of like ‘a possle just arrived from the post office”.
I discovered the ‘apostle’ error while playing Connections, a New York Times game. I couldn’t figure out the category for ‘apostle’ and when I discovered it belonged in “Words with a Silent T” (the other words were depot, mortgage, and Poirot, which I say correctly), I was outraged – the Times must have made a mistake! But the Hearing Husband said it was ‘apossle’ and the minister of my former church confirmed it. Get this – in the adjective ‘apostolic’, the ‘t’ is pronounced. Gahhh!
Should we correct the speech of other people? That depends. If we take into consideration regional accents and those who speak our language as their second language, we may not need to. We understand them. But if it’s a close friend or colleague who cares about speech, a gentle correction may be ok, even welcomed.
The better I hear, the better I articulate. Years ago, during the run of a play, I got new hearing aids. That night, a fellow actor said I was speaking more clearly. People who have had hearing loss from early ages may not distinguish the many subtleties of the spoken word. Many words take time to master. But while I may debate you on their meaning, if I am mispronouncing words, I would appreciate you letting me know.
