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Chappell Roan, semaglutide and Kamala Harris: the most mispronounced words
The Guardian
|December 06, 2024
At the Democratic national convention, Kamala Harris's nieces explained how to pronounce Harris's name.
Chappell Roan gave fans a friendly "final warning" about the pronunciation of hers. And Zendaya settled the matter on video.
All three helped to define 2024 and spent the year hearing people get their names wrong; each appears on lists of the year's most mispronounced words in the US and UK, produced by the language-learning website Babbel, which reminds us that they're pronounced COM-a-la HAR-iss, CHAP-uhl ROHN and Zen-DAY-a.
The lists, created with the closed-captioning and subtitling companies the Captioning Group and the British Institute of Verbatim Reporters, show the stars in good company: among the other mispronounced names and words are Barry Keoghan (BARR-ee key-OH-gin, with a hard g), the Irish actor and star of Saltburn, and Pete Buttigieg (Boot-Edge-Edge), the US transportation secretary.
This story is from the December 06, 2024 edition of The Guardian.
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