My ex-wife's father, now deceased, grew up in southern Minnesota and lived his adult years in Minneapolis. He sometimes pronounced "schedule" as "skeDUHley." He often played with words, and I assumed his pronunciation was his own concoction, used as much to confuse as to amuse his listeners.
Since the caller who mentioned that her father did the same thing, I'm wondering if it was a regional thing: Both men had German backgrounds; both were from the upper mid-west; and both were on the road a lot--my ex-father-in-law as an over-the-road trucker, the caller's as a city bus driver.
Anyone else heard this pronunciation?
That's a new one on me. But I wouldn't assume he made it up as a joke; often people who read a lot get pronunciations wrong and learn better only later when they get around to saying them aloud.
Sometimes much later. For years I had a word in my vocabulary, a verb "misle", pronounced "mizzle", which means to deceive or fool. The past participle, meaning "fooled", was pronounced "mizzled" and spelled "misled". I carried that word around in my head for at least a decade before discovering that "misled" is the past participle not of "misle" but of "mislead". I'd just assumed "misle" was more or less synonymous with "mislead".
It gets worse: I had another verb, "infrare", which meant to convert visible light to a lower frequency below the limits of human vision. Light which has been converted in this fashion has been "infrared", after which it is in the infra-red range. Again, at some point a decade or two later I suddenly noticed. . . .
This American Life did a show on this theme a year or two ago; they didn't mention "infrare", but "misle" was in there, the only difference being that apparently most people pronounce it "MY-zzle".
Long, long ago in an episode of That Girl, Ann's father dropped by to stay for a few days and her boyfriend Don showed up early for breakfast. When her father came down to join them, he remarked jokingly that it was nice to see that the world was still running this morning, that while they were all asleep nothing had gone awree (pronounced "AWE-ree"). Don laughed appreciatively, but it turned out Ann's father hadn't been kidding; it was a word he'd always mispronounced in ignorance. Followed a tirade: "Not all of us can go to college, you know!" I figure that little slip must have come from some comedy writer's experience, like my "mizzled". It must happen a lot, especially, as I said, in people who read a lot as children. Could be your father-in-law had the same experience and just kept the memory to trot out as a joke, now and again.
The last few days I've been going through old episodes of "Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In" looking for a certain sketch, and I've noticed the frequent and widespread pronunciation of "co-INKY-dink" for "coincidence". Everyone on the show says it, and nobody gives any particular indication that it's a joke. I could easily imagine someone who grew up watching the show thinking that's how the word is supposed to be pronounced.
Bob Bridges said:
This American Life did a show on this theme a year or two ago; they didn't mention "infrare", but "misle" was in there, the only difference being that apparently most people pronounce it "MY-zzle".
I share some of your history with misle/mizzle.
Chemistry class was a source of a couple more misreadings: reagent and cation both "mizzled" my inner voice when reading the textbook, and it took me several classes of listening to the teacher pronouncing re-agent and cat-ion before I associated the sounds with the words I had been reading as sounding like regent and the last two syllables of vacation.
randerson5 said:
My ex-wife's father, now deceased, grew up in southern Minnesota and lived his adult years in Minneapolis. He sometimes pronounced "schedule" as "skeDUHley."
A fellow graduate student's last name is "Kvale". He was 100% Norwegian and from southern Minnesota. He pronounced his name QUAH-ley. Perhaps this influenced his "skeDUHley".
Emmett