The DM for Critical Role did that in one of the early episodes. I think that if you're making a podcast, you should check your words for pronunciation.
I learned chitin from playing Morrowind. Pronounced it like "chit in" (like in "chip"). But also my local dialect/accent tends to drop pronouncing t's so it came out more like "chi'in". To this day it's an active effort to pronounce it correctly if I ever have to say it out loud
Oh my DM really leaned into that one. Had us searching for a golden brassiere as part of a ritual we needed to perform. We ended up picking up a rumour that the captain of the guard wears one, so on to the seduction attempt to go find out what she's into and where she hangs out. Play through the whole bit, get the brassiere and then ask what we do next. Well, now we need to burn incense in the brassiere. Now everyone just looks at eachother completely confused. Then the guy sitting next to the DM suddenly perks up and asks to see the module we're running for a sec. Tells the table it says brazier. Confusion dispelled and everyone laughing for days.
The magic of the modern day means you can type "define" or "pronounce" then any word into Google and it'll tell you how to say it. There's also an absurd amount of YouTube pronunciation videos for basically every word that exists.
Not that there's a problem asking, this is more advice for future words your friend doesn't know. So you can help them. The dummy.
We were playing some game (don't even remember what) back in 2005 and I read a card that said Lebron James as "Lee-bron James".
My wife will not let this go. It's been almost a full 2 decades, but anytime Lebron is mentioned in any context whatsoever, my wife will give me that look like "haha Lee-bron. You moron."
I’m ruined on “Lee-“ anything. , because I think of Leeroy Jenkins. Now I’m just imagining Lebron just charging into every play with no strategy, shouting “Leeee-bron James!”
I still have the irrepressible urge to pronounce the s at the end of "chaos" because I more or less learnt the word through warhammer 40k. Except in French the s is silent.
But now I've moved to the south where the locals have a habit of pronouncing many silent s !
My poor brain is so confused...
At university a college pronounced 'machine' a bit like 'ma-shayna' (almost a bit Slavic? but totally on accident whatever it was). I loved it so much it stuck with me all these years, basically became headcanon.
My father had a terrific sense of humour and would deliberately mispronounce certain words to wind up his fancy-pants daughters. "Patio" became "pay-tio", that kind of thing. But one word in particular has entered the family lexicon: "gnome", pronounced "ganOmee". Not meaning a garden ornament, but a young man of dubious moral/intellectual qualities. Our boyfriends were almost always declared gnomes.
I do this all the time. My son used to roll his eyes, but now he joins in, asking his grandmother for a "fork and ka-nife" or saying "I can do that, it's my pierogi-tive"
Guy I watch on YouTube drives around the UK following a 100 year old Michelin guidebook, looking at historical things on the way. It's nice and fairly cosy.
Last weekend's video was in my neck of the woods. He visited the town of Lymington (pronounced LIM-ington), and pronounced it Lie-mington the whole time.
90% of the comments were locals pointing it out to him.
I don’t overreact to things I can tell are regional dialects and whatnot. But I recently watched a movie review where the guy pronounced linear as “li-nEAR” and I was the personification of the double take white guy meme. Never heard that one before. And he kept using it throughout, so, somehow, this 30ish year old man has never been corrected. I think everyone that knows him might be playing a cruel joke.
Pretty mainstream. When I was a kid most people struggled to learn how to laugh these things off. These days if you speak on any platform it's a good idea to have some mispronunciations because it catches peoples attention. Even if it's the only thing they'll talk about as long as you're good natured about it you've made progress.
Funniest thing for me as a bilingual French is people butcheringpronouncing French words like hors d'oeuvre or whatever. I mean it's funny but okay, that's both no big deal and you can always educate someone and give them the real French pronunciation if they absolutely wanna sound posh.
But then I'm always so torn when somebody has a clearly French name but again, their pronunciation is atrocious. Like, I try to just ignore it, but sometimes I can just imagine myself jumping at them and screaming how they are pronouncing it wrooooooong, hahaha!