What do you think is the funniest English mistake?

[Jamie (K)]

Is there an English mistake, made by a lot of people, that you think is funny?

For me, the funniest one is when people use "stupid" as a noun to mean a stupid person. For example, they'll say, "That man is a stupid!"

I think it's so funny that I often imitate it in my own speech when I talk to other native English speakers.

[Ralf]

Sometimes it's just pronunciation. One of my PhD students once apologised for being late by saying "I'm awfully sorry, but I live outside the city and on my way here I got into a terrible fock!"

Fog, she meant.
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[Jamie (K)]

Like the woman who never learned how to pronounce "th" and used F instead. She was finishing her master's degree and had to defend her "feces".

[Daemon99]

I wouldn't call it a funny mistake people make, but it's something that made me a litlle uneasy when I first heard it in a movie.

I was in the process of learning English back in those days and I thought I was reasonably good at tenses.

One fine day, I switched on the TV and started watching an English movie. Then I heard an actor say this seemingly incorrect line. It made me think again, about my understanding of tenses.

The line was, "So, what do you got?"

I asked some of my gurus, who knew English quite well, about this weird combination of tenses. They said I might have heard it wrong.

I felt convinced -- otherwise I would've had to feel bad about my knowledge of English grammar :-)

But after a few days, a similar kind of thing happened and I couldn't have made a mistake that time, as I was watching the movie on a DVD and there were subtitles too. I didn't ask anybody about it again. :-)

After watching a few movies, I understood it was just an exception and was common in colloquial language, or so I thought :-)
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[SkiIucK]

People often tend to use 'loose' as in the sense of 'lose'. They actually believe themselves, non-natives, of course.

[Alan]

Hi Daemon,

[Jamie (K)]

[Lost_Soul]

[SkiIucK]

[Ralf]

"What do you got?"

[Prezbucky]

here in the South (southern USA) there are several common pronunciation mistakes, but this is probably my favorite:

"suite" is pronounced "suit"

as in:

I'm staying in a hotel "suit" (suite) tonight.

Many of the mispronounced words are foreign words... and in the absence of widespread knowledge of foreign languages by Americans, I can understand how someone might murder "buena" by pronouncing it "byoo-nuh".

But when someone mispronounces an English word... that is rich.
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[Prezbucky]

Another foreign word that's routinely bashed in the US is "bruschetta":

The Italian "ch" is pronounced "k" -- ergo, the correct pronunciation is "broo-SKEH-tah". Most people here, it seems, pronounce it "broo-SHEH-tah".
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[Lost_Soul]

Hi, Tom

Your remark led me to realize that "suite" and "sweet" are pronounced in the same way (I just looked them up in the dictionary)

Before I had thought that "suite" and "suit" are pronounced in the same manner

[Prezbucky]

yep, that's correct.

You wear a suit.

You stay in a suite (sweet).

hehe
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[Jamie (K)]