I want you to stop what you’re doing. I want you to look at the word below. I want you to speak it aloud.
height
How did it sound? Say it again. Did it rhyme with “right”? It should have. Say it again. Did it rhyme with “byte”? It should have. Say it again. Aloud, damn you. “Height” rhymes with “might”.
Think for a second. When you say it, does it sound like “hythe”? If it does, do you realize that you sound like an idiot whenever you say it?
No, it’s not “slang”.
No, it’s not “an accent”.
No, it’s not “just the way we say it here”.
No, it’s not “the same thing”.
The word is h-e-i-g-h-t. It rhymes with “tight”. If you say it any other way, it doesn’t mean you are being eloquent, or fashionable, or rebellious, or cool, or anything other than ignorant.
Unless you have a lisp. If you have a lisp, then you are excused and I’m sorry for making you feel dumb. People with lisps aren’t dumb. People who don’t have lisps but pronounce the word “height” as if they had a lisp are dumb. Are we clear on that?
See also:
- acrosst is not the same as across
- axe is not the same as ask
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- Search Google on this topic.
- Find more posts filed under rants.
{ 18 comments… read them below or add one }
You are very correct, although I don’t believe I have never heard it pronounced the way you apparently have. Is that something you hear people say often?
Shoot. I meant to say “…I don’t believe I have EVER heard it pronounced…”
Sure sucks when you are commenting on a point of grammar that reflects intelligence and you make a mistake like that.
AMEN!! My supervisor at my last job used to say “pecifically” instead of “specifically.” This wasn’t just once in a while; it was all of the time! It made him sound like a complete moron. The scary thing is that he has a B.A. in Education — he could be teaching people to say that word like that.
I know a girl that pronounces condom as cundum.
A VP in a company I used to work for pronounced “else” as “elks”. It was hard not to laugh.
I have a lisp, and i dont know how to say anything with “s”s in them and it makes me feel stupid when kids make fun of me!
I have a friend who thinks I say Wisconsen the wrong way. I couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong. As i turns out, I said it to “fast”. He said there should be an inperceptably small pause between Wis and Consen. I’ve gone bake to saying it my usual way instead of Wis-consen, because, it turns out that my friend is a dumb **** .
OMG you rule. I hate when people like my parents and ignorant retards at school and work say it like “hythe”. GOD!
What about “White” and stuff like that? It’s not “Hwyte”, geez, if anything it’s “Wahyte”…
I just happened to land on 2 pages of your web site today. The first was your discussion of how to pronounce the name Gagne. The second was your comments concerning the pronounciation of the word height. You contend that anyone who says height “incorrectly” is ignorant and sounds like an idiot. However you apparently don’t even say your own last name correctly…. hmm….. I would suggest that it is just as valid for me and my family to pronounce height the way we choose as it is for you and your family to pronounce Gagne way you choose.
Hey “Smoov Crinimal”– maybe you don’t say Wisconsin correctly because you don’t know how to spell it correctly. Many people not from Wisconsin, say ‘Wesconsen’. Sorry everyone, it’s ‘Wisconsin’– there are no ‘e’s.
Very interesting discussion. I notice that dictionaries seem to allow, or at least show, such pronunciations as (1) “fith” instead of “fifth” (most Americans in fact do say “fith” instead of fifth; they even say “sikth” instead of “sixth”) (2) “nucular” instead of “nuclear” (Eisenhower used to say it that way until somebody corrected him; Bush, Harrison Ford, and many officers in the military pronounce it that way). Dictionaries however do not show (3) “height” pronounced with a “th” ending (high-th) but I hear it pronounced that way often. Whether “fith,” “nucular,” “high-th,” “acrosst,” “asterix” (instead of asterisk), “aks” instead of “ask” are right or wrong, the truth is that millions of Americans, many of them intelligent, pronounce them that way and there is very little that can be done about it. Other examples of lost causes are (1) “If I would have knew, I would have went” for “If I had known, I would have gone” or (2) “I would have ate it” instead of “I would have eaten it.” “I would have ran, instead of I would have run.” The reason for these mistakes may be that they involve irregular verbs (to run, to go, to eat) in which the simple past and past participles are different (I ran, I would have run; I ate, I would have eaten; I went, I would have gone; I chose/froze, I would have chosen/frozen). They don’t have a problem with regular verbs in which both forms are the same (I started, I would have started, I closed, I would have closed; I opened, I would have opened) and they think the same applies to irregular verbs.
I apologize for this overly technical post.
Oscar
I am sorry this is not directly related to the “height” issue.
I would like to ask anyone who knows the answer, though.
Pronouncing “else” as “elks” is a part of Southern accent?
My favorite actor, a South/North Carolina native but have lived in New York more than 20 years, says so when he acts the Southern character or reads an audiobook set in the South.
I cringe every time I hear these words but when I look up across at the Webster’s online dictionary, it shows that acrosst is “allowable” as seen here:
http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?va=across
As well as allowing heighth:
http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=height&x=0&y=0
I never heard them until about 12 years ago here in California and since then I have been vexed by them daily.
As long as they exist in the dictionary, we are all doomed!
Spetember 23, 2006
Dartmouth, Nova Scotia
I often get irritated when I hear the word pronounced “hythe”. My father was a stickler on correct pronounciation and claimed that those who mispronounced words were simply lazy.
People who say “hythe” may also believe “altitude” and “attitude” are homophones.
how about the weird internal Ls that show up in mid-atlantic accents:
eg. ” i have a pencil and a paper and i am going to make a draling. ”
my girlfriend does it all the time, but it gets worse whenever she visits baldamorl. you know, the capital of murulun.
The heighth thing drives me crazy too….I guess people hear the words, length, width, and depth, and perhaps assume that heighth is correct.
Some of my pet peeves are “irregardless”, “lay” (as in “I’m going to lay down for a nap”), and “I could care less”, instead of “I couldn’t care less”.
Two pronunciations. Get over it Grammer Nazi!
hītth rules!
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