Question #90281 -- things you mix up that others don't

[Cindy]

https://theboard.byu.edu/questions/90281/

I always mix up Simon & Garfunkel and Gilbert & Sullivan. I definitely know the difference between them, but I always have to stop and think about which musical G&S duo with two- and three-syllable names I'm trying to say, or I'm sure to say the wrong one and confuse everyone with my discussion of my favorite Simon & Garfunkel operettas, for example.

I moved to Salt Lake from Saint Louis, and for a long time, I was constantly switching the names around when I referred to them. I also frequently mix up the cities of Vizag and Trichy in India. They're both cities I've visited in the southern part of India that have shortened names which most people use in informal speech (the full names are Visakhapatnam and Tiruchirappalli, for reference), and apparently that's enough for my brain to lump them both together.

And when I'm really tired, I mix all of my nouns up and become essentially unintelligible.

[Emiliana]

Not exactly the same thing, but I mix up my "r" and "l" sounds in ways that most American English speakers don't. I blame it on the two years I spent in Uganda, where the two sounds *are* pretty much interchangeable--it could be really entertaining, for example, to hear a speaker ask the audience to "crap your hands."

[Cindy]

Along those lines, after living in Missouri in three years, I sometimes slip up and say "whenever" when I really mean to say "when." As in, "Whenever I went to Elizabeth and Matt's wedding, we all had to wait for a while because they had forgotten to bring along their wedding license." Clearly "when" is the right word here, but constant exposure to this kind of grammatical error in Missouri has made it so this kind of error occasionally slips into my speech as well, and I don't usually notice until someone gives me a funny look and I think back about what I said.

It's interesting how easy it is to fall in with the speech patterns of those around you and start having grammatical or pronunciation issues that you never had a problem with before.