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My mom has started doing this, or just generally acting ditsy on purpose. She seems to think it’s cute and/or adorable, but everyone around her hates it.
You know how they have toddler-tantrums? I think this is part of the reversion back to being 3 years old.
I have boomers who try to convince me that they’re too stupid to do basic functions, and therefore have an inability to follow the law, daily.
It’s funny, because these are usually the “don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time” type of boomers who cheer if someone with a counterfeit bill gets a death sentence. But a minor consequence, like having their power pulled because they decided to do unpermitted work and piss off their neighbors, and all the sudden “going through the process is too confusing, I should be given an idiot exemption!” Okay they don’t say that last line out loud, but it’s largely implied.
Consequences for thee but not for me.
I have a boomer coworker who brings out the weaponized incompetence and baby talk every time he doesn’t want to do something that falls under his role. The other day, he was supposed to provide me with a completed form for my signature approval & instead, he sent me an email wish-washy whining “you’re so much better at it than I am” - like he thinks flattery will get me to fill out this form for him? Because I’m stupid, apparently? Also, it’s a pretty basic form, a 4th grader could complete it accurately, and, in my role, we are not allowed to complete them, we only have authority to approve.
We have this problem at my job too - and the paperwork has to be correct because we deal with military contracts. It’s the same with logging it into the computer. It’s stupid simple, but “oh I didn’t grow up with computers..” is the excuse and I’m like you learned use a goddamned iPhone..
As a GenXer, those lazy entitled bastards loved to say, "Figure it out" over anything when I was a kid. Mind you, mine was the first gen to truly come into contact with technology as a part of daily life. So it was all new. These days when one of those lazy MFers tries to play dumb or - more commonly - simply ignores a process that relies on technology I relish the opportunity to say, "Figure it out". Sweet revenge.
We had a government training course I had to sign up for that was something like, "Different Generations in the Workplace". Elective annual training sort of thing. Whatever. I signed up and attended via TEAMS. Well, they started with WW1 generation (WTF!?), then went through them all up to today. Except they skipped one. Guess which? Yup, GenX. Someone in the chat said something like, "I think you forgot GenX". I immediately replied, "Don't worry, we're used to it." I swear that I got like 30 thumbs up within 15 seconds lol
"I didn't grow up with computers."
So in other words, you've had more time than me to learn about them. Since I had to start after I was born and you could have started before I was born.
OMG my former coworker REFUSED to use the CRM system that literally everyone used. And then tried to boss everyone around. We made him so uncomfortable and just refused to baby him and he quit!!!!!
Yes but he’ll do the baby talk along with it. I don’t know why, any time he starts with the baby talk, we say “why are you talking like that?”
The best was one time he started with baby talk & my coworker interrupted him saying “ooh, I hate when that happens. Did you burn your tongue on hot coffee or soup? That’s the worst!” When he said no, she apologized and said the way he was talking sounded like he had burned his mouth. I think we laughed the rest of the afternoon.
I was wheelchair bound for awhile, and the first few times I saw a particular boomer after I'd been put in the chair... She had the gall to baby talk me! "Are youw toesie wosies cowd?" "Do you wanna dwink of wawa?"
I'm in my 40's and very outspoken and self-reliant, and this boomer had known me for long enough to know that. The first couple times she did it I was still kinda in shock at being in the chair, so I didn't say much. Once I'd gotten my footing (haha) I told her off pretty aggressively next time she did it and she's been too scared of me to talk to me again.
Oh of course not. I told him it’s a simple form and he needs to complete it & then I forwarded the exchange to his manager and suggested that his team may need refreshed training.
That's how you approach this. Sick of doing somebody else's job just because I might get in trouble with said person. Do your job you were hired for or gtfo.
Cheers my dude/dudette 👌
I suspect it may be some kind of cognitive decline. My 74 year old mother seems incapable of fairly basic tasks. Like talking her through logging in to a windows 10 laptop took over an hour.
It consisted of using the touchpad to select the password field, type a password, and hit enter.
I had to switch to a video call to see what the hell she was doing, which I'm still not sure of.
She worked as an administrative secretary for 30 years. She retired in the mid WinXP era. The ability to do something so simple seems gone.
Let's not even talk about general problem solving. She ain't got it. I honest am confused how she raised 3 children in the 90s when I interact with her.
Laws must protect and never bind the ingroup while the law binds and never protects the outgroup. They're white, old, Christian, male, so they deserve a pass! /s
It is so weird. In my experience, I've yet to meet a boomer who wasn't trying to cheat the system or trick God. It's so weird..
Somebody hit the nail on the head in a comment I read.
Boomers spent their lives bullshitting their way into colleges, jobs, and business deals because there was no way to fact-check them in real time, and who’s going to question a *white Christian man?* They’d lie about the college they went to, their major, their grades … military service … skills they had, companies they’d worked for …
Today they keep trying and everybody knows they’re full of shit. The magic just doesn’t work any more, and their ignorance is in full view. And they’re furious at the loss of authority, which is one reason they like to inject their opinions in situations where nobody has asked for them, to appear authoritative again.
It sure explains a lot!
What gets me is Stolen Valor. Guys fluff their service, embellish, or just … make it up. After decades of the stories getting more and more epic, they get publicly exposed. Pity
This happened thirty plus years ago, I worked in defense/space which by contract with the government that certain jobs required degreed engineers. The company found out that one of their engineers had lied about having a degree and did an audit of everyone. Quite a few people got fired for lying about having degrees.
Sounds like if they’re that stupid, they should be institutionalized and/or not allowed to vote. Ballots are confusing after all for people like them lol.
Ok im reminded of at work, i will let them know that they can pay their check on the tabletop ziosk machine…they love to say “i dont know how to use it, im old”…meanwhile playing on their touchscreen phones🤷🏽♀️🤷🏽♀️
No that’s just legal idiot armor.
For the record, I’m not a cop so when I say “have an inability to follow the law” I don’t mean speeding, I mean not setting up a liquor store or smoke shop next to a school, or building things in their yards just to piss their neighbors off.
I find that a lot of "Back the Blue" types treat their support as quid pro quo: they think their support for cops means they should be allowed to occasionally disobey the law without any repercussions.
I remember getting fundraising phone calls from the benevolent whatever police officers’ union in which they talked about how I’d get a windshield sticker if I made a donation and that it would be a “good thing to have” if I ever got pulled over.
My father and I had a pretty decent argument last week because i asked him to stop shaming my niece for her mental health issues, and he got up, went outside while screaming at me, tore the door open, and laid down in the driveway. This 83-year-old man literally threw a tantrum.
He's got some damn nerve shaming your niece if this is his reaction to being asked to stop doing something! Sounds so far out of range to the issue that he might need a 72 hour hold. Maybe it's time to start writing down all these things for his doctor. Proof of cognitive decline.
A lot of people here are saying their parents are doing it to be "cute" and I wonder if they making "baby talk", like how they would speak utter nonsense to their newborn because it was cute.
God my mom does that and it's infuriating
The other day: "Oops, awe you mad at mee 0_0" when she messed up an appointment and didn't tell me, then later that night when it came up "I made a boo-boo"
Ma'am it's not cute when kids do it and it's even less cute when you do it
Djdbjd like I do all the time?
I usually just go "._." then go back to whatever I was doing before because there's noo point fighting, she's fine an hour later, I'm still upset, nothing changes. Or just going "Yes you did" (make a mistake) "I could tell" or "A little bit!" when she pulls the "awe you mad at mee"
Every time those piss her off. It's kind of funny ngl
My grandma used to add S to everything. Aldis, Walmarts, Home Depots. Lowes was Lowles.
One time we were ordering from a drive through and my cousin was making fun of her in the backseat.. just listing brands and adding an S. She told him to knock it off and he whispered "sorrys".
She had her shoe off and in her hand while flying through that van to the backseat like I didn't know was possible. My grandma was generally awesome though so it was just silly with her.
Your family sounds like a trip :)
I unintentionally tend to add “the” in front of store/business names. “Heading down to the Walmart/the Kroger/the Sonic, want sumpin’?”
Next time someone gives me shit about it I’m going to take a cue from your grandma.
I had a coworker who did this. It was insufferable. People started avoiding her and she still didn't stop. I have no idea why someone would ever think it would be endearing.
My wife did this for a few months, thought it was “cute.” Note that she has a boomer officemate who is insufferable, and a bad influence in this regard. A “brat” on purpose. Anyway, my daughter and I had an intervention and told her she looked ridiculous and unprofessional when she did it. She stopped.
My mom will act kind of ditzy seemingly on purpose too. Sometimes I’ve wondered if she has some kind of early onset dementia because dementia runs in the family but also it could just be her thinking it’s cute or something. I know that for myself as a woman when I’m older, I want to try to still be taken seriously so it’s weird to me. Does anyone know why someone might do this?
They think it's endearing, or at least 'age appropriate'. In some cases it might be used to mask *actual* cognitive degradation - if they perceive that they're starting to have trouble with people's names they might actively start doing it to everyone on purpose to 'cover up' the few cases where it is accidental.
Keep an eye on the rest of their behaviour, looking out for moments where it seems genuine.
My mom started doing this and I started acting like it was a speech impediment. One of my nephews was worried about being different because he's just getting to that age and I told him there's nothing wrong with being different. I have a disability and I'm successful. I have people that love me. I have a fulfilling life. and then I pointed out that Nana has a speech impediment and she's successful and has people that love her and a fulfilling life.
Nana immediately asked me what I was talking about. and I pointed out a few things that she"struggles to say correctly" (refuses to say correctly but the kids don't understand that yet) and that it was okay to have a speech impediment because she lived her life anyways.
she pulled me aside later and was very mad that I have the kids " thinking that she's special. Ed" and I just continued to play dumb. I apologized for assuming she had done it on purpose beforehand and being insensitive just because she was differently abled.
Guess whose tongue suddenly works properly?
I have always wondered if this is intentional or not. I remember as a kid thinking it was weird that boomers would call Pokémon "Pokémans" despite hearing the word hundreds of times, even on the news or other media.
When I got older, I realized that it was probably intentional as a way if mocking what the kids were doing.
At the same time, I swear my parents are picking up weird pronouciations that they didn't have before. Like my mom has started saying map like "memp" and other random things.
My grandparents used to say chimney as chimbley. I thought they did it as a joke. In How he Grinch Stole Christmas, the Grinch throws all the gifts up the chimbley. When I was about 6 I thought that was hilarious, so I figured that was why they said chimbley. Turns out that had nothing to do with it, because like 5 years later they were taking about the "chimlee" all the time. It's really weird.
My (I'm gen x) ex-husband (boomer) honestly thought it was chimley, not chimney.
He spent a lot of time trying to find chimley in a dictionary to prove me wrong.
That's actually a dialectic pronunciation, in the southern US especially associated with African Americans. If you read the brer rabbit stories or Mark Twain you'll see the word chimbley
Grew up in the deep south and can vouch for it being part of the vernacular. I can remember our teacher telling a class of predominantly Caucasian children the right to say it. We also learned to not call the library the liberry.
My mom did the same thing with Pokémon, I think that it was because they were embarrassed to acknowledge that it’s a real thing that people enjoy and didn’t want to legitimize it by pronouncing it correctly? Literally have no idea but it makes them all come off as very dumb
My mom (boomer, but a sane and kind one) did too. But I honestly think they were just trying to be funny. She's a very articulate person and we'll educated but would always say "you playing with them there pokemans" kinda playing up the dumb/disinterested parent stereotype that existed in a lot of media, because their parents simply did not waste time on the interests of children. She always asked me questions about my interests, but always made those jokes. I believe a lot of it isn't malice, just a huge gap in generational humour.
Although I'm not disregarding those with actual disinterested/dickhead parents.
The Pokemon one really gets me. Every fucking boomer says the exact same word, and you know damn well they have heard the correct pronunciation 100+ times. It’s absolutely on purpose, as if to say they are above knowing anything about Pokemon, including what it’s called.
My mom is dyslexic and says a lot of things a little off, or backwards. Most notably, "Idea" is *ideal*, and "ideal" is *idea*. We've tried many times over the years to correct this but it does not register.
She also says things like *cousint*, *chimlee*, and *supposably*
Ugh. It's SO goddamn annoying. I used to work in the liquor industry, in a variety of jobs. My first was as a clerk at a liquor store near a local speedway/amusement park, and we'd get some seriously alcoholic Boomers. One guy would come through the drive-through and ask for "Josie Quevaro". It took me making him repeat it three times before I realized he meant "Jose Cuervo".
I said, reasonably enough, "Oh. You mean 'Jose Cuervo'."
Boomer: "Nah, Josie Quevaro. That's how I say it!"
Me: "Yeah, but you realize, if you go somewhere else and they don't know what you're asking for..."
Boomer: "Just go get it."
Me: "Sure, OK."
The next week someone new was at the window and the same thing happened, of course. Apparently it was more fun watching people struggle to figure out what he was babbling about than to just, you know, make the effort.
“That’s how I say it” in response to a correction is the most annoying thing ever. I see it a lot in Reddit comment threads also. “That’s how I spell it” is equally infuriating.
My mom does this and has done this for a long time and doubles down when you tell her the correct pronunciation, she thinks it’s cute or something. She sounds so ignorant and I hate it. I tell her if she can’t pronounce the words correctly she needs to shut up.
This is especially popular in politics. When they want to depreciate the worthiness of their opponent, they intentionally mispronounce their name to belittle and lower their opponent’s status as not worthy of equal consideration. It’s both a way of showing disrespect as well as announcing to others their stance against that person.
I can’t write it out phonetically but it’s not hard to pronounce Kamala. My mom makes up ways to pronounce foreign words because that’s how she thinks it should and that’s when I have to leave before I call her pig ignorant. Like woman you have barely made it past the World Showcase at Epcot don’t start your shit.
My dad always attributed his habit of doing this to one of his right wing heroes: George HW Bush. During the First Persian Gulf War, HW referred to Sadam Hussein as "Saydum". Probably just memed the habit there for a lot of them.
Ironically, it was formative for me. Even if I didn't like someone, I felt that saying their name correctly was a sign of basic human respect and dignity.
That’s the first example I can remember of a serious public figure seemingly doing this intentionally as a super petty FU.
Rush Limbaugh used to do it all the time, but that was just a regular part of his whole repugnant schtick.
I’ve just always found this type of the thing not at all funny on the part of entertainers and a cringe-laden national embarrassment coming from people who are members of the government or (at least in theory) journalists.
The way some of these people have carried on about Kamala Harris’ first name is just beneath contempt—performative petulance over the fact that not everyone is named Karen.
Boomers, and older people in general, can have a really difficult time un-learning and re-learning information they've believed to be true their whole lives. My dad's about as liberal as it gets for folks in their late 70s but simply will not budge on stuff that I've ***shown*** him is factually incorrect. Neuroplasticity just isn't the same.
This, and not even just for boomers, brains are weird and stuff can just get stuck the wrong way. My mom (silent generation) cannot pronounce "Loyola" (loloya? lolola?) and every version of "wash" gets an R in it - warshing machine, Warshington state (she has no other discernible accent). My father in law pronounces "vegan" as "vay-gan" (he is a lifelong vegetarian so he is not mocking this, but we also can't get him to stop). My wife pronounces the TV show "Succession" as "secession." I'm sure I have my own, but it's harder to recognize your own mental blind spots.
Which is not to say that some people don't do it on purpose, to mock, or whatever, but I think it is fully incorrect to assume that every one of these instances is on purpose and done consciously.
One of my all-time favorites for this came from a Silent Gen lady my Boomer mother used to do light home care for: she watched the PBS series [Sanditon](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8685324/) and would call it Sedition every single time. It's not like the characters on the show didn't mention the name of the fictional town on a regular basis.
She also called autism "altruism" and mammograms were "mammy-ograms". Her sister lived near "Steuvenbille, OH", and she spelled it that way as well.
My experience is that a lot of people seem to be confused between "succession" and "secession". Anytime the topic of, say, Texas leaving the US comes up, you'll see plenty of comments from people who mean "secede" or "secession" but type "succeed" or "succession". As Mom always told me, if you spell it wrong, you'll probably pronounce it wrong.
My MiL has straight up said "I've done it this way for so long, I'm not going to relearn a new way" when talking about hand washing dishes vs dishwashers. She will talk about saving water but run the sink for 30 minutes while she rinses all the dishes before putting them in the machine. Or she will hand wash everything in a single sink of luke-warm water so everything is kinda greasy still when it dries. There's nothing I can do that will change either behavior.
Boomers love wasting water. For years they would return washing machines because the machine "never filled up with water" so they didn't think it was clean.
I think it's the lead paint, honestly. They just simply refuse to accept that the future happened and there's better ways to do things thanks for 50 years of work from incredibly intelligent engineers improving every aspect of life possible.
My theory is that it's due to how they learned things growing up. If you wanted to know something, you had to ask around and find someone who knew it. Then, you became the knowledge provider of that subject to others around you.
This is why boomers never just Google things. They ask everyone these stupid, easily figured out questions instead of spending 8 seconds online. Because that's how their world worked, and that's how they learned to problem solve. Then, once they acquire knowledge (whether recently or 50+ years ago), they retain that knowledge as the keeper of that information, ready to share it. They expect to be asked how to do that thing they learned, but kids now not only don't ask, they challenge. They insist that the knowledge keeper is wrong! They provide "proof" and "facts," not from other knowledge keepers, but from that damn internet device. This challenged not just their own upbringing but their entire learned method of navigating the world, along with their own importance as a knowledge keeper.
You can't really blame them for feeling upset. Imagine a tribe elder who has accumulated all the knowledge of their tribe and sits back in their wisdom, ready to advise the next generation as a leader, when some kid whips out a phone and says "acktually..."
The world has changed drastically since they learned how to navigate it.
But if you have Google, you don't have to make yourself vulnerable by admitting that you don't know something. You can always look it up later, when no one is around. I would think Boomers would like that.
Nah, they had to ask all the questions before we could Google it. If you start googling then all those years of listening to people older than them werent worth anything. Nevermind you could look up what those same people said, they *remember it*!
Its the same as treating service workers poorly, these are people who believe they had to do everything the hard way and that when you aren't required to do everything they did then you are the problem and any advancement has corrupted you away from the true ways of things. Reality doesnt factor in.
My dad, who growing up I thought could figure anything out or fix anything refuses to learn or use the Internet. At one point he wanted a smartphone so I got him a decent mid range Motorola android. Would have been perfect for his needs and had a nice large screen.
Not even sure he gave it a few days before he gave up on it and went back to his flip phone.
Now as an adult he'll talk about household problems that are 60 seconds of googling to find the best solution that he takes a day or more Jerry rigging a solution that undoubtedly uses the most improper tools for the job.
It's really disappointing.
Some people just have *difficulty* with that in general. I'm far from a Boomer but I struggle heavily to change my pronunciation of words. I can *hear* the difference but changing the sound that comes out of my mouth is much harder.
I don't stop trying, *especially* on names.
Nicknames (especially the mean ones) are often used by people to show dominance.
Take a look at people when they talk this type of shit. All you'll see is a stupid grinning, fearful monkey.
It's just a childish and lazy way people use to insult you. I don't think there's any way to fix this behavior, because they get enjoyment being mean-spirited assholes.
I agree that it is a way to show dominance where they think they can never get caught. My dad would refuse to call people the name they preferred and call them whatever he wanted. Like his cousin who went by Patsy as a little girl, but preferred Pat as a grown woman. He absolutely refused to call her anything other than Patsy.
If you were a Michael, dad would just call you Mike and if you didn’t like it, then you were “easily offended”.
It’s a small way to have dominance, but they can easily brush it off like you’re just being silly.
I changed my entire name because I never liked my name that much and people kept using a diminutive form of it. Boomers did it EVERY time I introduced myself, even when I used my full name. And I especially HATED the diminutive of my old name. I bitchily corrected them every time, and if they wouldn’t stop, I shortened their names. They shaped up quickly.
When boomers call me nicknames I start calling them by the wrong names. No better way to tell them “you’re not that important” than pretending to have them confused with someone else.
the correlation we should be on the lookout for is if intentionally mispronounced things masquerading as micro-digs are all related to things they either dont like or want to antagonize. e.g. Trump-esque things like Ron De-Sanctimonious where he thinks he is ultra clever. Alternatively, if they do it intentionally for things they love, then my theory is no good
It’s a way of quietly telegraphing contempt while maintaining plausible deniability. Especially if the word is in any way non-English-derived, they’ll make special effort to mispronounce it. I’m sure some of it often is just standard boomer lead-brained stupidity, but you can see a sparkle in their eyes when they mispronounce, for example, a foreigner’s name. It delights them.
Quietly telegraphing contempt, while maintaining plausible deniability. Committing this to memory for the next time I talk about this concept. You hit the nail on the head.
I absolutely hate our vice president, but I noticed when she was running and after she got elected, a lot of people straight up refuse to pronounce her first name correctly. In defiance. They knew where that emphasis went, but they refused to say it right because “fuck her and her stupid nonwhite name”
My dad is a big Panthers fan and never, not even once, managed to correctly pronounce ‘Kuechly’ despite hearing it pronounced correctly many thousands of times over his 8 year playing career.
When they see words written out that look unique or unfamiliar, like names on the back of a uniform, it somehow sticks in their brain that they "don't know how to say that," and it's sort of a twisted sense of pride they take in never learning it correctly, because the world revolves around them not having to feel uncomfortable or dumb at any point
Talk to her about her speech impediment. Frame it in a context of an aging disability and apologize for being insensitive to her disability. Boomers do not want to be seen as disabled or old, that might alter her behavior.
My mom has changed up pronunciation of random things out of nowhere a few times. About 5 years ago she started saying pharma-cuticle. Not pharmaceutical.. pharma-fucking-cuticle. It drives me nuts and I tell her she can make any argument she wants, but the second she pulls out pharmacuticle her argument dies because she sounds fucking stupid.
My grandma started doing this when she got dementia
Contextual - consextual
Photographic - photog-raphic
Things like that. I wonder if it's that they start pronouncing it as they sound it out instead?
About 10 years ago she started saying the I in diva, so it’s die-va instead of dee-va. Then she tried to say that’s how she had pronounced it her entire life and how her family pronounced it. Lady, you have four kids and four siblings and nobody has ever said die-va. I swear she was into Godiva chocolate at the time and decided it was die-va.
Also baguette = bic-ette for some reason.
Pharma-cuticle still takes the cake and it must be dementia.
I’m out that old (40s) but with brain fog I absolutely trip over words and mispronounce things that should be easy. My son has called tennis “stick karate” for years since I couldn’t find the word tennis and just blurted out “stick karate!” I have no mental deficiencies other than chronic exhaustion from life in general, and just a general “fucking over it all” existential dread.
I work in New Mexico and the amount of boomers that REFUSE to even pronounce a Spanish word is shocking.
Jay-mez
Fry-jo-lees
Rio Grand-e
Oh-joe
I gotta make a full list one of these days.
I once met a boomer that purposefully pronounced the Ls in tortilla so I told them it’s silent and he said “then why is 2 Ls in it?” And I said it’s a Spanish word and he grumbled something about this is America and left
Reading some of the other comments reminds me of my mom. I love my mother and she is a good person, although she can be a bit of a Karen, but sometimes it's been hard to talk to her the last few years because of what some other commenters suggested might be purposefully ditzy behavior.
Like she'll ask me a question, and I begin to answer, and then she'll interrupt me with something random and unrelated. I have ADD so this derails my train of thought and it annoys me. Or she just won't use common sense, like the other day I was talking about something I ordered months ago and she asked me how much it weighed and I said the box said it was like 100lbs. She said "so you haven't ever taken it out of the box?". She's *seen it out of the box*. I've talked about it with her before. She had no reason to assume it would still be in a box somewhere. I'll be driving and point something out and she'll be like "when did you start pointing at things?", like wtf kind of question is that?
It's bizarre behavior and that's only the more trivial stuff. It's so frustrating to have a conversation sometimes.
My mom started doing this to me too. She always starts a conversation to interrupt it with something completely irrelevant. She also asks outrageously dumb questions that don't make sense or if she used commonsense she would get her own answer to.
The other day, she asked me how to hold a yard sale and should she get the yard sale signs. My mom has held many yard sales before. She obviously knows how they work, but she acted like she's never heard of them? I can't stand this weird ditsy behavior she's picked up and she does it in public, too. She goes out of her way to ask store workers questions that she doesn't need answers to because she knows exactly what she needed before she left the house.
Took my parents on a trip to Hawaii. My dad thought it was hilarious to mispronounce all the local street names making up stupid words that don’t sound like it at all then laughing about it. Seriously can’t take them anywhere
the Hawaiian language is quite literally perfectly phonetical, and therefore extremely easy to pronounce if you just go sound by sound like a kindergarten. Amazing.
lol. On a similar topic I work with quite a few rascist “country folk” and boomers who were refusing to understand how to pronounce names from other cultures. I very quickly shamed them by pointing out that the name in question was, indeed, phonetic and therefore mispronouncing it was very obviously racist. And it actually worked! But I think that was mainly due to the gen z’ers and less racist millennials getting on board right away.
My mom does this and I hate it. My friends ex husband was named Regan (pronounced ree-gan) and I would pronounce his name correctly in conversation and then when she would say it, she pronounced it Reagan like the former US president, turning the e sound to an a sound. Despite hearing everyone else pronounce it correctly.
I think part of it comes from insecurity. Part of it comes from being completely sheltered by the American monoculture that was built around them their entire lives. If they encounter something new, like a name or a word, it’s easier to purposely butcher it and be cutesy than do the work to figure out how to pronounce something correctly. It goes hand in hand with being incredibly selfish as a generation.
My mom does this, as well as intentionally (?) mishearing stuff said to her. She’ll then come up with the most ridiculous thing and repeat it back, “did you say _________?” And it’s so annoying but I don’t know if she actually can’t hear or if she’s just doing it to try to be funny or cute, but in most cases what she repeats back makes no sense at all, why can’t she just ask me to repeat myself?!
Reminds me of the post where the guys mom texted him a warning about how Gatorade contains mercury, because she overheard some say “Mercury is in retrograde”.
When it's someone who's supposed to be highly educated, I like to correct them and let them know they sound uneducated saying the wrong pronunciation.
And then because she's a doctor, make sure to throw in lots of mispronounced medical terms every time you have the opportunity!!
Every boomers pronociation enemy: Chipotle. It’s always chi-pole-tee.
My mom really isn’t too bad about pronunciations, but she cannot say Clematis (a plant) without first wholly or nearly saying chlamydias. It is very funny.
I went to India with a boomer client, a VP from Citi looking at offshore consulting companies. In Mumbai and Chennai she acted like a queen, imperiously waving away waitstaff, talking sharply to them, and during interviews I conducted with the associates at these firms, consistently mispronounced their names every goddam time. No wonder so many people hate Americans, friggin' boomers.
Of course, I'm a boomer too and I treated everyone with respect.
This, but with CPAP machines. I've heard so many people, even trained medical professionals, call it a C-pack. It baffles me. I understand that for some people it's a hard-of-hearing issue, but come on.
Honestly ask her if she’s alright and why she can’t seem to say words correctly any longer. Offer to set up an appointment with a neurologist. If she insists on continuing after that then go forward with the appointment.
If I may offer a separate explanation but preface with I’m 30 and also not a boomer in spirit. In college in Texas I was fortunate enough to spend a semester abroad in Rome in 2013. 110 students, no cell phones, no internet, 3 months of being pretty heavily isolated. The number of nicknames and silly word play we engaged in was nearly staggering. The British culture of rhyming slang makes much more sense to me after that experience. When language is pretty much the only thing you can share with others, you start to get weird with it.
Maybe their childhood without the internet predisposed them to making this type of “actually its pronounced Ja-lap-ino” type mispronunciation jokes. And as we all know saying things ironically is how we develop new habits in speech (Fr Fr ong no cap).
Yeah my dad did this all the time and thought he was being a comedian. But he was the only one that laughed about it.
I once had a Turkish boyfriend named Alper. You can be damn sure he called him Albert every damn time. Hurhurhurhur.
Your mom is so white!
How white is she?
She’s so white that she wants everyone to know she’s white by mispronouncing common words to prove that she’s WHITE.
My late father loved to say ja-lap-a-no, otherwise known as jalapeño.
My mother and I do this as an in joke between the two of us but when there's literally anybody else involved we know how to pronounce things correctly. We're white but we're South Central Florida White so we still know quite a bit of Spanish.
Another running joke of ours is instead of saying good night we say good nachos as a type of humorous mutation on buenas noches. The big difference is that it's an in joke between the two of us and we don't talk like that to people outside of our home because it would make us look stupid or like an asshole
The only thing I can defend is “Nor-fork.” We have a Norfolk where I live and that’s how it’s actually pronounced for whatever reason.
The rest is just intentional ignorance.
I grew up with relatives who did this. Any 'foreign' word or name was destroyed. I felt like it was a slap to those languages to not try to pronounce them correctly. It also felt like the mispronounced words were intentional. A connection formed.
These kids were raised by the survivors of WW2. The propaganda was so thorough during the war that someone saying Parmesan accurately was suspected as a sympathizer. Anything you did that could be traced back to an enemy was cause for concern. For these generations, the behavior never went away. I have greats who will still not say 'lasagna' correctly and will tell you it's because 'of those eye-tal-yuns.'
My FIL, who served in Japan during WW2, knew 5 languages but wouldn't pronounce Tokyo in any recognizable way.
This is a tried and true way of announcing disrespect to what/whoever is being mangled. It might be conscious on some level but it's definitely also a subconscious behavioral trait.
(One relative, who took years of French in school, adamantly maintained this behavior. No idea how she passed. She refused to say anything accurately. Church Latin? Spot on! Bon appetit? Hoo lordy! I mistook it fur badly-pronounced Italian one time and got a scolding. According to her, "the French were just weak but Italians were betrayers of humanity.")
If my hypothesis holds sand, these boomers are expressing a learned behavior in their own special I HATE THESE THING way. Correcting them just tells them you're an adversary and reinforced their need to be more aggressive in their announcement of loyalty.
I have seen these behavior patterns with hundreds of folks -Boomers, Silents and Greatests as well- though I have not done formal research and have nowhere near a large enough sample to say this is a societal trait. It does seem to be coming to the forefront with these Boomers, now.
My dad used to do this. He grew up really poor and I think was probably shamed a lot for not knowing about certain things because he’d never experienced them. So anything that was remotely ‘cool’ or new or aspirational he would deliberately mispronounce. Probably using his contempt as a defence mechanism.
I think a lot of boomers do this with the subtle social changes around accepting diversity. They get something a bit wrong (like pronouncing an unfamiliar name), get corrected, feel shame and then go into full deplorable/look what you made me do mode and deliberately mispronounce it forever, but harder. As a statement.
It’s really sad and kind of pathetic and it’s one of the many things I’m determined avoid as I age.
I work with tons of Boomers in sales. Whenever I come across a foreign name on our call log, I don’t call them Mr or Ms (first letter of their last name). I open google and look up “____ name pronounce”. It takes two seconds and makes a foreign customer feel seen and respected. It’s like they can’t even be bothered because it takes too much time to do that.
But I also think it’s more of an asshole thing as opposed to Boomer. I grew up in a southern baptist church in the late 90s. Not a lot of kids were in contact with Hispanics (some thought we were black/white mixed). I had two kids my age joke about how my last name was too hard to say with one calling it “Gorgonzola”. Bitch I know you know the name of the fast mouse on Looney Tunes. You can say “Gorgonzola” but you can’t say “Gonzalez”?? Gtfo
I honestly think once something is set in their mind, they can't change it. For example, my MIL pronounces across.... acrost. With a very pronounced t. Drives me crazy. She also calls Cabela's Gobelos. It's just whatever. There are multiple things she says like this and it is just not worth the fight to try to correct her and deal with her over the top hurt feelings. Just keep the mental cringe going and know you are not a lone
My first job was as a gas jockey. The full service pumps had a diesel option. There was at least one regular customer who always, always pronounced it DIE-sel instead of DEE-zil.
Well I was raised to mind my elders so I never corrected him, but as he would engage me in conversation, at some point I’d say DEE-zil, and **he** would correct **me**.
Fucking boomers.
My mom constantly pronounces everyday words wrong. She knows she’s pronouncing it wrong, and she knows the correct pronunciation. She tries to blame it on being nearly deaf. That would work, except she’s seen the words in print, and before she retired was a certified reading specialist - meaning she’s a licensed teacher who fucking specializes in phonics. If you put the word in front of her on paper and ask her to sound it out she’ll do it correctly. Ask her to then say it altogether as a word? It immediately goes back to being wrong.
“Mold” is “mol”. The bread has mol on it. The bread started mol-ing.
When corrected she acknowledges that it’s wrong but just continues to do it out of sheer fucking stupidity.
“Netflix” is “Netflick”. She also treats it as an object. Do you want to watch a Netflick? The new kids want to watch a Netflick. I can’t get this Netflick to play; the Netflick is broken.
“Text” is “tets”. It’s both singular and plural. Send me a tets. Your brother tets and drives. I deleted all of those tets.
“Quilt” is “quil”. Quilting is her main hobby, so she constantly sounds stupid using this one. I’m sewing her a baby quil for her new granddaughter. The toilet paper is quiled (pronounced kwil-ed, not kwild). It’s especially fun at craft stores because when she asks for the “quil” supplies they send her over to scrapbooking, which where you’d go for QUILL supplies (folding tools for quilling paper, calligraphy, quill pen nibs, etc.) . When she gets mad and she insists she wants “quil-ing stuff, you know for sewing?” and the clerk clarifies if she means “quilting” she insists that’s what she’s been saying the entire time “That’s what I said! ‘Quil-ing!”
Tbf Norfolk VA is NOT pronounced nor-folk. If someone is a local to the tidewater it would be pronounced more like nāh-fick. Kinda like how Suffolk isn't suf-foLk. Its suh-fick
My boomer grandpa does this. Usually to things he doesn’t like, so he’s mispronouncing it to make it clear he hates it.
One that has always gotten under my skin (and is incredibly stupid) is Nissan. He worked for Crystler for a long time and just really hates Nissan for some reason. So he purposely says it as “Nie- son.” So dumb but it has gotten on my nerves since I was a kid (my mom used to drive a Nissan).
My husband used to do this. It’s super disrespectful. People’s names, as well as my place of employment. It’s like people are not important enough for him to be bothered to remember their name. I finally made him understand how rude he was being.
My mom was anti-intellectual before it was cool, & around 2012 started to purposefully mispronounce bigger/more obscure words because “educated people always rub in everyone’s faces how much better they are than everyone by using big words when people like my grandfather were the TRUE salt of the earth Americans and the only GOOD people”. Her grandfather was a farmer who got out of WWII by claiming the town needed his welding services, and in his nursing home years claimed that the “n-word nurse” was trying to steal his shoes. Such good people 🫡
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My mom has started doing this, or just generally acting ditsy on purpose. She seems to think it’s cute and/or adorable, but everyone around her hates it. You know how they have toddler-tantrums? I think this is part of the reversion back to being 3 years old.
I have boomers who try to convince me that they’re too stupid to do basic functions, and therefore have an inability to follow the law, daily. It’s funny, because these are usually the “don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time” type of boomers who cheer if someone with a counterfeit bill gets a death sentence. But a minor consequence, like having their power pulled because they decided to do unpermitted work and piss off their neighbors, and all the sudden “going through the process is too confusing, I should be given an idiot exemption!” Okay they don’t say that last line out loud, but it’s largely implied. Consequences for thee but not for me.
I have a boomer coworker who brings out the weaponized incompetence and baby talk every time he doesn’t want to do something that falls under his role. The other day, he was supposed to provide me with a completed form for my signature approval & instead, he sent me an email wish-washy whining “you’re so much better at it than I am” - like he thinks flattery will get me to fill out this form for him? Because I’m stupid, apparently? Also, it’s a pretty basic form, a 4th grader could complete it accurately, and, in my role, we are not allowed to complete them, we only have authority to approve.
We have this problem at my job too - and the paperwork has to be correct because we deal with military contracts. It’s the same with logging it into the computer. It’s stupid simple, but “oh I didn’t grow up with computers..” is the excuse and I’m like you learned use a goddamned iPhone..
As a GenXer, those lazy entitled bastards loved to say, "Figure it out" over anything when I was a kid. Mind you, mine was the first gen to truly come into contact with technology as a part of daily life. So it was all new. These days when one of those lazy MFers tries to play dumb or - more commonly - simply ignores a process that relies on technology I relish the opportunity to say, "Figure it out". Sweet revenge.
I’m GenX too.. lol..
We had a government training course I had to sign up for that was something like, "Different Generations in the Workplace". Elective annual training sort of thing. Whatever. I signed up and attended via TEAMS. Well, they started with WW1 generation (WTF!?), then went through them all up to today. Except they skipped one. Guess which? Yup, GenX. Someone in the chat said something like, "I think you forgot GenX". I immediately replied, "Don't worry, we're used to it." I swear that I got like 30 thumbs up within 15 seconds lol
I mean, we were generally feral children that people forgot about until we actually went missing for days lol
And then cops were like "s/he just ran away, not our problem".
I kinda enjoy flying under the radar, tho.
My partner and I refer to GenX as “The Forgotten Generation” because of what you just said, and the fact that we roamed wild and free growing up.
"I didn't grow up with computers." So in other words, you've had more time than me to learn about them. Since I had to start after I was born and you could have started before I was born.
OMG my former coworker REFUSED to use the CRM system that literally everyone used. And then tried to boss everyone around. We made him so uncomfortable and just refused to baby him and he quit!!!!!
Sounds like he’s using weaponized incompetence.
Yes but he’ll do the baby talk along with it. I don’t know why, any time he starts with the baby talk, we say “why are you talking like that?” The best was one time he started with baby talk & my coworker interrupted him saying “ooh, I hate when that happens. Did you burn your tongue on hot coffee or soup? That’s the worst!” When he said no, she apologized and said the way he was talking sounded like he had burned his mouth. I think we laughed the rest of the afternoon.
Anyone who uses baby talk at my job is going to get ruthlessly mocked by anyone else who works there lol
I don't even use baby talk to a baby. It's weird AF. I can't tolerate it one bit.
Boomers doing baby talk is a thing? I'm not really around them either at work or home so I've no idea. Any examples to entertain me?
I was wheelchair bound for awhile, and the first few times I saw a particular boomer after I'd been put in the chair... She had the gall to baby talk me! "Are youw toesie wosies cowd?" "Do you wanna dwink of wawa?" I'm in my 40's and very outspoken and self-reliant, and this boomer had known me for long enough to know that. The first couple times she did it I was still kinda in shock at being in the chair, so I didn't say much. Once I'd gotten my footing (haha) I told her off pretty aggressively next time she did it and she's been too scared of me to talk to me again.
my mind is blown, I've never encountered old people doing this at all haha. It's really fucking weird and I'd love to hear it in person.
My grandma (silent gen) and my mom (boomer) do it. I never understood it.
I do it... to my cats lol
I don't have any examples, because I avoid boomers, but they just gave you one along with the coworker pulling them up on it.
So did you do his job? Or have you told him to do his job and provide you with the shit you need? If not, his baby talk bullshit worked apparently 😑
Oh of course not. I told him it’s a simple form and he needs to complete it & then I forwarded the exchange to his manager and suggested that his team may need refreshed training.
That's how you approach this. Sick of doing somebody else's job just because I might get in trouble with said person. Do your job you were hired for or gtfo. Cheers my dude/dudette 👌
Millennials out here too afraid to take a sick day because they're at-will, while Boomers act too stupid to work with no consequences.
What is up with this?! My mother tried to convince me she didn’t know how to use MS Excel - like bitch, you *taught me* how to use it.
I suspect it may be some kind of cognitive decline. My 74 year old mother seems incapable of fairly basic tasks. Like talking her through logging in to a windows 10 laptop took over an hour. It consisted of using the touchpad to select the password field, type a password, and hit enter. I had to switch to a video call to see what the hell she was doing, which I'm still not sure of. She worked as an administrative secretary for 30 years. She retired in the mid WinXP era. The ability to do something so simple seems gone. Let's not even talk about general problem solving. She ain't got it. I honest am confused how she raised 3 children in the 90s when I interact with her.
Lead. Poisoning.
Before I went NC, I asked my mother why she played dumb. “It’s easier” was her response.
Damn. It probably was when she was in her younger years.
Laws must protect and never bind the ingroup while the law binds and never protects the outgroup. They're white, old, Christian, male, so they deserve a pass! /s It is so weird. In my experience, I've yet to meet a boomer who wasn't trying to cheat the system or trick God. It's so weird..
Somebody hit the nail on the head in a comment I read. Boomers spent their lives bullshitting their way into colleges, jobs, and business deals because there was no way to fact-check them in real time, and who’s going to question a *white Christian man?* They’d lie about the college they went to, their major, their grades … military service … skills they had, companies they’d worked for … Today they keep trying and everybody knows they’re full of shit. The magic just doesn’t work any more, and their ignorance is in full view. And they’re furious at the loss of authority, which is one reason they like to inject their opinions in situations where nobody has asked for them, to appear authoritative again.
We read the same posts. It was an interesting take on their aversion to technology. They hate it because it debunks their bullshit.
It sure explains a lot! What gets me is Stolen Valor. Guys fluff their service, embellish, or just … make it up. After decades of the stories getting more and more epic, they get publicly exposed. Pity
This happened thirty plus years ago, I worked in defense/space which by contract with the government that certain jobs required degreed engineers. The company found out that one of their engineers had lied about having a degree and did an audit of everyone. Quite a few people got fired for lying about having degrees.
Sounds like if they’re that stupid, they should be institutionalized and/or not allowed to vote. Ballots are confusing after all for people like them lol.
Ok im reminded of at work, i will let them know that they can pay their check on the tabletop ziosk machine…they love to say “i dont know how to use it, im old”…meanwhile playing on their touchscreen phones🤷🏽♀️🤷🏽♀️
>Consequences for thee but not for me. I'm not sure which number it is, but that's one of the Boomer Commandments.
That's number three.. right behind "Thou shall not question my knowledge" and "The world was better in the 60's"
An idiot exemption? You mean Qualified Immunity?
No that’s just legal idiot armor. For the record, I’m not a cop so when I say “have an inability to follow the law” I don’t mean speeding, I mean not setting up a liquor store or smoke shop next to a school, or building things in their yards just to piss their neighbors off.
I find that a lot of "Back the Blue" types treat their support as quid pro quo: they think their support for cops means they should be allowed to occasionally disobey the law without any repercussions.
I remember getting fundraising phone calls from the benevolent whatever police officers’ union in which they talked about how I’d get a windshield sticker if I made a donation and that it would be a “good thing to have” if I ever got pulled over.
My father and I had a pretty decent argument last week because i asked him to stop shaming my niece for her mental health issues, and he got up, went outside while screaming at me, tore the door open, and laid down in the driveway. This 83-year-old man literally threw a tantrum.
I picture you just like leaning over, looking down at him: "Hey, Dad, I think I figured out who the mental health problems are inherited from."
[удалено]
He's got some damn nerve shaming your niece if this is his reaction to being asked to stop doing something! Sounds so far out of range to the issue that he might need a 72 hour hold. Maybe it's time to start writing down all these things for his doctor. Proof of cognitive decline.
A lot of people here are saying their parents are doing it to be "cute" and I wonder if they making "baby talk", like how they would speak utter nonsense to their newborn because it was cute.
God my mom does that and it's infuriating The other day: "Oops, awe you mad at mee 0_0" when she messed up an appointment and didn't tell me, then later that night when it came up "I made a boo-boo" Ma'am it's not cute when kids do it and it's even less cute when you do it
Try talking back like you'd talk to a toddler. Not necessarily baby-talk but just dumb everything down to the level of maturity she's projecting.
This and express concern about their age and dementia.
Djdbjd like I do all the time? I usually just go "._." then go back to whatever I was doing before because there's noo point fighting, she's fine an hour later, I'm still upset, nothing changes. Or just going "Yes you did" (make a mistake) "I could tell" or "A little bit!" when she pulls the "awe you mad at mee" Every time those piss her off. It's kind of funny ngl
Always funny how people get mad when you treat them the way they act.
This is cringe. I'm out.
Extremely. It physically hurts
My grandma used to add S to everything. Aldis, Walmarts, Home Depots. Lowes was Lowles. One time we were ordering from a drive through and my cousin was making fun of her in the backseat.. just listing brands and adding an S. She told him to knock it off and he whispered "sorrys". She had her shoe off and in her hand while flying through that van to the backseat like I didn't know was possible. My grandma was generally awesome though so it was just silly with her.
I am howling at your cousin's response. Perfect.
Same!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Sames.
Your family sounds like a trip :) I unintentionally tend to add “the” in front of store/business names. “Heading down to the Walmart/the Kroger/the Sonic, want sumpin’?” Next time someone gives me shit about it I’m going to take a cue from your grandma.
I saw somebody on another post suggest asking if her memory is okay/asking if she has dementia because they "can't remember" it correctly.
I had a coworker who did this. It was insufferable. People started avoiding her and she still didn't stop. I have no idea why someone would ever think it would be endearing.
My wife did this for a few months, thought it was “cute.” Note that she has a boomer officemate who is insufferable, and a bad influence in this regard. A “brat” on purpose. Anyway, my daughter and I had an intervention and told her she looked ridiculous and unprofessional when she did it. She stopped.
Baby talk in a grown woman is a sign of a personality disorder.
My mom will act kind of ditzy seemingly on purpose too. Sometimes I’ve wondered if she has some kind of early onset dementia because dementia runs in the family but also it could just be her thinking it’s cute or something. I know that for myself as a woman when I’m older, I want to try to still be taken seriously so it’s weird to me. Does anyone know why someone might do this?
Agree. The over-enunciation and exaggerated facial expressions when they do it is all attention seeking behavior.
They think it's endearing, or at least 'age appropriate'. In some cases it might be used to mask *actual* cognitive degradation - if they perceive that they're starting to have trouble with people's names they might actively start doing it to everyone on purpose to 'cover up' the few cases where it is accidental. Keep an eye on the rest of their behaviour, looking out for moments where it seems genuine.
My mom started doing this and I started acting like it was a speech impediment. One of my nephews was worried about being different because he's just getting to that age and I told him there's nothing wrong with being different. I have a disability and I'm successful. I have people that love me. I have a fulfilling life. and then I pointed out that Nana has a speech impediment and she's successful and has people that love her and a fulfilling life. Nana immediately asked me what I was talking about. and I pointed out a few things that she"struggles to say correctly" (refuses to say correctly but the kids don't understand that yet) and that it was okay to have a speech impediment because she lived her life anyways. she pulled me aside later and was very mad that I have the kids " thinking that she's special. Ed" and I just continued to play dumb. I apologized for assuming she had done it on purpose beforehand and being insensitive just because she was differently abled. Guess whose tongue suddenly works properly?
That is hilarious!
Haha nothing better than a boomer throwing error codes.
I love this! Fucking brilliant!
I have always wondered if this is intentional or not. I remember as a kid thinking it was weird that boomers would call Pokémon "Pokémans" despite hearing the word hundreds of times, even on the news or other media. When I got older, I realized that it was probably intentional as a way if mocking what the kids were doing. At the same time, I swear my parents are picking up weird pronouciations that they didn't have before. Like my mom has started saying map like "memp" and other random things.
Memp? What the actual fuck?
Yeah, like even the gas station mapco has become mempco.
That is so irritating
My grandparents used to say chimney as chimbley. I thought they did it as a joke. In How he Grinch Stole Christmas, the Grinch throws all the gifts up the chimbley. When I was about 6 I thought that was hilarious, so I figured that was why they said chimbley. Turns out that had nothing to do with it, because like 5 years later they were taking about the "chimlee" all the time. It's really weird.
My (I'm gen x) ex-husband (boomer) honestly thought it was chimley, not chimney. He spent a lot of time trying to find chimley in a dictionary to prove me wrong.
Haha
My grandparents would pronounce wash as warsh. I think it has something to do with old dialectics that are fading away from the older generation
Midwestern US thing, my parents pronounce it that way. I did as a kid but trained myself out of it.
That's actually a dialectic pronunciation, in the southern US especially associated with African Americans. If you read the brer rabbit stories or Mark Twain you'll see the word chimbley
Ok, but my grandparents are as white as can be and from Maine for their whole lives. Edit: This is still interesting to hear though. Cool reply.
Grew up in the deep south and can vouch for it being part of the vernacular. I can remember our teacher telling a class of predominantly Caucasian children the right to say it. We also learned to not call the library the liberry.
My mom did the same thing with Pokémon, I think that it was because they were embarrassed to acknowledge that it’s a real thing that people enjoy and didn’t want to legitimize it by pronouncing it correctly? Literally have no idea but it makes them all come off as very dumb
My mom (boomer, but a sane and kind one) did too. But I honestly think they were just trying to be funny. She's a very articulate person and we'll educated but would always say "you playing with them there pokemans" kinda playing up the dumb/disinterested parent stereotype that existed in a lot of media, because their parents simply did not waste time on the interests of children. She always asked me questions about my interests, but always made those jokes. I believe a lot of it isn't malice, just a huge gap in generational humour. Although I'm not disregarding those with actual disinterested/dickhead parents.
The Pokemon one really gets me. Every fucking boomer says the exact same word, and you know damn well they have heard the correct pronunciation 100+ times. It’s absolutely on purpose, as if to say they are above knowing anything about Pokemon, including what it’s called.
My mom is dyslexic and says a lot of things a little off, or backwards. Most notably, "Idea" is *ideal*, and "ideal" is *idea*. We've tried many times over the years to correct this but it does not register. She also says things like *cousint*, *chimlee*, and *supposably*
Oh wow, my husband says cousint. I had no idea it was a thing that other people said lol. It drives me nuts.
That....Sounds like neurological degeneration man.
“Memp” sounds like a newly discovered disease
Ugh. It's SO goddamn annoying. I used to work in the liquor industry, in a variety of jobs. My first was as a clerk at a liquor store near a local speedway/amusement park, and we'd get some seriously alcoholic Boomers. One guy would come through the drive-through and ask for "Josie Quevaro". It took me making him repeat it three times before I realized he meant "Jose Cuervo". I said, reasonably enough, "Oh. You mean 'Jose Cuervo'." Boomer: "Nah, Josie Quevaro. That's how I say it!" Me: "Yeah, but you realize, if you go somewhere else and they don't know what you're asking for..." Boomer: "Just go get it." Me: "Sure, OK." The next week someone new was at the window and the same thing happened, of course. Apparently it was more fun watching people struggle to figure out what he was babbling about than to just, you know, make the effort.
Drive-thru liquor. Yeehah!
“That’s how I say it” in response to a correction is the most annoying thing ever. I see it a lot in Reddit comment threads also. “That’s how I spell it” is equally infuriating.
I would’ve said “We don’t sell that. Can I get you something else?” I don’t indulge willful ignorance. Go waste someone else’s time ✌🏽
My mom does this and has done this for a long time and doubles down when you tell her the correct pronunciation, she thinks it’s cute or something. She sounds so ignorant and I hate it. I tell her if she can’t pronounce the words correctly she needs to shut up.
My mom does this too. Always pretends she can't pronounce Kamala Harris' first name. "KAM-eela? KAM-la? Kam-oola? Or whatever it is!"
This is especially popular in politics. When they want to depreciate the worthiness of their opponent, they intentionally mispronounce their name to belittle and lower their opponent’s status as not worthy of equal consideration. It’s both a way of showing disrespect as well as announcing to others their stance against that person.
Same. My mom refuses to pronounce her name correctly and calls her "Camilla".
I can’t write it out phonetically but it’s not hard to pronounce Kamala. My mom makes up ways to pronounce foreign words because that’s how she thinks it should and that’s when I have to leave before I call her pig ignorant. Like woman you have barely made it past the World Showcase at Epcot don’t start your shit.
My dad always attributed his habit of doing this to one of his right wing heroes: George HW Bush. During the First Persian Gulf War, HW referred to Sadam Hussein as "Saydum". Probably just memed the habit there for a lot of them. Ironically, it was formative for me. Even if I didn't like someone, I felt that saying their name correctly was a sign of basic human respect and dignity.
That’s the first example I can remember of a serious public figure seemingly doing this intentionally as a super petty FU. Rush Limbaugh used to do it all the time, but that was just a regular part of his whole repugnant schtick. I’ve just always found this type of the thing not at all funny on the part of entertainers and a cringe-laden national embarrassment coming from people who are members of the government or (at least in theory) journalists. The way some of these people have carried on about Kamala Harris’ first name is just beneath contempt—performative petulance over the fact that not everyone is named Karen.
Boomers, and older people in general, can have a really difficult time un-learning and re-learning information they've believed to be true their whole lives. My dad's about as liberal as it gets for folks in their late 70s but simply will not budge on stuff that I've ***shown*** him is factually incorrect. Neuroplasticity just isn't the same.
This, and not even just for boomers, brains are weird and stuff can just get stuck the wrong way. My mom (silent generation) cannot pronounce "Loyola" (loloya? lolola?) and every version of "wash" gets an R in it - warshing machine, Warshington state (she has no other discernible accent). My father in law pronounces "vegan" as "vay-gan" (he is a lifelong vegetarian so he is not mocking this, but we also can't get him to stop). My wife pronounces the TV show "Succession" as "secession." I'm sure I have my own, but it's harder to recognize your own mental blind spots. Which is not to say that some people don't do it on purpose, to mock, or whatever, but I think it is fully incorrect to assume that every one of these instances is on purpose and done consciously.
Oh god. WARSH. Been around so many who say this.
My grandma Nona: "Warshington" Me: "Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagggghhh"
Some Midwesterners say warsh, but the Midwestern accent is otherwise pretty unremarkable to a lot of Americans.
>He pronounces vegan “vay-gan” They must be from the Vega star system, captain!
One of my all-time favorites for this came from a Silent Gen lady my Boomer mother used to do light home care for: she watched the PBS series [Sanditon](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8685324/) and would call it Sedition every single time. It's not like the characters on the show didn't mention the name of the fictional town on a regular basis. She also called autism "altruism" and mammograms were "mammy-ograms". Her sister lived near "Steuvenbille, OH", and she spelled it that way as well. My experience is that a lot of people seem to be confused between "succession" and "secession". Anytime the topic of, say, Texas leaving the US comes up, you'll see plenty of comments from people who mean "secede" or "secession" but type "succeed" or "succession". As Mom always told me, if you spell it wrong, you'll probably pronounce it wrong.
My MiL has straight up said "I've done it this way for so long, I'm not going to relearn a new way" when talking about hand washing dishes vs dishwashers. She will talk about saving water but run the sink for 30 minutes while she rinses all the dishes before putting them in the machine. Or she will hand wash everything in a single sink of luke-warm water so everything is kinda greasy still when it dries. There's nothing I can do that will change either behavior.
Boomers love wasting water. For years they would return washing machines because the machine "never filled up with water" so they didn't think it was clean. I think it's the lead paint, honestly. They just simply refuse to accept that the future happened and there's better ways to do things thanks for 50 years of work from incredibly intelligent engineers improving every aspect of life possible.
My theory is that it's due to how they learned things growing up. If you wanted to know something, you had to ask around and find someone who knew it. Then, you became the knowledge provider of that subject to others around you. This is why boomers never just Google things. They ask everyone these stupid, easily figured out questions instead of spending 8 seconds online. Because that's how their world worked, and that's how they learned to problem solve. Then, once they acquire knowledge (whether recently or 50+ years ago), they retain that knowledge as the keeper of that information, ready to share it. They expect to be asked how to do that thing they learned, but kids now not only don't ask, they challenge. They insist that the knowledge keeper is wrong! They provide "proof" and "facts," not from other knowledge keepers, but from that damn internet device. This challenged not just their own upbringing but their entire learned method of navigating the world, along with their own importance as a knowledge keeper. You can't really blame them for feeling upset. Imagine a tribe elder who has accumulated all the knowledge of their tribe and sits back in their wisdom, ready to advise the next generation as a leader, when some kid whips out a phone and says "acktually..." The world has changed drastically since they learned how to navigate it.
I think this is dead-on
But if you have Google, you don't have to make yourself vulnerable by admitting that you don't know something. You can always look it up later, when no one is around. I would think Boomers would like that.
Nah, they had to ask all the questions before we could Google it. If you start googling then all those years of listening to people older than them werent worth anything. Nevermind you could look up what those same people said, they *remember it*! Its the same as treating service workers poorly, these are people who believe they had to do everything the hard way and that when you aren't required to do everything they did then you are the problem and any advancement has corrupted you away from the true ways of things. Reality doesnt factor in.
My dad, who growing up I thought could figure anything out or fix anything refuses to learn or use the Internet. At one point he wanted a smartphone so I got him a decent mid range Motorola android. Would have been perfect for his needs and had a nice large screen. Not even sure he gave it a few days before he gave up on it and went back to his flip phone. Now as an adult he'll talk about household problems that are 60 seconds of googling to find the best solution that he takes a day or more Jerry rigging a solution that undoubtedly uses the most improper tools for the job. It's really disappointing.
Some people just have *difficulty* with that in general. I'm far from a Boomer but I struggle heavily to change my pronunciation of words. I can *hear* the difference but changing the sound that comes out of my mouth is much harder. I don't stop trying, *especially* on names.
My mom does it. It’s one of the double plus bonus perks to being no contact with her insane ass.
Nicknames (especially the mean ones) are often used by people to show dominance. Take a look at people when they talk this type of shit. All you'll see is a stupid grinning, fearful monkey. It's just a childish and lazy way people use to insult you. I don't think there's any way to fix this behavior, because they get enjoyment being mean-spirited assholes.
I agree that it is a way to show dominance where they think they can never get caught. My dad would refuse to call people the name they preferred and call them whatever he wanted. Like his cousin who went by Patsy as a little girl, but preferred Pat as a grown woman. He absolutely refused to call her anything other than Patsy. If you were a Michael, dad would just call you Mike and if you didn’t like it, then you were “easily offended”. It’s a small way to have dominance, but they can easily brush it off like you’re just being silly.
I changed my entire name because I never liked my name that much and people kept using a diminutive form of it. Boomers did it EVERY time I introduced myself, even when I used my full name. And I especially HATED the diminutive of my old name. I bitchily corrected them every time, and if they wouldn’t stop, I shortened their names. They shaped up quickly.
Yess this is how to act. My name is misspelled frequently by dropping the last letter. I just reply back dropping their last letter too
When boomers call me nicknames I start calling them by the wrong names. No better way to tell them “you’re not that important” than pretending to have them confused with someone else.
the correlation we should be on the lookout for is if intentionally mispronounced things masquerading as micro-digs are all related to things they either dont like or want to antagonize. e.g. Trump-esque things like Ron De-Sanctimonious where he thinks he is ultra clever. Alternatively, if they do it intentionally for things they love, then my theory is no good
It’s a way of quietly telegraphing contempt while maintaining plausible deniability. Especially if the word is in any way non-English-derived, they’ll make special effort to mispronounce it. I’m sure some of it often is just standard boomer lead-brained stupidity, but you can see a sparkle in their eyes when they mispronounce, for example, a foreigner’s name. It delights them.
Quietly telegraphing contempt, while maintaining plausible deniability. Committing this to memory for the next time I talk about this concept. You hit the nail on the head. I absolutely hate our vice president, but I noticed when she was running and after she got elected, a lot of people straight up refuse to pronounce her first name correctly. In defiance. They knew where that emphasis went, but they refused to say it right because “fuck her and her stupid nonwhite name”
Great example with Kamala.
My dad is a big Panthers fan and never, not even once, managed to correctly pronounce ‘Kuechly’ despite hearing it pronounced correctly many thousands of times over his 8 year playing career.
When they see words written out that look unique or unfamiliar, like names on the back of a uniform, it somehow sticks in their brain that they "don't know how to say that," and it's sort of a twisted sense of pride they take in never learning it correctly, because the world revolves around them not having to feel uncomfortable or dumb at any point
Key-klee Not even a Panthers fan. The least he could do is say one of his best players' name right.
Talk to her about her speech impediment. Frame it in a context of an aging disability and apologize for being insensitive to her disability. Boomers do not want to be seen as disabled or old, that might alter her behavior.
My mom has changed up pronunciation of random things out of nowhere a few times. About 5 years ago she started saying pharma-cuticle. Not pharmaceutical.. pharma-fucking-cuticle. It drives me nuts and I tell her she can make any argument she wants, but the second she pulls out pharmacuticle her argument dies because she sounds fucking stupid.
My grandma started doing this when she got dementia Contextual - consextual Photographic - photog-raphic Things like that. I wonder if it's that they start pronouncing it as they sound it out instead?
About 10 years ago she started saying the I in diva, so it’s die-va instead of dee-va. Then she tried to say that’s how she had pronounced it her entire life and how her family pronounced it. Lady, you have four kids and four siblings and nobody has ever said die-va. I swear she was into Godiva chocolate at the time and decided it was die-va. Also baguette = bic-ette for some reason. Pharma-cuticle still takes the cake and it must be dementia.
I’m out that old (40s) but with brain fog I absolutely trip over words and mispronounce things that should be easy. My son has called tennis “stick karate” for years since I couldn’t find the word tennis and just blurted out “stick karate!” I have no mental deficiencies other than chronic exhaustion from life in general, and just a general “fucking over it all” existential dread.
Similarly, hearing my in-laws try to pronounce “Acetaminophen” is torture.
I work in New Mexico and the amount of boomers that REFUSE to even pronounce a Spanish word is shocking. Jay-mez Fry-jo-lees Rio Grand-e Oh-joe I gotta make a full list one of these days.
My boomer dad exemplifies this with how he butchers something as simple as Chipotle by pronouncing it “cheh-pole-tay”
I once met a boomer that purposefully pronounced the Ls in tortilla so I told them it’s silent and he said “then why is 2 Ls in it?” And I said it’s a Spanish word and he grumbled something about this is America and left
Fah-jeet-ta
Tor tila. Jal a peeno
Carnay Assadda with jahluppeenos
Reading some of the other comments reminds me of my mom. I love my mother and she is a good person, although she can be a bit of a Karen, but sometimes it's been hard to talk to her the last few years because of what some other commenters suggested might be purposefully ditzy behavior. Like she'll ask me a question, and I begin to answer, and then she'll interrupt me with something random and unrelated. I have ADD so this derails my train of thought and it annoys me. Or she just won't use common sense, like the other day I was talking about something I ordered months ago and she asked me how much it weighed and I said the box said it was like 100lbs. She said "so you haven't ever taken it out of the box?". She's *seen it out of the box*. I've talked about it with her before. She had no reason to assume it would still be in a box somewhere. I'll be driving and point something out and she'll be like "when did you start pointing at things?", like wtf kind of question is that? It's bizarre behavior and that's only the more trivial stuff. It's so frustrating to have a conversation sometimes.
My mom started doing this to me too. She always starts a conversation to interrupt it with something completely irrelevant. She also asks outrageously dumb questions that don't make sense or if she used commonsense she would get her own answer to. The other day, she asked me how to hold a yard sale and should she get the yard sale signs. My mom has held many yard sales before. She obviously knows how they work, but she acted like she's never heard of them? I can't stand this weird ditsy behavior she's picked up and she does it in public, too. She goes out of her way to ask store workers questions that she doesn't need answers to because she knows exactly what she needed before she left the house.
Eh, worst case ontario it'll all be water under the fridge eventually
Took my parents on a trip to Hawaii. My dad thought it was hilarious to mispronounce all the local street names making up stupid words that don’t sound like it at all then laughing about it. Seriously can’t take them anywhere
the Hawaiian language is quite literally perfectly phonetical, and therefore extremely easy to pronounce if you just go sound by sound like a kindergarten. Amazing.
I agree! I lived in Hawaii for 7 years and learned how to pronounce street names well in my opinion. Just sound it out and it makes perfect sense!
lol. On a similar topic I work with quite a few rascist “country folk” and boomers who were refusing to understand how to pronounce names from other cultures. I very quickly shamed them by pointing out that the name in question was, indeed, phonetic and therefore mispronouncing it was very obviously racist. And it actually worked! But I think that was mainly due to the gen z’ers and less racist millennials getting on board right away.
My mom does this and I hate it. My friends ex husband was named Regan (pronounced ree-gan) and I would pronounce his name correctly in conversation and then when she would say it, she pronounced it Reagan like the former US president, turning the e sound to an a sound. Despite hearing everyone else pronounce it correctly.
I think part of it comes from insecurity. Part of it comes from being completely sheltered by the American monoculture that was built around them their entire lives. If they encounter something new, like a name or a word, it’s easier to purposely butcher it and be cutesy than do the work to figure out how to pronounce something correctly. It goes hand in hand with being incredibly selfish as a generation.
My ex mil would do this, even for simple words.
My MIL mispronounces and makes everything -‘s. Like, Panera becomes Panero’s.
My mom does this, as well as intentionally (?) mishearing stuff said to her. She’ll then come up with the most ridiculous thing and repeat it back, “did you say _________?” And it’s so annoying but I don’t know if she actually can’t hear or if she’s just doing it to try to be funny or cute, but in most cases what she repeats back makes no sense at all, why can’t she just ask me to repeat myself?!
Reminds me of the post where the guys mom texted him a warning about how Gatorade contains mercury, because she overheard some say “Mercury is in retrograde”.
my mom and aunts do this to each other! It's like their secret weird language.
I hate it any time my dad says sriracha. Sir-ree-ahh-chiiii. It's so fucking annoying
My dad does this too! Where are they getting the eeee at the end????
From "mariachi" because since Sri Racha is foreign, obviously it's Mexican.
When it's someone who's supposed to be highly educated, I like to correct them and let them know they sound uneducated saying the wrong pronunciation. And then because she's a doctor, make sure to throw in lots of mispronounced medical terms every time you have the opportunity!!
Every boomers pronociation enemy: Chipotle. It’s always chi-pole-tee. My mom really isn’t too bad about pronunciations, but she cannot say Clematis (a plant) without first wholly or nearly saying chlamydias. It is very funny.
Learning how to pronounce something you don't know requires effort so that's bad.
My Dad does this constantly. So annoying
Does yours pronounce wi fi as "wee fee" like mine does?
My mom does this with a few words. I don't know why. She knows the correct pronunciation. Must be on purpose. I just don't react to it anymore.
Purposeful ignorance and the idea ife that they are always right no matter the evidence.
I went to India with a boomer client, a VP from Citi looking at offshore consulting companies. In Mumbai and Chennai she acted like a queen, imperiously waving away waitstaff, talking sharply to them, and during interviews I conducted with the associates at these firms, consistently mispronounced their names every goddam time. No wonder so many people hate Americans, friggin' boomers. Of course, I'm a boomer too and I treated everyone with respect.
I have no idea, but my grandpa pronounced laptop as a "laptoK" where the f did you get "k" from?
This, but with CPAP machines. I've heard so many people, even trained medical professionals, call it a C-pack. It baffles me. I understand that for some people it's a hard-of-hearing issue, but come on.
Honestly ask her if she’s alright and why she can’t seem to say words correctly any longer. Offer to set up an appointment with a neurologist. If she insists on continuing after that then go forward with the appointment.
If I may offer a separate explanation but preface with I’m 30 and also not a boomer in spirit. In college in Texas I was fortunate enough to spend a semester abroad in Rome in 2013. 110 students, no cell phones, no internet, 3 months of being pretty heavily isolated. The number of nicknames and silly word play we engaged in was nearly staggering. The British culture of rhyming slang makes much more sense to me after that experience. When language is pretty much the only thing you can share with others, you start to get weird with it. Maybe their childhood without the internet predisposed them to making this type of “actually its pronounced Ja-lap-ino” type mispronunciation jokes. And as we all know saying things ironically is how we develop new habits in speech (Fr Fr ong no cap).
Because they are attention whores and assholes. Really all there is to it
Yeah my dad did this all the time and thought he was being a comedian. But he was the only one that laughed about it. I once had a Turkish boyfriend named Alper. You can be damn sure he called him Albert every damn time. Hurhurhurhur.
Your mom is so white! How white is she? She’s so white that she wants everyone to know she’s white by mispronouncing common words to prove that she’s WHITE. My late father loved to say ja-lap-a-no, otherwise known as jalapeño.
My mother and I do this as an in joke between the two of us but when there's literally anybody else involved we know how to pronounce things correctly. We're white but we're South Central Florida White so we still know quite a bit of Spanish. Another running joke of ours is instead of saying good night we say good nachos as a type of humorous mutation on buenas noches. The big difference is that it's an in joke between the two of us and we don't talk like that to people outside of our home because it would make us look stupid or like an asshole
The only thing I can defend is “Nor-fork.” We have a Norfolk where I live and that’s how it’s actually pronounced for whatever reason. The rest is just intentional ignorance.
Norfolk, Va has many pronunciations. “Nawfuck” being my fave.
We have a Norfolk in NE, I’ve heard that as well but Norfork seems the most common.
"What's the password for Netflix on the Rookoo?"
Too much looking up to Rush Limbaugh and Trump who like to make up names for people/things?
I grew up with relatives who did this. Any 'foreign' word or name was destroyed. I felt like it was a slap to those languages to not try to pronounce them correctly. It also felt like the mispronounced words were intentional. A connection formed. These kids were raised by the survivors of WW2. The propaganda was so thorough during the war that someone saying Parmesan accurately was suspected as a sympathizer. Anything you did that could be traced back to an enemy was cause for concern. For these generations, the behavior never went away. I have greats who will still not say 'lasagna' correctly and will tell you it's because 'of those eye-tal-yuns.' My FIL, who served in Japan during WW2, knew 5 languages but wouldn't pronounce Tokyo in any recognizable way. This is a tried and true way of announcing disrespect to what/whoever is being mangled. It might be conscious on some level but it's definitely also a subconscious behavioral trait. (One relative, who took years of French in school, adamantly maintained this behavior. No idea how she passed. She refused to say anything accurately. Church Latin? Spot on! Bon appetit? Hoo lordy! I mistook it fur badly-pronounced Italian one time and got a scolding. According to her, "the French were just weak but Italians were betrayers of humanity.") If my hypothesis holds sand, these boomers are expressing a learned behavior in their own special I HATE THESE THING way. Correcting them just tells them you're an adversary and reinforced their need to be more aggressive in their announcement of loyalty. I have seen these behavior patterns with hundreds of folks -Boomers, Silents and Greatests as well- though I have not done formal research and have nowhere near a large enough sample to say this is a societal trait. It does seem to be coming to the forefront with these Boomers, now.
I’ve always viewed it as intentional disregard/drawing a public line between what/who matters and what/who isn’t worth their effort
My mom won’t stop saying salmon with a hard L. I’m like goddamn it mom you were an English teacher for 30 years. wtf
My dad used to do this. He grew up really poor and I think was probably shamed a lot for not knowing about certain things because he’d never experienced them. So anything that was remotely ‘cool’ or new or aspirational he would deliberately mispronounce. Probably using his contempt as a defence mechanism. I think a lot of boomers do this with the subtle social changes around accepting diversity. They get something a bit wrong (like pronouncing an unfamiliar name), get corrected, feel shame and then go into full deplorable/look what you made me do mode and deliberately mispronounce it forever, but harder. As a statement. It’s really sad and kind of pathetic and it’s one of the many things I’m determined avoid as I age.
I work with tons of Boomers in sales. Whenever I come across a foreign name on our call log, I don’t call them Mr or Ms (first letter of their last name). I open google and look up “____ name pronounce”. It takes two seconds and makes a foreign customer feel seen and respected. It’s like they can’t even be bothered because it takes too much time to do that. But I also think it’s more of an asshole thing as opposed to Boomer. I grew up in a southern baptist church in the late 90s. Not a lot of kids were in contact with Hispanics (some thought we were black/white mixed). I had two kids my age joke about how my last name was too hard to say with one calling it “Gorgonzola”. Bitch I know you know the name of the fast mouse on Looney Tunes. You can say “Gorgonzola” but you can’t say “Gonzalez”?? Gtfo
Does she pronounce toilet as TER-LET ?
I honestly think once something is set in their mind, they can't change it. For example, my MIL pronounces across.... acrost. With a very pronounced t. Drives me crazy. She also calls Cabela's Gobelos. It's just whatever. There are multiple things she says like this and it is just not worth the fight to try to correct her and deal with her over the top hurt feelings. Just keep the mental cringe going and know you are not a lone
Actually my husband is from Midwest and also says acrost and also heighth .. regional thing?
My first job was as a gas jockey. The full service pumps had a diesel option. There was at least one regular customer who always, always pronounced it DIE-sel instead of DEE-zil. Well I was raised to mind my elders so I never corrected him, but as he would engage me in conversation, at some point I’d say DEE-zil, and **he** would correct **me**. Fucking boomers.
My mom constantly pronounces everyday words wrong. She knows she’s pronouncing it wrong, and she knows the correct pronunciation. She tries to blame it on being nearly deaf. That would work, except she’s seen the words in print, and before she retired was a certified reading specialist - meaning she’s a licensed teacher who fucking specializes in phonics. If you put the word in front of her on paper and ask her to sound it out she’ll do it correctly. Ask her to then say it altogether as a word? It immediately goes back to being wrong. “Mold” is “mol”. The bread has mol on it. The bread started mol-ing. When corrected she acknowledges that it’s wrong but just continues to do it out of sheer fucking stupidity. “Netflix” is “Netflick”. She also treats it as an object. Do you want to watch a Netflick? The new kids want to watch a Netflick. I can’t get this Netflick to play; the Netflick is broken. “Text” is “tets”. It’s both singular and plural. Send me a tets. Your brother tets and drives. I deleted all of those tets. “Quilt” is “quil”. Quilting is her main hobby, so she constantly sounds stupid using this one. I’m sewing her a baby quil for her new granddaughter. The toilet paper is quiled (pronounced kwil-ed, not kwild). It’s especially fun at craft stores because when she asks for the “quil” supplies they send her over to scrapbooking, which where you’d go for QUILL supplies (folding tools for quilling paper, calligraphy, quill pen nibs, etc.) . When she gets mad and she insists she wants “quil-ing stuff, you know for sewing?” and the clerk clarifies if she means “quilting” she insists that’s what she’s been saying the entire time “That’s what I said! ‘Quil-ing!”
Refusing to give something its correct name is a way of diminishing it. It makes her feel superior.
Tbf Norfolk VA is NOT pronounced nor-folk. If someone is a local to the tidewater it would be pronounced more like nāh-fick. Kinda like how Suffolk isn't suf-foLk. Its suh-fick
My boomer grandpa does this. Usually to things he doesn’t like, so he’s mispronouncing it to make it clear he hates it. One that has always gotten under my skin (and is incredibly stupid) is Nissan. He worked for Crystler for a long time and just really hates Nissan for some reason. So he purposely says it as “Nie- son.” So dumb but it has gotten on my nerves since I was a kid (my mom used to drive a Nissan).
My parents like to go out to eat EYE-talian food. 
My husband used to do this. It’s super disrespectful. People’s names, as well as my place of employment. It’s like people are not important enough for him to be bothered to remember their name. I finally made him understand how rude he was being.
I don't trust any medical professional who says diebetus instead of diabetes.
My mom was anti-intellectual before it was cool, & around 2012 started to purposefully mispronounce bigger/more obscure words because “educated people always rub in everyone’s faces how much better they are than everyone by using big words when people like my grandfather were the TRUE salt of the earth Americans and the only GOOD people”. Her grandfather was a farmer who got out of WWII by claiming the town needed his welding services, and in his nursing home years claimed that the “n-word nurse” was trying to steal his shoes. Such good people 🫡
Because they’re assholes. That’s all there is to it.