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eXspresso and maRscapone never fail to make my blood boil. Oh, and when people say vee-nee-ga-rette meaning vinaigrette (if they speak of a man actually named Vinnie Garette, I'm all right with that). I can probably think of more, but these are the most annoying.

hal-a-penyo

i dont know how to use the n with squiggly sign above it so ny is as close as i can type

how do you say pasties? and vee-nee-gret is correct.... i dont understand the gar-ette ending, though.

as for annoying me, i tend to think mispronunciations are funny, like or-a gan-o in the simpsons. or nu-cu-lar from the president.

@bliz - pas-tē is how you pronounce "pasty".

As for vinaigrette, I do not have a problem with the "vee-nee-" part of it (although it should be a short "i", as in vi-ni-ˈgret), it's the "A" that boggles my mind. I think that people who pronounce it vee-nee-ga-ret actually say vinegar-rette and I'm quite certain they can't spell vinaigrette right, either.

mispronunciaton of chipotle gets my goat every time...

It's chi-pote-lay for god's sake, how hard is that?

You mean you don't pronounce it Gia-la-peeno.

Seriously, the first time I went to Puerto Rico I was very surprised that they pronounce pollo with a "g", pogio.

I had a business partner (in a catering business) who insisted on pronouncing it "em-pen-nya-duh," rather than "empenahda." Drove me insane.

ha-la-PEEN-yo.

I will add that I say ha-ba-NYER-o because this is the way I was taught to say it. When someone says ha-bah-NAIR-o, it drives me crazy.

(I tend to roll my R's whenever I'm discussing a culture where this is done.)

Sandra Lee made "empanyadas" recently. I wanted to slap her.

It especially bugs me that Bobby Flay can't pronounce "chipotle." He also says "marscapone." I think he does both of those things on purpose.

I get really irritated when people at Starbucks say "expresso." They really should know better.

Hallah-pen-yo, habanyero, pah-eh-yah (slurring or light on the "y" for paella) here.

My coworker isn't joking when she says jah-LOP-eh-noz and kwessa-dillaz.

An aquaintance of mine once said she wanted some "tortillya" chips. Tor-til-ya. Seriously? I can maybe understand not knowing the double-L pronunciation, but I've spent years wondering why she thought that simply adding the "ya" sound to the Ls was correct!

My hubby delights in mispronouncing words just to get my goat. Ja-LOP-eno is one of his favorites. As is my biggest pet peeve:

Pee-CAN. As in, CAN you say anything worse to tick me off? The nut's name is pronounced "pe-CAHN." Short e in the first syllable, please! It's almost "puh-CAHN" but not quite. And the second syllable is like James Caan. Please. Pretty please!

Pee-CAN drives me absolutely insane. I cringe every time I hear it. It's not a place to go number 1 if you don't have access to a bathroom!

I've been known to pronounce things wrong, simply because I've only seen the words in print and never heard them pronounced. Once I know the right way, I make the effort. Quinoa is one example. I'd seen recipes, I'd seen the product, but it was a while before I heard it pronounced. Luckily, I wasn't running around talking about the product.

I do cut people a lot of slack on this, particularly if it's a non-English word that has been adopted into English. After a while, the "authentic" pronunciation disappears, and the regional English morphs it. I mean, do we all say "spaghetti" the way Giada does? Hers is probably correct for the dialect of Italian she grew up with, but it's not how any average American says it.

And honestly, some people don't "hear" their own accents or realize they're saying things "wrong." My MIL thought her accent had faded until she heard herself on tape. She was truly surprised that she had such a noticable accent. Let's not get into the time she was talking about "before people had thumbs," and I almost went mad trying to figure out what the heck she was trying to say.

And some people can't get their mouths around certain sounds or certain words. I babble every time I order a chili relleno. I know how I should say it, but I always get stuck. But ya know, if I say it wrong, the waiter will still know what I want, and we won't have to spend five minutes with me trying to untie my tongue.

As far as habaneros go, this one's interesting because there's no tilde above the n, so it's a plain n instead of the "ny" sound. But people who've heard enough Spanish words tend to make all the n's sound like the n-with-a-tilde. When I heard Rick Bayless say "ab-an-air-o" I knew I was saying it wrong. And the "h" is mostly silent. I might or might not be saying it correctly on any given day, depending on how much I'm thinking about it.

If someone is a professional, I expect that they'll be a little more likely to pronounce things correctly, but in a country like America, where there are so many dialects, I think you'll find that not everyone says things the same way. Some friends who lived in New Orleans for a while were ribbing be about how I pronounced some words. As far as they were concerned, I was wrong because I wasn't saying them the way someone in New Orleans would say them. But I grew up in Chicago, and this was the way people in Chicago would have said them. If I went with the NO version in Chicago, I would have been asked why I was trying to mimic someone's accent.

@RegrettableFoodie-
I ALWAYS wish I could slap Sandra Lee!!!

My mother says salsa like " sow sa". Absolutely drives me nuts! My entire fambly.. oops! that's family, says sherbert, not sherbet. Then they are ballsy enough to laugh at me for pronouncing it correctly. They even say " no, no, listen to me, this is how you say it.. say sher then bert.. got it?". My friend's hubby went to Taco Bell and ordered, I'm not kidding, "some of them thar cheeken fa Ji tees". She wanted to crawl under the table. Wonder why?

Dulce de leche is not pronounced dole-chay day lay-chay, it's
dool-seh deh leh-cheh.
Rachael drives me batty every time she says it!

@alosha, the thumbs episode was a hoot. The conversation came to a screeching halt with me saying, "Are you saying THUMBS?" "Yes, thumbs." "When did people not have thumbs?" I was expecting some weird version of evolution. "Before they invented them." "Huh? Don't they just sort of grow on your hands naturally?"

At this point, she has no idea what I'm talking about, and I'm convinced she's joined some thumbless cult.

It turns out she was saying "Tums."

@soozm32 the new Girl Scout Cookie this year is the Dulce de Leche. I logged a lot of training hours this fall teaching girls (and parents) how to pronounce it. I still heard a lot of cringe-worthy pronunciations.

You say Toe-MAY-Toe ... I say Toe-MAH-Toe ... Or is it the other way around.

dbcurrie ... Thanks for bringing me back down to earth.

@blizcheetah~don't you mean wista.

@lamora: I know what you mean. My street is call Gloucester.

I say "Wuhs-ter" and "pee-can" or "peakin", even though I know that the latter is wrong. I think I'll be more conscious of "pecan" now.

How about "car-ml" (where there's no "e" pronounced) instead of caramel, phonetically?

I used to work with an AHEM woman who would say over and over...FO CA SHE YA...drove me nuts...Fo CAH cha...geesh...Focaccia

Confession. I didn't know the proper pronunciation for gyro. I learned it here. I've never ordered or eaten one, but still....... As one who lives near a Nuclear Power Plant and was married to an engineer who worked there, and sold homes in it's shadow - I heard that mispronunciation a million times. While we're at it, I was a Realtor. Two syllables, exactly as it's spelled. Even some Realtors say real-a-tor or real-it-ore or real-ad-er. It's real'-tor.