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Well, I think "creme" might be a legislated thing, because "cream" is an actual dairy product, and God only knows what goes in a "creme".

Macaron and macaroons are totally different things at this point. But I never know how to pronounce it. Do I do a full-on, French-style silent "n", or do I pronounce it "macaroon", or what?

one thing that i think is weird is that there seems to be no constant for what you should pronounce accurately and what you should anglicize.

for example -- you would never say HORS DUH URVES, you'd say the accepted french(ish) correct pronunciation. same with escargot -- people don't pronounce the T, knowing the french pronunciation.

but you would never then say "oh i'm going on vacation to PA-REE" or people would think you're ridiculous -- you are expected to use the anglicized version, pronouncing the S in paris.

i don't know -- it's weird!

If you want to have some fun with people and pronunciations of foreign words you've gotta read and listen to David Sedaris. I recently saw him at a reading, and one of his funniest essays, which he correctly identified as not being as funny read, than as to listened to, involved actually paying attention in a college class just to hear the professor throw in foreign words with their correct pronunciation in that language, although otherwise the professor seemed to have a rather flat, ordinary American English delivery throughout the lecture.
"Me Talk Pretty One Day" is priceless. And his essay about the "Chef" with the rubber hand is just so absurd and yet so funny. Don't even get me going about his sister's bird who imitates kitchen appliances.
As far as blue vs. bleu~before I hit 7th grade, cable television was not available in our area and three out of the four channels were Canadian and it was Kraft Bleu Cheese dressing. I'll take the cheese, blue or bleu as long as it's good.

Birds are funny that way. My parakeet was set off by a particularly creaky kitchen drawer he liked to talk back to! Maybe he thought I was hiding his girlfriend in there?

He could mimic lots of other things, and listen to & obey voice commands.
He was a sky blue cinnamon wing, fond of greens, but not cheese.

@meg3j: Besançon? Really? A couple of my good friends did a year there during college for study abroad. How fun.

@megannesta: Good point. My friends and I used to try to pronounce "gyro" in whatever we thought the Greek way would be -- "yheero" or some such. But after I moved to NYC and heard people call them jye-rows I just gave up and gave in. This also applied to Turin/Torino during the Olympics, with NBC doing the Italian spelling/pronunciation for the duration of the games. Also, people seem to do Sevilla instead of Seville, which is a reverse from the Pair-iss/Paree thing.

Sous Vide gripes me...it's Boil in Bag....(well, simmer in bag)

Vichyssoise pronounced vee-shee-SWAH.
Brunoise pronounced brun-WAH.

Go to Sbux, order a cappuccino by pronouncing it correctly - kah-pu-CHEE-no - and listen to the staff call it a KAPPA-cheeno.

Perhaps a little removed from the above mispronunciations - how about downright misuse of culinary terms? "Meaty Marinara" is an oxymoron - it cannot be done. It's ragu (or some other tomato sauce with animal protein) or marinara (tomato sauce WITHOUT animal protein).

@therealchiffonade- Yeah, those mispronunciations kill me. I remember when I was learning how the use the IPA, and my phonetics teacher going on and on about how people never said Vichyssoise correctly. I'm pretty sure she didn't know what a brunoise is, but she would have gotten on anyone's case in my class had they dropped the "z" sound from the end of it.

Whatever.

I find it funny when someone throws a hissy tantrum about how to properly pronounce something, only to run into someone who speaks the native language, and then they find out they've been wrong all along.

Me, I don't care so much. If someone speaks the original language and they want to use the native pronunciation, that's fine. But sometimes, if you don't speak the lanuguage, you look like a pretentious twit if you try to mimic a language and do it poorly.

On the other hand, saying a common thing wrong can make you sound like an illiterate dope.

But there are so many dialects and regional accents that it's a little difficult to insist that a specific pronunciation is absolutely the correct one. Case in point, my parents grew up in different areas of the country. They chose my name, but each one pronounced it differently. Was one of them wrong?

@heart, probably the funniest was the arguement in a Mexican restaurant where a fellow diner asked if the place had sway-zayz.

The waiter was baffled. Never heard of it. She got a little upset because in HER neighborhood, they had sway-zayz, and they had a mild sauce...

She kept repeating sway-zayz in a more and more exaggerated manner, thinking that maybe then he'd understand her proper Spanish pronunciation. He kept offering options she might like, she just kept getting louder and more annoyed.

Eventually, she settled on something else.

Later, we figured out she wanted enchiladas suizas (and fer cripes sakes, she never said they were enchiladas). I'm not anything close to a native speaker, but I've been able order that same dish in restaurants passably well (and they did have enchiladas suizas at the place.) but the sauce probably wouldn't have been what she was looking for. I tried to gently explain that suizas referred to Swiss-style, so her insistance about the sauce probably threw the waiter off track, but she kept insisting that suizas meant it had a particular sauce. And she kept going on about how stupid this waiter was to not understand a simple thing like that. I guess in the end she didn't actually get corrected, because no matter who was explaining it to her, she wasn't willing to accept that she was wrong.

someone needs to build a bridge and get over it.... Blue not bleau?! WTF?! seriously... be angry at HFCS (high fructose corn syrup) being in your dressing, not the way the cheese is spelled!