Ask Your Relator About the Nucular Foilage, Ekcetera

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Did the headline of this article look strange?

It should have. Four words were misspelled:

 relator (realtor)

 nucular (nuclear)

 foilage (foliage)

 ekcetera (et cetera)

Even many people who spell these words correctly when they write, mispronounce them badly when they speak.

At some cost to their credibility.

To many people in your listening audience, you will sound flat-out dumb if you pronounce these common words the way they were spelled in the headline (my respectful apologies here to President Bush 43, who has always and forever scrambled the syllables of the word "nuclear" when he
pronounced it).

Here's how these words should be pronounced:

Realtor: ree-uhl-tor, not ree-lah-tor

Nuclear: new-klee-ur, not new-cue-lar

Foliage: fol-lee-age, not foil-age

Etcetera: just the way it looks. Not ekk-cetera. There is no "k" in there anywhere.

Everything else in your speech can be great, but if you slip into mispronunciations of common words, especially these common words, your audience will take you less seriously--and that's the last thing any speaker wants.

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