Sound them out, one after the other

[venta]

Yesterday[*] I finished Life After Life. I highly recommend it, though I should declare that I am a massive fan of Kate Atkinson's writing.

Anyway, at one point during the book a character in a garden is surprised. He leaps backwards, and falls over into a cotton-eater.

Wait, back up, he falls back into a what now?

A cotton-easter.

Err, no that's not a thing, either.

At which point something weird happened. I realised that I was looking at a word, and had no idea what it was. Obviously I meet words whose meaning I don't know on a daily basis - technical terms, words in languages I can't read, obscure words that don't crop up much. I read them, and realise I don't know them. I look them up (or not, as appropriate) and move on.

A related problem, of course, now that I work on the fringes of marketingworld, is finding words that I know perfectly well but which are clearly being used to mean something other than what I think they mean. See also: neologisms, ghastly. Though at least it was immediately obvious what was meant by the word "onboarding".

Anyway, the cotton-eater. For the first time in probably thirty years, I found myself having to carefully spell out a word, syllable by syllable. Co-to-ne-as-ter. Aha! A cotoneaster! A word I know perfectly well once it's said, but which - had I ever thought about it - I would have spelled katoniasta.

It's rather nice to know that English can still surprise me.

[*] With rather annoying timing - I still had a lot of journey left when I ran out of book.

Comments

[vicarage.livejournal.com]

Its always been pronounced a cotton-easter in my family. We've had one on top of the wall in the front garden all my life.

[ylla.livejournal.com]

My gramma used to have one outside her front door. But I had read the name somewhere - as cotton-easter - long before I ever knew the name of her plant-with-berries.

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

I used to think it was spelled cottone-asta (cf panettone, pasta). Anything ending in -one being pronounced -ony was normal in our house, given that several family surnames were spelled that way, so this made phonetical sense to me. When I first encountered 'cotoneaster' written down it took me a while, but I figured it out, only to be told by a teacher that it was 'really' cotton-easter. That didn't help...

Tangentially, I have terrible trouble with 'crassula', which I always want to spell and pronounce cressula.

[deborahw37.livejournal.com]

Falling into a cotoneaster would not be comfortable!

[exspelunca.livejournal.com]

That thing with tiny pink flowers the bees loved and red berries the birds snaffled, that grew under and round the dining room window until a couple of years ago when it got an incurable white fungus (but the stump is having another go)..

[dr-bob.livejournal.com]

[*] With rather annoying timing - I still had a lot of journey left when I ran out of book<\i>

Well, the slow train is rather slow... Nice to bump into you yesterday.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Yes, nice to see you too!

[satyrica.livejournal.com]

we read that for our Book Group a few months ago: I really enjoyed the Blitz sections (which was a real surprise as WWII is generally a period that leaves me cold) and would almost have preferred a book that was just that, without all the other gubbins going on

[zotz]

One appeared in my garden. I had to be told what it was. I'd never heard of them.

[venta.livejournal.com]

We had one in the garden when I was little. Apparently. It looked nothing like the picture on Wikipedia. You can't trust plants.