There’s a new list of the words Canadians needed the most help pronouncing this year… and as somebody who talks for a living, I feel like this is an audit.
The website Unscramblerer analyzed Google searches for pronunciation help, and Porsche came out on top.
Apparently it’s “POR-shuh.”
Good to know. I’ve been pronouncing it “outside my budget.”
Also near the top: gyro, charcuterie and Worcestershire sauce.
Worcestershire sauce is the reason you’ll see a grown adult in a grocery store pointing at a bottle and saying, “That one. Beside the barbecue sauce.”
I can use it in a recipe. I just can’t introduce it to anybody.
And charcuterie? We used to say “meat and cheese.” Everybody understood. Then somebody added a wooden board and suddenly lunch required a French oral exam.
But my favourite finding: Ontario’s most searched pronunciation was Toronto.
We LIVE here and we’re checking.
The more carefully you pronounce every letter in Toronto, the more people suspect you’ve never been there.
Try asking someone downtown for directions to “TOR-ON-TO.”
They’ll hand you a brochure and point toward the CN Tower.
Quebec also made the national list. Somewhere, a geography teacher just quietly put their head down on their desk.
And GIF was up there too. Hard G? Soft G? That argument has been going so long, the little animation’s already played eight hundred times and nobody’s watched it.
Honestly, everybody’s got one word they avoid. You see it coming in a sentence and suddenly decide the story needs a different ending.
