The Duchess of Apostrophe on pronouncing Idumea and Muir

Recent encounters on the internet have prompted me to add a Feature to my Hodgepodge blog, about grammar and pronunciation. Just kind of a running random commentary for the benefit of anyone who happens to have need of it.

For this purpose I have a guest blogger, the Duchess of Apostrophe. Over to you, Duchess.

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Thank you, my dear. I think we will simply plunge right in without ceremony today.

I must apologize for not appearing in full regalia in the accompanying portrait. As has been the case with others of my station in life I've fallen on rather hard times, but I will refrain from burdening you with my problems for now. Clearly, as you can see, teaching children takes a toll on a person.

My teaching selections may seem whimsical and I will not be justifying them to you, but as a Duchess I have certain prerogatives you understand. I am not yet commenting on the egregiously offensive offense against my very title, that of the epidemic misuse of the poor apostrophe, but you can be sure that, God willing, I'm going to have quite a bit to say on it eventually.

But for today I had a couple of mispronunciations on my mind. And they are also words I mispronouce myself it turns out. Hard as it is to believe, duchesses do have a thing or two to learn as well as everybody else, and a GREAT need of learning humility in particular. So I've heard at least.

So we begin with how we are to pronounce:

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IDUMEA

A nice Biblical word. It's that part of the Middle East that was Edom in the Old Testament but got renamed Idumea under the Romans.

Here's the pronunciation entry at Merriam Webster dot com:
Variant(s): or Id·u·maea or Id·u·mea \ˌi-dyu̇-ˈmē-ə\

Go to the site to hear it pronounced. I found out that I pronounce it wrong myself. I say ID-YU-MAY'-UH but they say ID-YU-MEE'-YA. I think my pronounciation is more accurate of course :>) as the word is clearly Latin-based. But I'll do mee-ya from now on. Can't argue with Merriam-Webster.

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MUIR

I also looked up "Muir" as in John Muir ("Scottish-born American naturalist who promoted the creation of national parks and reservations") after whom the famous Muir Woods of California were named.

In this case you get three different pronounciations: Merriam-Webster has MYUR (You'll have to listen at the site, I can't make it look reliably the way it sounds). Free Online Dictionary has MYOOR, which is similar but not exactly identical to the pronunciation at Dictionary.com. As for my own mispronounciation of this word, I'm sorry to say I've ALWAYS said MWEER. Oh dear.

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"Bozrah" is BAWZ-rah. "Hecate" is HEH-ka-tee or HAY-ka-tee. "Tarot" is roughly TEH-roh or TAY-roh. "Irenaeus" is either Ear-ren-AY-us (American) or Eye-ren-EE-us (British)

"Conflageration" doesn't exist, and "perquisite" is NOT "prerequisite." You need to look at the word carefully from left to right and sound it out.