Misled

My father was an assignment foreman in the telephone company. It was an open office, and pretty informal. One day, one of the women who worked for him came to complain that someone else had misled her about some aspect of a job she was working on. She pronounced the word my’zld. Once the issue itself was dealt with, Dad said to her quietly, “Mary, it’s pronounced miss-led’.”

“No it’s not.”

“It is, Mary.”

She turned and called across the room. “Freddy, how do you pronounce
“m-i-s-l-e-d?”

Freddy wrote it down on a piece of scrap paper, looked at it, and called back, “My’zld. Why?”

So guess how we pronounce it in the big linguistic in-joke that is our family.



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