True, though I don’t hold with the theory that reading automatically makes you smarter — Dan Brown exists.
this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2025
783 points (98.9% liked)
TenForward: Where Every Vulcan Knows Your Name
6200 readers
1716 users here now
/c/TenForward: Your home-away-from-home for all things Star Trek!
Re-route power to the shields, emit a tachyon pulse through the deflector, and post all the nonsense you want. Within reason of course.
~ 1. No bigotry. This is a Star Trek community. Remember that diversity and coexistence are Star Trek values. Any post/comments that are racist, anti-LGBT, or generally "othering" of a group will result in removal/ban.
~ 2. Keep it civil. Disagreements will happen both on lore and preferences. That's okay! Just don't let it make you forget that the person you are talking to is also a person.
~ 3. Use spoiler tags.
Use spoiler tags in comments, and NSFW checkbox for posts.
This applies to any episodes that have dropped within 3 months prior of your posting. After that it's free game.
~ 4. Keep it Trek related. This one is kind of a gimme but keep as on topic as possible.
~ 5. Keep posts to a limit. We all love Star Trek stuff but 3-4 posts in an hour is plenty enough.
~ 6. Try to not repost. Mistakes happen, we get it! But try to not repost anything from within the past 1-2 months.
~ 7. No General AI Art. Posts of simple AI art do not 'inspire jamaharon'
~ 8. No Political Upheaval. Political commentary is allowed, but please keep discussions civil. Read here for our community's expectations.
Fun will now commence.
Sister Communities:
Want your community to be added to the sidebar? Just ask one of our mods!
Creator Resources:
Looking for a Star Trek screencap? (TrekCore)
Looking for the right Star Trek typeface/font for your meme? (Thank you @kellyaster for putting this together!)
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
To some degree you're right, reading doesn't make you intelligent in and of itself, but I do think constantly reading like that does make you to some degree smarter. Like even if you're reading slop, you're probably smarter than if you had been reading nothing.
It has also been proven that reading makes you more empathetic, because you are actively putting yourself in the character's headspace.
I don't think that it's been proven that reading makes you more empathetic, I think that there has been a correlation established between those who exhibit empathy and enjoying fiction (or at least narratives where you adopt another perspective).
I think it would be almost impossible to prove that reading improves empathy, but I wouldn't be surprised if the part of your brain responsible for empathy gets a workout when reading fiction.
Um, not always.
(Points toward Trump trying to say anonymous.)
Acetaminophen was hilarious
Chimera, Chitin, and even Drow are a few that I got wrong because I read them in a book first.
Drow will always be pronounced drow to me, never draouuu or whatever it is. Im ok with the proper chimera, but also yea i was wrong for awhile. And it was today that I learned i have been mispronouncing chitin for over a decade in my head.
The funniest for me will always be Hermione. (Obligitory never spend money on potter stuff, fuck that terf asshole). But it was in one of the later books, when we meet Hagrids brother, that I realized I was saying it wrong. Harids giant brother prounced it the way I had been reading it in my head for years. I thought she was Herm o nin e, her my o knee
It stats with ch, I learnt ch words in school. I was very good at them. It is not my fault if someone else can't manage it, that is how you say it!
Churchill, Church, Chernobyl.
Beware Greeks bearing syllables.
how are you supposed to pronounce drow and chitin?
Drow = dr ow. Chitin = Kai tin.
Chitin can be somewhat dialect dependent kinda like solder, sometimes it's pronounced correctly as soder sometimes they are wrong and pronounce it solder.
Drizzt Do'Urden!
Is it Drizt* or Drist*? It confuses me to this day.
Chitin
You don't talk about insects in middle school?
I read the word long before I heard it in school. I said it kind of like it is spelled "Chit" - "In".
I've always had a bad opinion of people who try to chide little kids who use words like runned instead of ran. I'd always argued the kid successfully extrapolated past tense words end with a hard d sound and haven't gotten to deeper English classes to learn the special scenarios for words like run or drink.
You are correct; the "correct" way to correct speech issues like this is to repeat their story back to them using the correct wording.
For my 4yo, currently he is saying hims rather than his. Rather than saying in a corrective way "his, is how you say that, not hims"; you repeat the story, "oh, that is his tractor!".
load more comments
(1 replies)
Lost a spelling bee in 5th grade to abhor
I put an e on the end. The word took out the whole class, except the Korean kid. He was my best friend and wicked smart.
Won a spelling bee in 5th grade with the word camouflage.
No one got the u in the middle. The word took out the whole class, except me. I had been playing Metal Gear Solid 3 a lot and had few friends.
This reads like I'm meming on you but true story
My left eye twitches when niche rhymes with itch.
Why would you pronounce it "eesh"?
Because of the French.
every language pronunciation problem is because of the french
English is nothing if not a bastard child of way too many different languages and has inherited and then changed their pronunciation rules. English pronunciation will never make sense.
English is the C++ of spoken languages.
I often start talking about a book I'm reading only to realise I have zero idea how to pronouce the names of half of the characters.
My sister recently blew my mind when she straight up pronounced "the Teixcalaanli Empire", presumably correctly and without any hesitation. I haven't heard it out loud before then. Hell, I didn't even know it was possible to pronounce it in the first place.
I just call it the Tex Mex empire
None of the Dune audio works can agree on how "Tleilaxu" is pronounced. I've heard everything from "telly-axe-uh" to "t'lay-lax-you"
load more comments
(8 replies)
load more comments
(7 replies)
Mine was queue. I assumed it was pronounced like kway. I thought queue as in a line, was cue, like the stick.
load more comments
(3 replies)
I first saw "epoch" in Chrono Trigger and I thought it was pronounced like "E-Pock." Years later, I found out it's the same as "epic." So I had probably actually heard it spoken before ever reading it, but thought they were saying "epic" and not "epoch" because, in the context, both words would absolutely work.
That's definitely an American bastardisation. It's a common word in all European languages with origins from Greek.
To make things more confusing, all these other languages also have the syllables mixed up, but at least consistently so.
Epoch is is from Greek Epi meaning a period of time. It's pronounced with O and rhymes with fuck.
Epic is from Greek Epos meaning story or song. It's pronounced with I and rhymes with dick.
...
goddamnit
TIL
Nah, this is wrong. In british english, it's pronounced EE-pock. American it's generally pronounced eh-pock. In no way is it ever pronounced 'epic'.
Whohhh was gonna say top level comment’s wrong but…
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/epoch
First pronunciation’s super “epic”, second’s what we know
…hmmm OK, this is indeed a little more epic:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/epic
But come on! Listen back to back! I’m not linguisticy enough to know exactly but that ə is certainly not an i… just wouldn’t recognize the difference in many contexts I’m thinking
That website's pronunciation of ə is super weird. It should be more of an 'uh' sound.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid_central_vowel
Anyway, the pronunciation using ə isn't common even in the US, not sure what merriem webster is smoking, here's cambridge: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/pronunciation/english/epoch
whew thank fuck, I didn't catch the dropdown for american vs British when searched it
English is just mispronounced French
Interesting history provided by Rob Words - https://youtu.be/TUL29y0vJ8Q
Poppycock. It's mispronounced German and Latin and Greek and French and... well... English, all with a delightful seasoning of mispronounced Dutch and Spanish.
load more comments
(1 replies)
"The History of English Podcast" is really fun and gets into the weeds of why English is such a mess.
Not be be confused with "The History of England Podcast", which is also really good.
load more comments
(2 replies)
view more: next ›