Reminds me of self-taught tech. I’ll often know the name/acronym, but pronounce it differently in my head than the majority of people. Decades ago GUI was “gee you eye” in my head but one day I heard it pronounced “gooey” and I figured it out but had a brief second of “hwat?” (I could also see “guy” or “gwee”.) It’s, of course, more embarrassing when I say it out loud first...

First time I went to a Python conference in SV, more than a decade ago, I kept hearing "Pie-thon" everywhere, and had no idea what the hell people were talking about.

I took me a solid half hour to at last understand this pie-thingy was Python... in my head I had always pronounced it the French way. Somewhat like "pee-ton", I don't know how to transcribe that "on" nasal sound... (googling "python prononciation en francais" should yield a soundtrack for the curious non-French speakers).

I thought numpy was pronounced like it rhymes with bumpy for a year or so.

Picture 18 year old me in 1995, I got a 486SX laptop as a graduation present out of the blue from my estranged father. I wanted to add an external CD-ROM to it so I could play games and load software for college, and it had a SCSI port. I went to the local computer store and asked the guy for a "ess see ess eye" CD-ROM drive, he busted out laughing and said "oh you mean a scuzzy drive?" Very embarrassing for me at the time but that's when I learned that computer acronyms have a preferred pronunciation so I should try to learn them myself to avoid future confusion.

> Very embarrassing for me at the time

it shouldn't be, it should be a badge of honor of some sorts - it points to somebody reading to expand their knowledge that is not available in oral form around them, so kudos to them !

It's even more visible in non-English speaking countries. In Poland: first everyone says Java as Yava and after a while they start to switch to a proper English pronunciation. Many times it divides amateurs from professionals, but I wouldn't really know, because I don't work with Java.

Great story :) https://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education

Not the one I was thinking of but same point :) https://fs.blog/2015/01/richard-feynman-knowing-something/

Great story, yes. But there's no such thing as a "halzenfugel" in German as far as I can tell as a native speaker. Even www.duden.de, the official German dictionary, doesn't know that word ;-0

That's OK, AFAICT there's no bird called the "brown throated thrush" either.

As a native English speaker and middling foreign-language speaker of German, "halzenfugel" sounds to me like a mock-German word that an English speaker would make up.