Which is correct - parents association, parent's association or parents' association?

New names - I have fun with new enquiries too. I find part of the trick is getting away from 'English' concepts of vowels and dipthongs, and will give it my best shot, although at the end of the day it's often guesswork.

Fettling is modern teenage slang for being sick... (sorry to lower the tone! I don't use the word myself)

Seeing we're in the pedants' thread......but I'm sure it was just an oversight (or a dyslexic finger).

I collected my violin from the luthier today, and he startled me by saying that he had "fettled" a violin. I have never heard the word used as a verb before, and started wondering if it was Scottish dialect, or (more likely) plain ignorance on my part. Is is a valid usage of the word?

Edit: The Oxford Shorter English Dictionary is happy with it, so I guess that's a "yes".

Clearly you don't know many cyclists - they are always fettling

Fettling is modern teenage slang for being sick... (sorry to lower the tone! I don't use the word myself)

Headline on MSN...

'Pivitol game on road to Champions' League'...

Pivitol. Hmm. I'm sure my doctor put me on that once

I read a mark sheet yesterday which described the candidate's singing of a folk song as having 'good annunciation'...

Last week one of our local Grammer schools had an open night.

yup. Mist is dung.
I can't say "brawn" for Braun - it just feels wrong to do so.

Menzies/Mingies - actually there are some families who do pronounce it Men-zees - in the neck of the woods in which I work, I have to ask which pronunciation people want. There is also the name Lamont, which people persistently pronounced La-mont, where locally it'd be pronounced Lamment, with the stress on the first syllable.
More Scottish ones - Cockburn....co-burn, and Milngavie.... moo-guy. On the other hand, Scots also pronounce "wh" with a blowing noise, so that where and wear sound different from each other.

At the moment I have fun and games with our many immigrant patients' names - I found a website which will generate for me a pronunciation for anything Polish I care to throw at it, but we also have many Africans: sometimes I find myself rehearsing a name three or four times before attempting to produce it in the waiting room: one time I got the very surprised reply, "hey, that was rather good, do it again".....but couldn't .

About pronunciations ........ We once heard Dolgellau pronounced on the radio precisely as written, rather than how it's pronounced by the welsh, and my grandma was very confused when she was asked once by a frenchman about a place called "soo-tum-tun". Turns out he was asking about Southampton........

There have been Americans heard looking for Loogabarooga, which although it sounds like somewhere in Australia, is actually Loughborough

There are lots of those! National BBC stations always have difficulties with local pronunciations. Liverpool has two - Childwall and Aigburth - which are pronounced Chilled-wall and Egg-berth.

Although I don't speak Welsh, I do try to pronounce place names with Welsh pronunciation as best as a non-speaker can - the basic rules aren't that hard (the principle ones being to handle "ll" "d" "dd" "f" and "ff").

When I was on the train to Oxford last weekend, I was sat next to some Americans who were getting ready to change trains at Slow (Slough)

But it's no surprise when you look at the different ways of pronouncing "ough"
thorough
through
though
thought
tough
bough
...

O have a daughter living in Aigburth. It's an awful name. Described by Ma Boswell in Bread as being a place so posh that they use knives and forks to pick their noses.

Please don't look up the definition of Aigburth in The Meaning of Liff http://folk.uio.no/alied/TMoL.html

I mean, please don't

Madejski. Madejski. Madejski. A surname, and the name of a stadium.

Yet again this morning I heard a sports presenter talk about Mr "Ma-jess-key". I suppose with Reading gonig back up to the Premier League I should get used to hearing it.

But it is ma-day-ski (as near as I can manage). Or just go for it completely phonetically and say mad-edge-ski if you must. But ma-jess-ski is definitely wrong - you haven't even bothered to read the letters in the correct order, if you're putting the E after the J!

(I say this with the authority of someone whose husband has worked regularly at the Madejski Stadium [and I think at least once met the man himself - though I'm pretty sure they didn't have a "how do you pronounce your surname?" conversation )

Madejski. Madejski. Madejski. A surname, and the name of a stadium.

Yet again this morning I heard a sports presenter talk about Mr "Ma-jess-key". I suppose with Reading gonig back up to the Premier League I should get used to hearing it.

My friend a fews ago pronounced "picturesque" as "picture-skew" in his german class.

I can't ever spell original correctly without looking it up.

There are lots of those! National BBC stations always have difficulties with local pronunciations. Liverpool has two - Childwall and Aigburth - which are pronounced Chilled-wall and Egg-berth.

However, I was told a wonderful story by the Sub Postmaster at our local Post Office, concerning a rather well-to-do lady who runs a small mail order business. Apparently she had sent a parcel to an address near to Croydon in Surrey, and had written the address down exactly as it had been pronounced by the caller. She was quite put out when the parcel was retuned undelivered, with a note saying that there was no such address as Fort Neath in the Croydon postal district.

SB

(For those who don't know, Thornton Heath is a less-than-salubrious district of Croydon...try saying it in your best Sarf Lundn accent and you'll get the joke above...)

I looked at a map and worked it out eventually

EDIT: anyone else having problems posting? Took three attempts to load this up and it mis-formatted it - I've had to delete all of the muliplely repeated quotes

no such address as Fort Neath in the Croydon postal district.

My son was born in Mayday Hospital, almost at Fort Neath north of Croydon.

There is an old story of a fellow asking for a ticket for Holborn and ended up in Oban, but seems rather implausible !

Great story, SB! Reminds me of a dear (and rather well-spoken) friend of mine who went by bus to visit a colleague in the aforementioned hospital. Asking the driver about the fare, the reply was ' Furpay'.

Total mystery to my friend, who after three highly embarrassed attempts to clarify, realised that he was asking her for 30p.

One of my friends worked for Royal Mail for a while, and the one that had him most foxed was a town Arajarba. Eventually the penny dropped: Harwich Harbour.

Akcherly, we tend to say 'Fort Neaf' rather than the posh people who say, 'Fort Neath'...

It is amazing how quickly accents can change (Bill Bryson wrote about this - he said that in the UK there can be bigger shifts of accent in 10 miles than in 1,000 miles in the USA).

Where I grew up, we were about 5 miles from Liverpool city centre, so local accent was "generic" Liverpudlian (i.e. not the really heavy one). Just another 5 miles and you hit St. Helens which has an accent all of its own. Another mile or two and it morphs into pure Lancashire. I know that when my dad worked in St. Helens it took him several months to adjust to the local accent..

I sometimes wonder what foreign visitors make of it all!

SB: it reminds me of the large debate of pronouncing anything with an A in it:
Newca?stle vs Newcastle
Fa?st vs Fast
A?men vs A-men
...

Yes; but it goes much further than that. As an example, many Geordies I know have difficulty pronouncing 'E's and 'A's differently, as both sound like 'ear'. If you ask them which letter it was they will say 'ear'.

SB

They can't pronounce the name "Ian" as most of us would either - it sounds like Een. And "film" has an extra syllable - "fillum". I love the Geordie accent!

It can be, as in "to loose an arrow" but most people who use "loose" as a verb are not using it in that context, and unless I'm wrong, that is your gripe!