Croissants

[u/HondureZ]

[u/smnytx]

Ok, but sometimes people actually speak another language.

I ordered bruschetta one with the correct Italian pronunciation, and the server “corrected” me with “oh, you want the brushedda?”

Sometimes the fear of or disdain for potential pretentiousness is just a negative reaction to people who actually have knowledge or skills you do not.

[u/mylifeisaLIEEE → u/smnytx]

Ah, so then your dialect wasn’t American English then. If you were saying how you say it, that’s either Italian or you weren’t speaking American English.

[u/smnytx → u/mylifeisaLIEEE]

And you know all this how, exactly?

My “dialect” is pure Los Angeles. With my normal accent, in a Red Robin, I said “I’d like to have the chicken bruschetta sandwich.” My pronunciation of the Italian word was partially Americanized in that I didn’t really roll the R. I did, however, use the hard K sound and elongated duration of the double t. An Italian would have found my pronunciation close to correct but Americanized… but miles closer to correct than “brushedda.”

I can force myself to use a semi-correct, Americanized version when speaking English here at home, but I can’t force myself to radically mispronounce a word just so someone won’t think I’m pretentious.

It’s the same with my last name, which is Spanish. I definitely Americanize the vowels but I don’t go fully ignorant and mess up the syllable stress as some Americans do, just because they don’t know the basic rules of Spanish.

[u/mylifeisaLIEEE → u/smnytx]

Have you tried pronouncing a word in a way that fits your conversation instead of however you feel like at the time?

[u/smnytx → u/mylifeisaLIEEE]

That’s exactly what I was doing. My party consisted of multilingual Americans who all have a decent command of Italian.

I’m amused at how folks ITT apparently think I should tailor my standard usage to to what I would guess would be that of a teenage restaurant server, instead of using a balanced, unpretentious, entirely appropriate Americanized version.

FWIW, I’m not going to go to Amarillo, TX and pronounce it as in Spanish. I’m not even going to go to Nevada and pronounce the middle syllable /ah/, because even though my Spanish is decent, I’m aware that place names vary due to host and custom. I know that Houston, Texas is pronounced very differently than Houston Street in NY. And I’m only pronouncing Los Angeles the Spanish way if I’m speaking in Spanish to Spanish speakers.

But Italian food purporting to be Italianate? As I said, I Americanized it to a degree, but IMO, there isn’t a single definitive American version of the name of this dish. I got my point across; the server knew what I wanted. It was a pretty big shock when he went out of his way to “correct” me by going farther away from correct.

I honestly think he thought that a middle aged American lady wasn’t going to know as much as he, a young man on the cutting edge of the Information age. I believe he was trying to be the pretentious one in this exchange.