“Embarrassed”...every time that I pronounced that word someone laughed because of my wrong accent, with the stress of the word put in the wrong position.
But the best from Matteo's English dictionary still had to come... “appositly!”. This word (appositly) doesn't exist, however the meaning would be “on purpose” and I said that for 6 months and Ben never corrected me!
Reading this, you can easily think that Ben doesn't listen to me at all (even if sometimes it might be good not to listen to me and my complex reasonings); anyway I think there were too many mistakes in my speech, so it wouldn't have changed much correcting one more or one less!
Many times I made up my own word just guessing... trying to adapt the Italian root of the words with an English suffix (which is something that a crazy guy with a degree in Italian Linguistic as me would do!)
But where did it come the word “Appositly”? Here the explanation:
- all the words ending with -MENTE usually end with -LY in English
- apposita-mente = apposit-ly... (dropping the “a” because it's a vowel)
When did I discovered about this terrible mistake?
One day I was in Ben's car with Monique (Ben's colleague from work) during a lunch-break in South Melbourne. When I said a sentence using “appositly”, Monique turned the head asking “what??” and I repeated “yes, appositlyyy!”
She said: “but it's not a word”.
I said: “Bennn, what?! You never told me it was wrong!!”
He answered: “ohhh, you know, you say so many words!”
He was right ...appositly!
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