A thing to consider not doing around me

[azurelunatic]

There is a thing that sometimes people do, to be funny or for emphasis or whatever. It is the thing where they substitute the letter L for R in words, such as "VICTOLY" for "VICTORY".

There are many possible places and reasons to have picked up doing this, including the ever-popular "somebody I know was doing it and it seemed like fun".

The roots of this substitution is making fun of people with no distinction between R/L sounds, which is common when people whose first language is Chinese learn to speak English.

Which is why I cringe every time I encounter it, and would prefer that people not do this around me.

Comments

[torrilin]

If I'm doing this kind of thing, it's pronounced WICTORY! Why? My family is a mix of French Canadian, Austrian, and Scandinavian. So the German W sound for V is culturally appropriate for me. Bonus, I'm Catholic and I know Latin. And the primary inflection set I learned is the Germanic one, where W is used for V.

If you type it tho, it's still VICTORY! Because languages are rarely 100% phonetic.

I figure it's fine to make fun of myself and my cultural background, but it's not so cute to make fun of other people.

I didn't know until the last 5 years or so, but the V/W thing could also be seen as making fun of someone with an Indonesian accent. It's very tricky to tell a slight Indonesian accent from a slight German accent, and Indonesian doesn't really use the V sound the way English does.

[azurelunatic]

And it's a lot easier to not stumble into something genuinely hurtful when it's your own culture, you know?