ENGLISH MISPRONUNCIATIONS BY A COLONIAL AT CCNY

While most people understand my English pronunciation, some seem to have a problem with it, and whenever I say certain words, they have the need to say a similar word, and then ask if that is what I meant. It can be they do not understand, or, perhaps, it is that they are so uptight, rigid, they cannot hear what they consider is a mistake, and, therefore, try to force the speaker to sound like what they consider is the “correct” pronunciation.  A dean and a professor of constructivism at CCNY’s School of Education used to that all the time, until I decided I would not speak with them anymore. And this was at a College where a large segment of the student population spoke English as a second language. Luckily, I was not as angry as a man from Quebec visiting Dublin was, when a Parisian doctor in a bar made fun of his accent, and he beat the shit out of the physician. My colleagues did not laugh and thought my accent was a joke, as some people tend to do when they hear a foreign accent; in my case, a colonial one.