CHAT: F.L.O.E.S.

Yesterday I went out to lunch.

This is not a novel occurrence; I eat lunch out most days.  However, it
is usually fast food from the food court or something quick from the
employee cafeteria.  Yesterday I went to a nice seafood restaurant,
purely due to time constraints: the food court was packed with delegates
from a huge convention across the street, the employee cafeteria was
packed with employees fleeing the food court, and I had only a little
bit of time to eat lunch before a meeting.  So I went to the nice
seafood restaurant in the building.

As I was perusing the menu, a particular dish caught my eye: hake.
Now, I had never eaten hake - had never even heard of it - but it was
evidently some form of whitefish, and the preparation (baked with a
horseradish crust) sounded delicious, so I ordered it.

Or tried to.

What I ordered was ['ha.ke].   Turns out that "hake" is pronounced
[hejk].  The waiter laughingly corrected me (a no-no in waitiquette,
but I appreciated it), and probably will continue to get some mileage
out of my error.

So I have diagnosed myself as suffering from F.L.O.E.S.: Foreign
Language Over-Exposure Syndrome.  I seem to be unable to pronounce novel
English words with any confidence, for fear that they might be
borrowings.  In fact, that is my default assumption; I suppose it's the
peril of a large vocabulary:  "Well, if *I've* never heard the word
before, it *must* be a loan from another language!"  Getting something
so simple wrong is a tad deflating, I must say.

So have any of y'all had a similar experience?  Dish, dish!  (No pun
intended.)

-Mark

P.S. Okay, so maybe the pun was intended.  Just a little.

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