Doug Ewell wrote:

>My favorite related story: Until I was about 20 I had never actually
>heard the word "albeit," though I had seen it in print many times and
>understood its meaning from context. I thought it was pronounced
>[OlbaIt], as if it were a German word. The first person I heard say the
>word was Howard Cosell, during a Monday Night Football telecast, which
>makes sense the more you think about it.
>
Yeah, me too; for a long time the word in my head was [alIbeit]; no idea
where the extra vowel came from. Similarly, for quite some time I
simultaneously knew the word pronounced [dE'bri], and I also knew a
*different* word in print, "debris," which in my mind was pronounced
['d@...] (again a misreading, transposing the b and r for some reason.
And no, I'm not notably dyslexic; I was an early reader in fact).
Somewhere along the line it clicked together...

~mark