Perhaps Lough Ia is my mishearing, or the storyteller's mispronunciation of Lough Leath, for there are many Lough Leaths.

Many long-standing prepossessions are as hard to be corrected as a long-standing mispronunciation, against which the direct experience of eye and ear is often powerless.

"I apprehend," says Churchill, "it has been from an erroneous notion of proper names being unchangeable, that some, feeling the necessity of obviating this mispronunciation, have put an apostrophe between the o and the s in the plural, in stead of an e; writing Cato's, Nero's; and on a similar principle, Ajax's, Venus's; thus using the possessive case singular for the nominative or objective plural.

I. Mimesis is a ludicrous imitation of some mistake or mispronunciation of a word, in which the error is mimicked by a false spelling, or the taking of one word for another; as, "Maister, says he, have you any wery good weal in you vâllet?"Columbian Orator, p. 292.

As he grew older, of course, all this faded a good deal, but he never quite lost the sense of reality in namesthe significance of a true name, the absurdity of a false one, the cruelty of mispronunciation.

When the Athenian audience hissed a public speaker for a mispronunciation, it did not follow that any one of the malcontents could pronounce as well as the orator.

It rolled off his lips in a torrent, undefiled by a mispronunciation or a foreign idiom.

Molly's account was full of interest, in spite of the grotesque lingo in which it was delivered, and which once or twice nearly sent me into convulsions of laughing, whereupon she apologized with great gravity for her mispronunciation, modestly suggesting that white words were impossible to the organs of speech of black folks.