Earlywood: Things That Get Mispronounced in Woodworking

Publisher’s note: Welcome to Earlywood, a free weekly excerpt from one of the thousands of pieces I’ve written since 1996. Sometimes, it’s from a magazine article. Or a book. Or (in this case) a blog post published in 2013. Each entry has been updated or annotated with some modern context or point of view. Enjoy!

A “Robo” bench I built with the help of “Lee-Nelson” planes.

When you learn woodworking through reading – books, magazines and websites – you often have no idea how certain words are pronounced. And so when you finally encounter fellow woodworkers in the flesh and have a conversation, there can be a language barrier.

Here are some of the common mispronounced words I have encountered at woodworking shows and classes.

1. Roubo pronounced as “Robo,” as in “Robocop.” It makes me chuckle every time because I think of what a boring movie “Robobench” would be. (Oh crap, check out this entry I wrote about pronunciations. Maybe I have been saying it wrong all along.) You’ll also hear “Rubio” bench these days, thanks to the rise of this new wax finish.

2. Veritas as “Vur-IT-ass.” To say it right, just remember the accent is on the first syllable and you will get it righter.

3. Lie-Nielsen as “Li-Nelson” with a long “I”. Very common. It’s correctly-er pronounced “Lee-Nealson,” and it would be funny/not funny if a competing planemaker named his company that.

4. Sapele. Heck, I don’t know how to pronounce this one. It’s probably not “SAP-a-lee.”

5. “Rebate,” the English spelling of the American word “rabbet.” Early English books say you should pronounce this word like “rabbit” not “rebate.” Yup.

6. Holtzapffel. It’s not an easy one to say. Say “holtz,” then “apple.” That’s close enough.

7. “Crochet.” It does not have the word “crotch” in it. Just say it like the word for a knitting needle. Yup, the word means “hook” in French.

8. Roorkhee pronounced as “rookery.” Think of it instead as rhyming with “dorky.”

9. “Jameel Abraham” of Benchcrafted. There is no end to the wacky ways people say his name. While I was with him in Georgia many years ago, someone sent a package to him that was addressed to “Jamal Alabama.”

10. We had an editor at Popular Woodworking who always pronounced “mortise” as if he had an outrageous French accent: “mor-TEESE.” And tenon was “TEE-non.” Oui oui, we made great fun of him. We also had an editor whose name was Robert Lang. And the hotels we stayed at seemed bewildered that he wasn’t Chinese. People are strange.

11. Wenge. Is it pronounced “WEN-gee?” Or something that rhymes with “henge?” No clue.

12. And then there’s my name. I honestly don’t care how people pronounce it because there are so many correct ways to say it. My father preferred “Shh-wars.” My grandparents preferred the German pronunciation, which sounds more like “Sh-vats.” I also answer to “Shh-warts” and “Shhh-it-hed.” (Maybe I should have taken my journalism teacher’s advice and used my mother’s maiden name as my professional name….) Whenever I hear people struggle to pronounce my name, I thank my lucky stars it’s not: Sandor Nagyszalanczy.