Word o’ the Wise :: Maven does not equal Maverick
One of the coolest things about a digital dictionary like m-w.com, is that now when you go and look up a word, you can hear it pronounced correctly instead of having to try to understand their pronunciation guide (which makes me have to look up more words I didn’t know like umlaut and diacritic). However, it’s a little disappointing to look up the meaning of a word you’ve actually used in conversation in the past, and find out that you’ve been mispronouncing it the whole time. I kinda knew what a ‘maven‘ was - it was someone who was cool because he/she knew a lot about something. But I think I must have somehow associated it with being a ‘Maverick’ (it’s probably lame that I even still think Top Gun was cool), because I have always pronounced it ‘mavin’ (with the ‘a’ sounding like the a in ‘nag’) instead of ‘mayven‘.
Now that I know how it’s actually pronounced, it’s lost a lot of its coolness factor for me. If I am referred to as a maven now I’ll associate it with being a maynard or something.
