The problem with that Barney & Clyde solution is that this character is an unabashed thief and while the store only gets the value of one book out of the deal, the thief is freed to steal again (ad again).
Crankshaft’s unconscious processing is working hard, as it did correctly identify the voice actor who did Yosemite Sam, before dropping into malaprop mode.
I was pretty slow to connect the written “Yosemite” with the pronunciation /yoʊˈsɛm ɪ ti / or [yoh-sem-i-tee]. I thought it might be “Yo!, Semite” somehow parallel to “anti-semite”.
Danny Boy – as a kid I thought it was pronounced “yos-might” with a long “o.”
@beckoningchasm: I can sympathize, if you only ever encountered it via reading. Young Ed thought for a long time that “misled” was pronounced “MYZ-ulled.”
Ed, that’s one of the more common ones; my mother had two words in her vocabulary for years as a kid, “miss-led” (spoken) and “misled” (written, pronounced in her head your way).
Of course, with classic Warner Bros cartoons, about 99% of the voices were Mel Blanc.
It seems as though you would pronounce it Yo-Semite only if you just read the comic books and never saw the cartoons. Perhaps your parents wouldn’t buy a television.
Into my 20s I had one of those print/speech splits, for the word ascertain. When reading to myself, my subvocalization would be uh-certain, and not connected to the word I occasionally heard people use, pronounced /ˌæs ərˈteɪn / (stress on final syllable).
And of course I never noticed that “assertane” never appeared in my reading, nor that nobody ever seemed to have reason to say “uh-certain”. And retroactively I claim that I even had slightly different meanings for the two words — though both might fit the dictionary definition:
to find out definitely; learn with certainty or assurance; determine. to ascertain the facts.
But you might distinguish making certain on a yes/no question or very limited multiple-choice (“uh-certain”), versus finding an answer from a wide or unrestricted range of answers (“asser-tane”). Though I suppose if someone actually asked me, that would be enough to draw my attention to what was going on, and collapse the split. In fact the split collapsed when I was monitoring at Recording for the Blind and the reader correctly said “asser-tane” where the text had “ascertain”, and I started to reach for the Stop button but stopped and saw the whole thing.
Comics I Don't Understand 
The problem with that Barney & Clyde solution is that this character is an unabashed thief and while the store only gets the value of one book out of the deal, the thief is freed to steal again (ad again).
Crankshaft’s unconscious processing is working hard, as it did correctly identify the voice actor who did Yosemite Sam, before dropping into malaprop mode.
I was pretty slow to connect the written “Yosemite” with the pronunciation /yoʊˈsɛm ɪ ti / or [yoh-sem-i-tee]. I thought it might be “Yo!, Semite” somehow parallel to “anti-semite”.
Danny Boy – as a kid I thought it was pronounced “yos-might” with a long “o.”
@beckoningchasm: I can sympathize, if you only ever encountered it via reading. Young Ed thought for a long time that “misled” was pronounced “MYZ-ulled.”
Ed, that’s one of the more common ones; my mother had two words in her vocabulary for years as a kid, “miss-led” (spoken) and “misled” (written, pronounced in her head your way).
Of course, with classic Warner Bros cartoons, about 99% of the voices were Mel Blanc.
It seems as though you would pronounce it Yo-Semite only if you just read the comic books and never saw the cartoons. Perhaps your parents wouldn’t buy a television.
Into my 20s I had one of those print/speech splits, for the word ascertain. When reading to myself, my subvocalization would be uh-certain, and not connected to the word I occasionally heard people use, pronounced /ˌæs ərˈteɪn / (stress on final syllable).
And of course I never noticed that “assertane” never appeared in my reading, nor that nobody ever seemed to have reason to say “uh-certain”. And retroactively I claim that I even had slightly different meanings for the two words — though both might fit the dictionary definition:
But you might distinguish making certain on a yes/no question or very limited multiple-choice (“uh-certain”), versus finding an answer from a wide or unrestricted range of answers (“asser-tane”). Though I suppose if someone actually asked me, that would be enough to draw my attention to what was going on, and collapse the split. In fact the split collapsed when I was monitoring at Recording for the Blind and the reader correctly said “asser-tane” where the text had “ascertain”, and I started to reach for the Stop button but stopped and saw the whole thing.