Aramaity?

It's true that misunderstandings caused by mispronunciation often occur when someone is learning English as a new language.

One story I remember a story was told by one of our grads. She made a Safeway clerk laugh when she tried to buy some bran to make muffins. Since she was also unsure about when to use the indefinite article "a," the question she asked was, "Do you have a brain?"

But English has wide regional differences, too. That's what caused my embarrassing faux pas when talking to an Australian a few years back. Same language, different pronunciation.

We were both visitors in Cambridge, attending a conference called New Directions in the Humanities, and I was conscientiously facilitating a Talking Circle, as I had agreed ahead of time to do.

When we introduced ourselves, I got the Australian's name all right. "And where are you from?" I asked her. As a volunteer, I was making a list of Talking Circle participants.

"Aramaity" was what I thought I heard. I was making a valiant effort to spell it when she leaned across, read what I had written, and gently corrected me: "No, R.M.I.T., The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology." (It's now RMIT University.)

My mortification was the greater because I knew that this institution had organized the conference. But Australian colleague waved my apology away. She understood; the way Aussies say the letters of the alphabet is very unlike how we pronounce them in Canadian English.