'AITA for correcting my wife's speech and grammar?' UPDATED

"AITA for correcting my wife's speech and grammar?"

My wife grew up in a small community and I grew up in several large cities on the east and west coasts of the US. We met at art school - she went for fine art and I went for theatre. In my theatre training we were drilled on proper pronunciation. While I'm not perfect, I think I'm fairly intelligible.

My wife is an outstanding artist, and expresses herself visually in ways I couldn't comprehend being able to. In some ways I'm quite jealous of her abilities. She has a good vocabulary, too. She's taught me words and drawing techniques and I've attempted to use them in my daily life.

However, in her community, she picked up one of the regional traits we were "warned" about in speech classes - the i / e substitution. Basically, she'll pronounce words like "pillow" as "pellow", while she prounounces "pen" as "pin", and "lemon" as "limon."

On its own, I find it endearing. But, we have a kid. Our kid is starting to pick up the same substitutions, pronouncing "milk" as "melk", "pen" as "pin", and it drives me up a wall. I have no ethical issue with correcting my young learner, but I've also tried to extend that to correcting my wife when I hear the same idiosyncrasies.

Then there's just plain old terminology. Today she asked if I could barbecue up some hotdogs and hamburgers. To me, BBQ is a specific style of meat prep, with sauces and low heat and particular meats. You don't barbecue a hotdog, you grill it. So I corrected her - for clarity.

Of course, I've now been banished to my office and am typing this up for a public consensus. Show me the way, the truth, and the light, dear experts.

EDIT: She also spells things the way she pronounces them. She reads prolifically, but she was never taught to look up spelling and so she writes stuff phonetically- really tough when she puts a shopping list together and I have to text her photos of the list with “what’s this say?” and it’s supposed to be “cauliflower“ or something but it’s spelled in a way I cannot understand.

Also, she gets on my case about doing math in my head. Often, I can’t add two two-digit numbers in my head, and she things I’m joking when I say I need a calculator.

Edit 2: For the curious, she’s from the San Juan Islands in NW Washington State. I’m from Seattle. Geographically, they’re about 90 miles apart. Other people on the island do not talk like that, but her mother does.

Her father is also from Seattle and doesn’t have the speech pattern. I’ve lived in Boston, SoCal, Chicago, and the Florida Keys, and have been around plenty of American dialects, which, when it’s regional, I don’t have a problem mentally parsing because I expect it in context. Since we’re both from the same area, it’s unexpected and 98% of everything we say to each other is the same dialectic.

I have a flat western American dialect and so does she. We both went to public schools and the same college of art in Seattle.

She’s still an artist, but I am now a computer scientist, and have developed a sensitivity to ambiguity.

Edit 3: she asked me to barbecue for a party, so I started putting a shopping list together and it had ribs and wings, and she says, “no, just hotdogs and hamburgers."

What do you think? AITA? This is what commenters had to say:

Lucetti said:

YTA and your desperate attempts to justify it are so obviously unconvincing that I have trouble not calling this a troll post. I mean, you edited in how she sucks at spelling? How is that even relevant? Just to show ways your wife is a big dummy who needs correcting?

You’re insufferable just reading what you write to the point that I can’t imagine being in a room with you for any length of time. Obviously “correcting” your wife’s regional accent unprompted is a shitty thing to do.

Your whole post is full of dumb sh!t like:

"You don't barbecue a hotdog, you grill it. So I corrected her - for clarity."

“Despite being perfectly clear and understanding fully what she meant I decided to be a pedant to my wife and use clarity as an excuse”.

Binky390 said:

YTA In theater this stuff may be important but in every day life, it's simply a matter of "cultural" differences. Different places have different ways of pronouncing stuff and there's nothing wrong with it.

The fact that you brought up how she's from a small town and you're from the city and took theater classes makes you sound like a pretentious perfectionist. I do hate when people say pellow or draw instead of drawer, but it's just how they talk. In every day life when amongst family and friends, who cares?

And baileywaffles said:

NTA but... I get it. I am a linguistics nerd, and words matter a GREAT deal to me. I fuss and ponder and overthink what people say and mean, because my inner motivation is always to deeply understand the person with whom in communicating.

If my dad said he wanted to BBQ tonight, I would know he meant steak or lamb chops or ribs. If my husband says he wants to BBQ, it means “anything he puts on the BBQ” because he is a casual dude who overthinks NOTHING.

As you can imagine, these little differences in communication can add up to some pretty serious stuff if you let it. I care about every spoken or written word, and my partner is rather casual and even careless sometimes in his communication. But I found a solution.

I changed my focus. Truly that was it. I started practicing stoicism and learning to focus on changing my own responses and thoughts about things that used to bother me, and it’s worked beautifully.

Today, (and I mean this), my favorite sound in the world is my man falling asleep making his little snoring sounds. Those same sounds that used to ruffle me are now my lullaby, because I know there may be a day when I never get to hear them again - and when I focus on that, I know am the luckiest woman in the world, to hear the smallest sounds of my best friend, who I get to sleep next to and wake up with.

He later shared this edit to his post:

Thanks everybody for the feedback. I think it’s safe to say that I’m the @$$hole and should curb the corrections. While a few of you sympathize, and while I maintain it isn’t regional or dialectical, there’s probably no changing her pronunciation, and she likely can not hear the differences. Cheers!

And then he shared this update:

I wanted to post an update. I've taken the @$$hole label to heart, and it's really changed my outlook on my biases and what is normative to me vs. what's socially acceptable.

I think I held on too much to my former lifestyle, and I have come to terms with the fact that her little idiosyncrasies are among the reasons that she is endearing to me. I won't be suggesting alternate pronunciations anymore.

Additionally, I am putting my own upbringing into another perspective. I was corrected A LOT, for various things, spelling, syntax, and pronunciation among them. While I believe they were important corrections that helped make me who I am today, and I also believe my folks corrected me out of love and desire to see me succeed, that's not how I come across when I do it to my wife.

So, thanks. I don't know that this is a common place to fulfill therapy from strangers, but I definitely think this post will serve me and my loved ones well, far into the future.

Thanks again.