September 2

A word you have stressed wrongly for years is something you rarely notice on your own. At some point someone next to you pronounces it correctly, or someone kindly points it out. The correction takes two seconds. What is unpleasant is something else: you remember the many conversations in which you said it that way, and the people who probably noticed and said nothing.

The new knowledge itself costs you nothing. It is even a relief to know the word properly now. What hurts is looking back on a time when you were sure and others already knew more. The insight arrives in the present, but it shames the past.

With a word, that is easy enough to get over. It becomes harder with a conviction you have used to advise others, or perhaps even to lecture them. The longer you hold on to it, the longer the stretch of time a later insight would have to reinterpret after the fact. So the error grows more expensive precisely because you are not yet paying for it.

As for those who kept quiet back then, you don't know whether they did it out of consideration or because they didn't think you would be glad to hear it.