It should be no surprise that I like words. With as much as I talk, I'd better. Vocabulary has always been a fascinating subject to me. I was one of those kids who read the dictionary. Not for very long, because I'd get distracted thinking of how to use all those words.
However, I never really mastered the pronunciation key. I liked the look of the word, and sort of just let my brain fill in the sounds, which is unreliable at best. Hence, I will still often say "miss-chee-vee-ous" instead of mischievous. Same with grievous. I'm especially bad with names in novels. My love of reading will let me create fantastic worlds in my mind with the information on the page, and then leave me incomprehensible when trying to talk to other people about books that we've both read.
The Wheel of Time series is perhaps the worst for me in that respect, because the outlandish names that my eyes sort of gloss over, make their impression and recognize and never really transmit a pronunciation to my brain. When I'm reading, I don't need the sounds of the words, just the look is enough to let my visual brain continue along. Then when I try to talk about characters, I realize that I don't actually know all the letters and in what order enough to form a pronunciation. I just sort of go with what I recognize from the page, and make up the rest. Hence "Moghedien" becomes "Mogidishu" and "Nynaeve" is "Nin...Nyn... Ninavee... Nynnyeve... you know, the cranky Wisdom."All of that is to get around to the fact that my brain is always trying to put words to the things I see, and images to the things I read. Whether or not I know how to pronounce any of those words is another matter entirely.
I started thinking about this a couple of nights ago in the bath (where lots of good thinking happens) when I squeezed out some shampoo. It looked like a slug for about a quarter of a second before it spread out and looked more like shampoo again. So there I was, thinking about a graceful way to describe the pearly white slugness of my shampoo... for what purpose, I have no idea. I just was. It wasn't sluggish* in a revolting way, it was sluggish in a very neutral way. But why would I waste time and thoughts trying to describe something as fleeting and inconsequential as the shampoo I'd just squeezed? I don't know, but I realized then that I do this all the time.
