Are you familiar with decals? Or maybe, like me, you call them stickers.

One of my ukulele cases with some stickers on it

Whatever you call them, they are “a design or picture produced in order to be transferred to another surface either permanently or temporarily.” or in other words, a decorative sticker. Apparently decal can be used as a verb as well, meaning to apply decals to (sth) [source].

I’ve come across the word decal in novels and other texts by American writers, but I hadn’t heard anybody use it in speech. Yesterday I watched a video made by a Canadian woman in Japan in which she talks about decals, and pronounces it [ˈdɛkəl] (deckle). This surprised me as I assumed it was pronounced more like [ˈdiː.kæl] (dee-cal).

Apparently, both pronunciations are used: [ˈdiː.kæl] in central Canada and Australia, and [ˈdɛkəl] in the USA, western Canada and Australia. If you use this word, how do you pronounce it, and where are you from?

Decal is an abbreviation of decalcomania (The process of transferring decorative designs onto surfaces using decals; a decal), from French décalcomanie (same meaning), décalquer (to trace, transfer [a design]), and -manie (a compulsion, obsession, a place where something can be found in great amounts).

A word that possibly comes from the same root is cockamamie, which means a foolish or ridiculous person; ridiculousness, folly or foolish nonsense; foolish, ill-considered, silly, unbelievable, triffling, and used to mean a decal [source].

Are there any words that aren’t pronounced as you’d expect based on their written forms?

If you’re sitting catty-corner from someone, what does that mean?

This is an expression that has come up a number of times recently in books I’m reading and which puzzles me a bit. So I thought I’d find out what it means and where it comes from.

Catty-corner means “diagonally across from (one another)” or “located diagonally in relation to something, especially across an intersection.”, and is used in the USA and Canada. It is also written cattycorner, catty-cornered or kitty-corner. It makes me think of a cat in a corner.

It’s apparently a corruption of cater-corner(ed) with influence from catty (cat-like). Cater-corner(ed) means “something at a diagonal to another; of four corners, those diagonal to another.” in the USA and is an old dialect word in the UK meaning “uneven, not square, as mislaid stones or people with a limping gait.” It comes from cater, and old word for four, particularly in card and dice games, from the French quatre (four), and cornered (possessing corners or angles) [source].

According to the Grammarist, the cater in cater-cornered originally referred to the four spots on a die, or the four legs of a beast, and came to refer to the corners of four city blocks meeting. Over time it came to mean something positioned diagonally from something else. Another version of it is caddy-corner.

Are there words or phrases in other languages that have similar meanings?