Words That Don't Sound the Way They Look

We learn by doing, so I will dispatch with the phonetic spellings. It's 2010, and there's an information super-highway at our fingertips. Here are my top five:

Minutiae
Verbiage
Foliage
Hyperbole
Antithesis

And now, the most fun of all:

Guerrilla (Variant: Guerilla) - a person who engages in irregular warfare especially as a member of an independent unit carrying out harassment and sabotage. This is employed in modern language to describe use of an unconventional system to achieve a desired result (e.g. "guerrilla marketing").

Gorilla: a very large typically black-colored anthropoid ape (Gorilla gorilla) of equatorial Africa that has a stocky body with broad shoulders and long arms and is less erect and has smaller ears than the chimpanzee

Here is an example of gorilla warfare:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXuXoH6lVkg&feature=related

... Join 'em.

I began, on the week of September 14th, to modify my approach to dealing with what I will lovingly call “verbal misappropriation.” Instead of getting angry at the words many of us cannot (Yes, Amy, cannot—you win) seem to use properly, I’m giving each wrong word a definition … giving it a chance to shine, if only for a moment. Today’s star is “periphial,” not to be confused with “peripheral.”

Peripheral:

1. Of, relating to, involving, or forming a periphery or surface part (“periphery” being an area lying beyond the strict limits of a thing).

2. Of, relating to, or being the outer part of the field of vision . (Merriam-Webster)

Periphial:

1. An angry elf. (Me)