My common bloopers - 5

This is a word I am a bit embarrassed to admit to, but then, sometimes one needs to take a good hard look at oneself. 

The word in question is 'laugh'. I knew you would laugh! But yes many moons ago, for some strange reason I was convinced that this word was pronounced as loff, with the vowel sound being elongated like in 'court' or 'ball'. And mind you, I was very good at English even as a 5 year old. So where this came in from, I do not know. I always maintain that Indians those days used to learn the written form and hence their spellings were far better than their pronunciations. Today, the trend (due to media, mobile phones etc) has changed and the kids today have better pronunciations than spellings. I was part of the earlier generation. 

Then one fine day, a colleague (by the way this is another majorly mispronounced word पर वो क़िस्सा फिर कभी), loffed at my loff. I asked him what was so funny. He asked me to say loff. I said it. He loffed. This went on for quite a while. I was so confident that I felt this could go on all evening. Finally he took pity on me and said it is not loff, it is laaf. Now it was my turn to loff. And I asked him to repeat it. He repeated it. I loffed again. By the time all this silliness ended, both of us were loffing or laafing, depending on our preference. Finally we did check the dictionary (there was no internet at that time), and to my consternation I realised that I shouldn't have loffed at all. I thanked my colleague, and since then I have worked very hard to avoid loffing. I have been successful in totally exorcising the loff. These days when I look back at this phase, I do laaf out loud. Or as the chat generation says - LOL. Imagine saying LOL in a conversation. But there are many who do. 

So in summary, for those who found my sentence structuring very convoluted and complex, the correct pronunciation of the word 'laugh' is laaf or लाफ़. And I used to make the mistake of pronouncing it as loff or लॉफ़