It's not easy to change when one is raised with poor grammar skills or in a family where it is not a priority. It can be learned at a later age *raises hand* but it's trickier to remember it when speaking as opposed to the written word. Schools didn't encourage it in my time (or correct bad grammar) and I bet they're worse nowadays about that. Don't look down on those with inferior grammar skills. Help them if they want help, but remember, many people are too busy trying to earn a living and survive to care about not ending sentences with prepositions. Not everyone is middle class with a laptop and intelligent friends.
The guy's friend isn't an idiot for pronouncing a work incorrectly. He's an idiot for stubbornly refusing to change his pronunciation, even though every resource he and Technobuilder had checked - over several months - did not back up the friend's claim.
It's also not a word that comes up in every day conversation... for most people, at least. BOB: Jim, did you forget to refill the coffee pot? JIM: Well, yes I did. Sorry about that. BOB: You are now anathema! Yeah, haven't come across that in the office recently.
Or spell anathema properly when using it twice in one sentence. And the sentence, grammatically, should read: It's an anathema to me that people can't pronounce anathema properly!
Actually, no. "X is anathema to Y" is a standard and acceptable usage. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/anathema
Every once in awhile I like to pronounce "pronunciation" as "pronounciation" to see if anyone catches the geeky language humor of it.
If we're going to get down right technical here, the following is probably the best sentence: "To me, people who cannot pronounce anathema correctly are anathema."
Ba-hahaha! This is 20x funnier because my wife and I just finished watching the first two seasons of the Muppet Show on DVD and that bit was in one of the episodes. Classic.
I'm English. You heathens keep playing our language It might be an acceptable usage in the US, but over here in the UK we would usually include the an in the sentence, unless specifically writing in US English. So says pretty much every English teacher I've ever had, including the American one who always marvelled at the differences in the two languages.