McKean's Law, from University of Chicago College Bowl legend and eminent lexicographer Erin McKean -
"Any correction of the speech or writing of others will contain at least one grammatical, spelling or typographical error."
One summer during high school, I went to a Governor's School and there was a guy with a really thick Smithfield accent who pronounced the name of the county as AAAIIILLL o'why. So I pronounced it that way once went I interned at the state demography office, and my boss, who spoke with an exaggerated trans-Atlantic accent like Julia Child or Aunt Bee, said, "No! It's ile of WHITE!" Then she played some silly game where she hypercorrected someone's pronunciation of "forte" in a job interview and looked like an absolute moron. Then again, there was an another guy with a drawl from Buena Vista who liked to say, "I come from a place so backward the people there cannot even pronounce the name of the town."
"In forte we have a word derived from the French that in its "strong point" sense has no entirely satisfactory pronunciation. Usage writers have denigrated \ˈfȯr-ˌtā\ and \ˈfȯr-tē\ because they reflect the influence of the Italian-derived forte entry 2. Their recommended pronunciation \ˈfȯrt\, however, does not exactly reflect French either: the French would write the world le fort and would pronounce it more similar to English for. So you can take your choice, knowing that someone somewhere will dislike whichever variant you choose. All are standard, however.
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