Yes, I don’t say ‘Catwoman’ fast enough, yes, I saw Nirvana at Reading festival in 1992, and, yes, I have been pronouncing ‘Marvel’ wrongly for an extremely long time. I accept that that’s a lot to cope with
The correct way to pronounce Marvel, as in Captain Marvel, is with all the emphasis front-loaded on to the first syllable, like the verb. I have been pronouncing it all this time like the poet Marvell, and this hasn’t interrupted my life in any way; I’ve never, for instance, gone to the cinema and ended up in the wrong film, or embarked on a debate about the feminist subtext of Captain Marvel and landed, mystified, in a conversation about country house poetry. Yet it is still a tremendous problem, since it makes me the most irritating person alive. Thank God, some years ago, I took the precaution of producing young, since I would never otherwise have found out how incredibly grating I am.
Other ways in which I am maddening, just in the comic universe space: being unable to distinguish between Marvel and DC; failing to say “Catwoman” fast enough, so that it sounds like I’m listing two separate entities.