But that’s not the only word that has confounded newscasters lately. On Tuesday, the language-learning app Babbel released a list of the most mispronounced words of the year, based on words that have stumped newscasters and other people on TV. It was compiled by the US Captioning Company and the British Institute of Verbatim Reporters.
Babbel had language expert Todd Ehresmann weigh in on the right way to say these words.
Here’s the list for the US, complete with their correct pronunciations:
Eilish [EYE-lish] – People have struggled saying the last name of singer Billie Eilish, who released album “Happier Than Ever” this year.
Ethereum [ih-THEE-ree-um] – Ethereum, the blockchain technology behind cryptocurrency ether, had a buzzy year.
Ever Given [EV-er GIV-en] – The container ship blocked the Suez Canal in March, disrupting global trade for several days. Babbel notes that newscasters mispronounced it by mistaking the ship’s name for that of the company that owns it, Evergreen, which was printed on the ship in letters much larger than the vessel’s name.
Kelce [KEL-ss] – Philadelphia Eagles center Jason Kelce said in a radio interview that his last name has been mispronounced for years.
Omicron [AH-muh-kraan or OH-mee-kraan] – Two pronunciations seem to have risen to the top as the most popular ways to refer to the Omicron coronavirus variant.
Stefanos Tsitsipas [STEH-fuh-nohs TSEE-tsee-pas] – The Greek tennis player competed against World No. 1 Novak Djokovic in the final of the French Open in June.
Yassify [YEAH-sih-fai] – Figures from history pop culture are yassified by applying beauty filters to their pictures using photo editing apps.
The container ship that blocked the Suez Canal returned to shipping freight between Europe and Asia on Sunday.
Last month, The Ever Given dry-docked in China to undergo repairs after the canal damaged its bow.
Newly released photos show cranes and trucks loading containers onto the restored ship — see them here.
The Ever Given container ship has completed its repairs in Qingdao, China, and is back on shipping schedules.
Yu Fangping / Costfoto/Barcroft Media via Getty Images
The ship’s bulbous bow was damaged after The Ever Given infamously blocked the Suez Canal for six days in March.
Yu Fangping / Costfoto/Barcroft Media via Getty Images
Last Thursday, the ship’s repaired bow with a fresh coat of paint was spotted at a shipyard in The West Coast New Area of Qingdao, East China’s Shandong Province.
Yu Fangping / Costfoto/Barcroft Media via Getty Images
Here, a ship repair worker introduces the repaired Ever Given to an inspector at the Huangdao Entry-Exit border control station in Qingdao, China.
Yu Fangping / Costfoto/Barcroft Media via Getty Images
More than 1 million cubic feet of sand and mud were removed from around the ship to dislodge the vessel’s bow and stern from the canal. By the time it was removed, the bow suffered severe damage.
Yu Fangping / Costfoto/Barcroft Media via Getty Images
As the supply-chain crisis continues, giant container ships like The Ever Given have become even more valuable. One expert said the ship’s entire bow had to be replaced.
Zhang Jingang/VCG via Getty Images
The Ever Given weighs 220,000 tons, making it one of the largest container ships in the world. Here, hundreds of truck drivers and other dock staff unload shipping containers onto its deck.
Zhang Jingang/VCG via Getty Images
On Sunday, The Ever Given began transporting freight between Asia and Europe once again.
Zhang Jingang/VCG via Getty Images
Container ships are getting larger every year — the Ever Given is longer than three football fields. Experts say the ships’ drastic increase in size has contributed to the supply-chain crisis.
Zhang Jingang/VCG via Getty Images
Inspectors from the Huangdao Entry-Exit border control station “bid farewell” to The Ever Given, which is returning to sea just in time for holiday shipping surges.
The container ship Ever Given getting stuck in the Suez Canal in March was a billion-dollar demonstration of an overlooked security threat, a top Democrat in Congress says.
“I would have liked to have more focus and more people’s hair on the back of their neck standing up, because I think a lot of people don’t think about maritime chokepoints,” Rep. Elaine Luria, vice chair of the House Armed Services Committee, said at a Navy League event in July.
The Ever Given was dislodged after six days, and experts were quick to note the military significance – in 2014, Russia sunk obsolete ships to block Ukrainian ships in a Crimean port. Disruptions like that are a threat in more places than most people think, Luria says.
“If you ask people if they even know what a chokepoint is they would probably come up with the Suez Canal [and] the Panama Canal, but not a lot of other ones,” Luria said at the Hudson Institute this month.
Many chokepoints are already closely monitored. The Strait of Hormuz, through which much of the world’s oil is shipped, and the Bab-el-Mandeb, through which Suez Canal traffic passes, both have a heavy multinational military presence to counter threats from state and non-state actors.
US Navy aircraft carrier USS Forrestal in the Suez Canal, August 6, 1988.
US Navy/PH2 Buckner
Other chokepoints are seeing increasing military activity amid changes to the security and natural environment.
The Greenland-Iceland-UK Gap, which Russian warships must transit to reach the Atlantic Ocean, is an area of renewed focus for NATO. The Strait of Malacca is a vital channel between the Indian and Pacific oceans, and China’s increasing presence there has worried neighboring countries, particularly India.
A more accessible Arctic may also make the Bering Strait busier. In March 2020, the US Navy’s top officer said he expected that strait will “at some point” be “strategically as important” as the straits of Malacca or Hormuz.
US policymakers and military officials have warned repeatedly about China’s presence in those waterways and at ports around the world.
China’s construction of bases in the South China Sea is an effort to “create their own chokepoints” in one of the world’s busiest shipping corridors, Luria said this month, adding that China’s sole overseas military base, in Djibouti near the Bab-el-Mandeb, is also in “an incredibly strategic point.”
Beijing has added “a significant pier” at that base that can accommodate an aircraft carrier, the head of US Africa Command said this spring, warning that China also sought a naval facility on Africa’s Atlantic coast “where they can rearm and repair warships.”
Chinese military personnel at the opening ceremony of China’s military base in Djibouti, August 1, 2017.
STR/AFP via Getty Images
China has also invested heavily in Latin American countries, which experts say it could leverage for military benefit, including around the Strait of Magellan, through which Chinese ships first sailed nearly a decade ago.
Army Gen. Laura Richardson, who will replace Faller, told lawmakers this month that “two ports on either end of the [Panama] Canal are owned by Chinese state-owned enterprises, and so that’s very concerning.”
In the Arctic, Russia wants to do “the same thing” that China is doing in the South China Sea by exercising control over traffic along the Northern Sea Route, Luria said this month. Even before Ever Given was freed, Russian officials were using the incident to promote that route.
“So we literally have the Chinese and the Russians who want to essentially create new chokepoints, and not only that but the Chinese have positioned themselves in a variety of ways at every major chokepoint in the world,” Luria added.
Chinese President Xi Jinping, Panamanian President Juan Carlos Varela and their wives in front of a Chinese container ship at the Panama Canal, December 3, 2018.
LUIS ACOSTA/AFP via Getty Images
US officials have warned that Chinese investments in infrastructure, particularly in ports, are being made with the goal of developing “dual use” capabilities that would support future military operations.
Whether China has the political influence and logistical ability to establish such facilities is still uncertain, but the Djibouti base and other facilities that Chinese firms own or have stakes in aren’t suited for power projection, according to John Culver, who retired from the CIA in 2020 after more than 30 years as a Chinese military analyst.
“I think that the [intelligence] community can maybe take a breath here about the dire threat of Chinese bases as locuses of power projection,” Culver said in May. “I think they’re really more the accoutrements of a great power, especially a country with global trading.”
But China’s growing presence around the world’s most important waterways still presents an outsize risk, Luria said this month.
“The interruption to the flow of trade and these geographic maritime chokepoints are ways that [China] can disrupt that are not just one-on-one, like naval vessel vs. naval vessel,” Luria said.
Egypt released the Ever Given from its anchorage in the Suez Canal on Wednesday after agreeing a compensation deal.
The ship was the object of a protracted legal battle between its owners, Japanese company Shoei Kisen Kaisha, and the Suez Canal Authority (SCA) ever since its seizure on April 13.
The ship, which was carrying nearly 20,000 containers, had been impounded by the SCA after it was unstuck from the banks of the canal, where it had spent six days blocking a crucial international shipping route.
Egypt initially asked $900 million in compensation, a demand that was whittled down in the following weeks. The ship’s owner’s counter-offer to that initial demand was $150 million, according to Bloomberg.
Details of the final deal between the SCA and the ship’s owners have not been made public. However, people close to the negotiations told The Wall Street Journal that the preliminary compensation deal, struck in late June, called for $200 million and a tugboat.
Dustin Eno, a spokesman the UK Club, which insures the Ever Given, declined to provide details of the deal.
According to the WSJ, the ship’s departure from the port of Ismailia – the nearest city to where the ship got stuck – will be broadcast live on Egyptian TV. The passage would be marked with a ceremony, Reuters reported.
Photographers watch the Ever Given set sail in Ismailia, Egypt, July 7, 2021
Amr Abdallah Dalsh/Reuters
As of 11.45 a.m. local time, the ship was headed out of the Bitter Lake, an artificial body of water off the canal where it has been held since its seizure.
The Ever Given’s departure route out of the Bitter Lake, Egypt.
MarineTraffic.com
The ship’s next port of call is Port Said, at the canal’s northern mouth, where it is to be inspected for its seaworthiness.
After that it cane get into the Mediterranean and try to reach its original intended destination, the port of Rotterdam in the Netherlands. It will also remove its containers at the UK’s port of Felixstowe, the paper reported.
For its second trek through the canal, it will be accompanied by two tugboats and will have two experienced pilots on board, Reuters reported.
The Suez Canal Authority (SCA) recently revealed that one person reportedly died during the six-day operation that eventually freed the massive Ever Given container ship from a sandbank back in April.
In another statement posted on Facebook, the authority states: “The highlighted losses incurred by the S.C authority due to the incident of the grounding crisis of Ever Given that can be seen is the damage to a number of participating marine units and the sinking of one of SCA marine units during the salvage operations, resulting in the death of one of the participants.”
It is unclear who died and how exactly this reported death occurred. There is also no record of a tugboat or marine unit sinking during the operation.
Insider has reached out to the SCA for more information but did not hear back in time for publication.
The Japanese-owned Ever Given container ship made headlines in March after it ran aground in the single-lane stretch during a sandstorm, blocking the Suez Canal for six days and significantly disrupting global trade.
Lawyers acting on behalf of the Japanese company Shoei Kisen Kaisha, which owns the ship, have said the SCA was at fault for Ever Given’s grounding because they allowed it to enter the canal amid poor weather conditions.
A container ship owned by the same company as the Ever Given – the ship that blocked the Suez Canal – is sailing back to Italy this week, nearly two months after its captain died on board and the ship was turned away from multiple ports in Asia.
According to the maritime news site gCaptain, the Ital Libera container ship works the Far East to South Africa Express, delivering shipments between South Africa and ports in China and Taiwan.
It’s owned by Italia Marittima, a subsidiary of the Evergreen Marine Corporation, the company that owns the Ever Given.
The ship brought on a new captain and crew before setting off from Durban, South Africa, on April 1, and within days a number of crew members became sick in what appeared to be a COVID-19 outbreak on board, according to the Maritime Executive.
Captain Angel Capurro, 61, is believed to have died on board on April 13, according to Italy’s ANSA news agency.
Capurro tested negative for the coronavirus before getting on the ship, and traveled to Durban via Doha, Qatar, and Johannesburg, South Africa, according to the Maritime Executive.
When Capurro died a decision was made to divert the ship to the port of Jakarta for a 14-day quarantine, according to gCaptain.
After the quarantine was over, Italian officials wanted to fly the captain’s body back to Italy, but no Asian ports allowed anyone get off the boat, Maritime Executive reports.
The Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs was said to have been turned down by Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, South Korea, the Philippines, and South Africa.
For that reason, a decision was made for the ship to sail to Italy to return the captain’s body, according to a June 7 update from the Hapag-Lloyd shipping company, a partner of Evergreen.
Hapag-Lloyd said the ship will return to its Far East service, but dates on when are yet to be determined, according to gCaptain.
As of Thursday, the Ital Libera was sailing in the Red Sea off the coast of Egypt, according to the shipping tracker AIS.
Egyptian authorities said this week they plan on widening and deepening parts of the Suez Canal to avoid a repeat of the Ever Given blunder in March, according to Bloomberg.
In a televised address on Tuesday, the head of the Suez Canal Authority (SCA), Osama Rabie, said an 18.6 mile stretch of the waterway would be widened by about 131 feet (40 meters) and deepened by 32 feet (10 meters) to improve the movement of ships in the area.
The expansion will take around two years, Rabie said.
Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi, who also spoke at the event, stressed he doesn’t want to mobilize “huge” public funding for the project, according to Bloomberg.
The canal authority since reduced the claims to $600 million. However, the insurer of the vessel said this amount is still too high.
The massive container ship had spent 48 days idle as of Saturday. It is impounded in the Great Bitter Lake, a body of water roughly 30 miles from where it first got stuck.
Shipping vessels have grown larger by multiples in just a few years, adding to worries among some industry insiders that a single mistake made by a massive ship could cause a global supply chain disruption, as the world saw with the Ever Given.
That ship, which was stuck in the Suez Canal for about a week in March, slowed or stalled shipping traffic around the world. It was estimated to cost the global economy about $400 million per hour, and its effects have still been rippling through the economy in recent weeks.
As ships like the Ever Given have grown over the last few decades, their crews have been shrinking because they’re using more automated processes, said Captain Rahul Khanna, global head of marine risk consulting at Allianz Global Corporate & Specialty, whose team publishes an annual safety review.
“Decades ago, the ships with 3,000 TEU – that’s the number of twenty-foot containers that can fit onboard – were considered the big ones,” said Khanna.
Now, ships like the Ever Given carry maximum loads of more than 20,000 containers. Boat-building technology could in the years and decades ahead produce ever-larger ships, perhaps growing to 50,000 containers or more. If there’s demand for such ships, modern technology could allow for such builds, Khanna said.
Between 2006 and 2020, the largest shipping vessels in the world grew by 155%, according to a January report from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. The biggest ships are loading or unloading 125% more at each port they visit.
With bigger boats, there could be more impactful accidents.
“While seemingly efficient, they are too large to fit in some ports, increase dangers in storms, and highly piled containers are falling, causing product and the corresponding financial losses,” said Cheryl Druehl, associate professor of operations management at George Mason University.
Even the Ever Given debacle, which grabbed hold of the worldwide news cycle, could have been worse. If that ship’s hull had broken, say, it would have taken even longer to fix the issue, Khanna said. It’s likely that a crane would have had to have been constructed nearby to remove some or all of its load. Refloating it would have been a more complex task, likely stretching into months.
Surveying the world’s riskiest shipping routes
A cargo ship in the North Pacific Ocean.
David Goldman/AP Photo
As the shipping industry gets back to its normal routine, Khanna and other shipping industry insiders walked Insider through their concerns about the next big disaster.
The most obvious answer was that another ship could get stuck in the Suez or Panama canals. The risk of a situation similar to the Ever Given’s crash in one of those waterways was “unlikely but high impact,” said Ambrose Conroy, founder and CEO of Seraph, a consulting and turnaround firm.
The risk was lower at other heavily travelled shipping lanes, including the Singapore Strait, and the Strait of Hormuz, although it has geopolitical risks of its own, said Khanna.
Ports in the future may also have trouble handling larger ships, but that’s an issue that can be fixed with proper planning, Conroy said. Instead, it’s the “black swan events” like the Ever Given that the industry needs to look out for.
One concern is a shipping route that’s becoming more popular. In decades past, a lane through the Arctic would open in summer months, giving ships a more direct path between Europe and Russia.
As the climate crisis has reduced the amount of ice in those northern regions, that passageway is now increasingly beingused in the winter. It’s become so popular that the International Maritime Organization issued a revised Polar Code.
As the Ever Given stalled global shipping in March, Moscow officials pointed to the Northern Sea Route through the Arctic as an alternative.
But Arctic travel comes with its own risks. While it’s unlikely that modern ships, with all their technology, would hit an iceberg, smaller ice floats can still damage hulls, Khanna said. An oil spill in the Arctic would also be devastating to marine life. And rescue crews might have difficulty reaching a stranded ship in such inhospitable waters.
Concerns about long journeys during the pandemic
Crew aboard a Finnish icebreaker.
David Goldman/AP Photo
Shipping industry observers also say the health and wellbeing of ship crews are a growing concern for 2021 and beyond. Shipping can take crews around the world – “It’s easier to list the places I haven’t been,” said Khanna – but many haven’t been able to visit their homes since the pandemic began.
“Crews haven’t been able to go back home on their leave,” he said.
Automation hasn’t helped, said Druehl, the George Mason professor. With more automation, ships have been able to stay away from their home ports longer. And it’s brought up issues like “skeleton crews, leading to more isolation and risk of piracy.”
Decentralizing the manufacturing industry is one possible way to cut risk, said a few industry insiders. Bring manufacturing back in the parts of the world that have become importers, and shipping won’t be as much of a concern, they said. But that’s easier said than done.
“The intricacies of global logistics are meaningless to most, that is until the truck doesn’t show up and the shelves go empty,” said Richard Weissman, director of the Organizational Management Program at Endicott College.
Issues caused by the Ever Given were still trickling through the supply chain in the last few weeks, he said. But most people won’t notice, unless they’re among the few who actively follow supply chains.
He added: “Once freight crosses the threshold of the loading dock and the truck door closes, we tend to forget about it. That’s the one thing that has to change now.”
A training facility in a lake in eastern France, which replicates some of the busiest trading routes in the world, has seen a surge in interest after the colossal container ship, the Ever Given, became wedged in the Suez Canal last month.
The Port Revel facility, located in a lake on the foothills of the Alps in Saint-Pierre-de-Bressieux, is designed to help mariners and ship captains navigate crucial shipping channels.
The replicas of the different waterways, including the Suez Canal, the San Francisco Bay, and Port McArthur in the Gulf of Mexico, are made to be as realistic as possible, built to one twenty-fifth the scale of the real ones.
Trainees at the facility have to learn how to maneuver scale models of massive container ships without getting stuck in narrow channels, facing strong underwater currents, and machine-generated waves while doing so.
Instructors can also simulate steering problems and engine outages to see how the trainees react.
Instructor Philippe Boulanger talks to pilots as they steer a scaled-down model of a container ship, named the Spirit of Port Revel, during a training course on a lake at the Port Revel Shiphandling Training Centre in Saint-Pierre-de-Bressieux, France, on April 19, 2021.
Stephane Mahe via Reuters
Francois Mayor, the managing director of Port Revel, told Reuters that the training facility has seen a spike in interest following the chaos caused by the Ever Given container ship, which ran aground amid a sandstorm in March and blocked the Suez Canal for six dramatic days.
He said it may prompt shipping companies to send their staff for refresher courses.
“After each accident … we see new clients coming,” said Mayor, according to Reuters. “The cost of training at Port Revel is nothing like the cost of having a vessel like that stuck for a day.”
Container ship Ever Given stuck in the Suez Canal, Egypt on March 27, 2021.
Kristin Carringer/Maxar
Mayor also said that while the facility has multiple machines to simulate different environments for the maritime pilots, it is “a bit hard to recreate sandstorm.”
“But we have gusts of wind which will push our ship to one side or another,” he added. “You have little space to maneuver. You have to be particularly focussed.”
Francois Mayor, managing director of Port Revel, steers a scaled-down model of a tanker, named the Brittany, on a lake at the Port Revel Shiphandling Training Centre in Saint-Pierre-de-Bressieux, France, on April 19, 2021.
Stephane Mahe/Reuters
While the Ever Given might have been freed from the banks of the Suez Canal – with the help of tugboats and excavators – the 1,300-foot ship remains trapped in Egypt.
Last week, the Suez Canal Authority said they won’t release the ship until its owners agreed to pay up to $1 billion in compensation.
The excavator driver who shot to fame for his work dislodging the massive Ever Given container ship from the Suez Canal ought to have been paid his overtime by now, the Suez Canal Authority said.
The body, also called the SCA, released a statement saying that it believes Abdullah Abdul-Gawad has got the extra money he was duel from the grueling work helping to move the ship.
Officials at the SCA, which is owned by the Egyptian government, praised his work as “above and beyond” his obligation.
Abdel-Gawad does not work for the SCA, but a subcontractor. He told Insider at the time that he fully expected to receive his overtime pay at some point, but noted that it was slow coming.
Insider has not been able to confirm with Abdul-Gawad’s employer whether he has now received his overtime. Abdul-Gawad declined to comment.
After the Ever Given was grounded on March 23, blocking the Suez Canal entirely, images of Abdul-Gawad’s digger trying to free it became world famous. A watching world found the sight of Abdul-Gawad’s tiny excavator next to the colossal ship appealing material for memes.
But the actual working conditions he described painted a much more serious picture – he and his colleagues could only snatched brief sleep in a nearby hut, and that he feared for his safety.
The Ever Given, trapped in the Suez Canal, Egypt, as of Thursday March 25 2021.
Suez Canal Authority
The ship was freed on March 29 by the combined efforts of Abdul-Gawad’s excavations, multiple tugboats, winches, a specialized dredger – and a supermoon-powered full tide.
The SCA took a victory lap in a statement on the same day, in which its head Lt. Gen. Osama Rabie congratulated SCA workers “who achieved this heroic feat saying that they have done their patriotic duty impeccably,”
But Abdul-Gawad told Insider he felt overlooked in the triumph.
In the Facebook statement, posted April 13, the SCA urged Egyptians “not to pay attention to rumors and anonymous news,” and asked people to rely only on “official sources.”
It added: “We affirm that the employee has obtained all his due salaries/fees from his employer in addition to a bonus in recognition of his service above and beyond.”
The Ever Given remains in the Suez Canal’s Great Bitter Lake, where it has been impounded amid a major legal action launched by the Egyptian government against the ship’s owners.
