For quite a long time I have occasionally stumbled across a YouTube video where the author talks about "carbon dioxide" where, for some reason, he seems to have a hard time pronouncing that pair of words clearly. More particularly, most of these people pronounce it so that it becomes almost indistinguishable from "carbon monoxide". And this is not just one or two people I have seen having this problem. I have encountered at least a dozen or so people on YouTube who seem to have this same pronunciation trouble.
And no, it's not that they are confusing the two compounds and saying the latter when they mean the former. It's usually very clear that they know and mean it's "dioxide". In fact, in one video the author was actually talking about both compounds, comparing them, describing how they are different and so on. I am not kidding that several times during the video I had a genuinely hard time telling if the guy was saying "carbon dioxide" or "carbon monoxide", because it wasn't clear even from the context.
This is a particularly important distinction to make, especially if you are making a didactic video about physics and chemistry. If your listeners can't distinguish which compound you are talking about (and it isn't clear from the context), that's quite counter-productive.
Honestly, I cannot really understand why they a) have difficulty pronouncing "carbon dioxide" clearly, and more importantly, b) why they pronounce it like "carbon monoxide". (Ok, they might not pronounce it exactly like that, but it's so close to it that it's hard to know which one they are talking about.)
What in that "...on di..." combination of sounds is such that it induces them to pronounce it like (or at least very close to) "...on mon..."? It's genuinely mysterious to me.
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