Commonly mispronounced words

[Kingswood]

Originally Posted by wolf

Am I following this correctly?

AE: Stur-rup
BE: Steer-up

It's reasonably close but IIRC the vowel is closer to the short vowel in "hit":
BE: Sti-rup
Note that the r is doubled in the spelling; doubled consonants often follow a short vowel. So BrE pronounces "stirrup" more or less as it is spelt, whereas AmE has a somewhat different pronunciation that appears to be based on the pronunciation of "stir". (Based on that, I guess one could also argue that the AmE pronunciation follows the spelling.)

Originally Posted by wolf

I'm not getting how ["hurry" and "furry"] would be spoken differently by a British speaker.

"hurry" - just say "hut" without the "t" and then add a "ry" on the end ("hu-ry"). It's actually fairly easy to say.

I find the hurry-furry merger to be quite interesting from a linguistic point of view because it is one of the few vowel mergers that seems to create no homophones.