Is it aluminum or aluminium?

I was a linguistics major in university (see previous post about being unemployed) and language has always been interesting to me. What I really enjoy though is hearing new ways of pronouncing old words. It probably sounds weird but it entertains me. When I started my first phonetics/ phonology course I spent the ride home from class getting my cousin to repeat various words repeatedly just to see how we said them differently. Last night I was watching a documentary and the lady that was speaking pronounced the word aspartame as asparta-me (sounds close to anemone). I had never heard it pronounced that way before. I don't know if that is the correct way to say it or if she was incorrect but I found it interesting. That got me thinking about the way I say different words and how I will read a word and pronounce it a certain way in my head and then actually hear it aloud and realize that I was wrong (I used to think the word 'bodice' rhymed with 'lease') I will also hear a word pronounced completely weird or wrong and adopt that as my pronunciation because it sounds cool (I pronounce the word 'particularily' as 'particuly' because I heard it that way on ER.) On another note, I find it interesting that the plural of octopus is octopodes and not octopi.