Lazy? No. Efficent.
In fact it was sometimes spelled “Tokio” in American newspapers during World War II. That might have reflected the common Western pronunciation of the time, or maybe it helped change it. I’m not sure which.
[QUOTE=Mijin]
I bet there are western cities that have a different Japanese pronunciation.
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These are not cities, but I believe the Japanese replace the /v/ sound in Virginia and Vermont with a /b/ — making “Bajinya”, for example.
I assume they’d do something similar with Vancouver and Las Vegas.
*There’s been a split in the one and only Christian church!?
*
Seriously, that reminds me of a Jewish friend of ours who got married right out of college, and kept talking about “TV vows.” My wife asked her to explain herself, and it turns out she thought “Do you, [Bitsy], take [Bubba] as your lawfully wedded husband, to have and to hold, through sickness and in health…” were never really said at *real *weddings - only on TV. She’d only ever been to Jewish weddings, and had no idea that Christian ceremonies typically use those vows.
Bueno, Las Vegas should properly be pronounced with a B… it’s you people who turn Viva las Vegas into Fifa las Fegas.
As an exercise, people should try speaking in a foreign accent (or in a language if you can) and then halfway through a sentence try and pronounce a single word “properly” from your native tongue and then go back to the foreign language.
It feels weird, doesn’t it? It jars and breaks the flow of the sentence.
Quite simply, use the pronunciation that is common to the language you are speaking, not the language that it comes from. For this reason, when I speak Swedish I will talk about LON-DON (both bits rhyming with “on”), a city in EHNG-LAND (“eng” starting with an “eh” sound instead of an “i” sound).
I bet you don’t like what we’ve done with Los Angeles either.
There’s a song popular in the ‘30s, Hors d’oeuvres, that was better known as Whores’ Doors by the bands playing it.
Oh, right. That’s is weird; the whole point of a werewolf is a person turning into a monster. My bad.
Sorry, forgot to add the smiley.
That one is a pet peeve of mine since becoming a moderator. People will tell me that such and such post is on “page 3” of a thread. Without knowing their “posts per page” setting, those directions are useless to me. While I don’t know anyone who uses the lowest setting (only five posts per page), a lot of people with fast Internet access and good computers use the highest (200 posts per page).
You, I like. 
[quote=“Gary “Wombat” Robson, post:529, topic:615416”]
Sorry, forgot to add the smiley.
That one is a pet peeve of mine since becoming a moderator. People will tell me that such and such post is on “page 3” of a thread. Without knowing their “posts per page” setting, those directions are useless to me. While I don’t know anyone who uses the lowest setting (only five posts per page), a lot of people with fast Internet access and good computers use the highest (200 posts per page).
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I’d kill them. Guess it’s a good thing I’m not a moderator, eh? 
I am often amazed at how strongly people are tied to that nomenclature. Every now and then, I like to mess with people’s heads by saying that I’m going “down to San Francisco” (from the San Jose area) or “Up to LA”. Most people usually just give me a funny look, but sometimes someone will get really flustered and say emphatically, “Uh, you mean down to LA,” not as a question but as a firm statement of what I must have meant to say, as if I’d violated a firm rule rather than a general convention. Same thing happens when I say, “Out east” instead of “Back east”, and “Back west” instead of “Out West”.
How can people not know that “Up means north” is not a grammatical or semantic rule, but just a usage convention?
Pretty much everyone knows that. There’s no reason to be a dick about it.
nm
Plenty of places along the east coast where “down” and “up” refer to toward and away from the coast. I’ve traveled north to “go down the shore.”
And yes, everyone understands the standard application of these words to cardinal directions, but some people genuinely have trouble wrapping their heads around the idea that this is just a convenient convention. The only dickishness here (although it’s usually just stupidity–I too have seen peoples heads pop re: rivers flowing north) is insisting that everything must conform to that convention.
And it’s a good thing that none of us are doing that because that would be dickish. Violating the convention “just to mess with people’s heads” is dickish as well.
What about Korea? And for that matter Passchaendale, Somme, D-Day, Italy, and the liberation of the Netherlands?
Are you available for contract work? 
Speaking for myself, 20th century history was an option at my high school, and as it happened, my teacher spent so much time on WWI that we barely touched upon WWII or Korea, etc. I don’t really know why the curriculum was like this, but there you have it.
I don’t expect most of my peers to have learned much of this stuff unless they went out of their way to get it (or picked it up through media, for example).
Kind of sad, really.
[quote=“Gary “Wombat” Robson, post:538, topic:615416”]
Are you available for contract work?
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Now look. I thought that everyone understood that Cousin Vinnie and I have first dibs on any killing to be done. And that Ed doesn’t want to know about it, if it happens.