“Opposition to Pines Stiffens. Film at 11.”
Problem is, the name is actually pronounced “PEE-ness”.
It’s an old Eastern-European name. There’s also a town in Israel called Kfar Pines (“Penistown”?), as well as a television personality by the name of Guy Pines, who has made a habit of going to press junkets and embarassing major Hollywood stars by having them say his name.
Yeah, Israelis are in on the joke, and it makes us giggle a bit too. But what can you do?
Not sure if it’s true or not, but I read once that Dole means penis in the Iranian language. It was in a story speculating about how the Farsi language papers would have printed the news had Dole won the '96 election.
Anyway, you can bet Saturday Night Live will have fun with this Pines guy.
I assume T&A City refers to Tel Aviv but its abbreviation’s pretty funny considering the context.
/hijack/ When I was in the Mediterranean area I found a Spanish coastal town named Peniscola. (Way southwest of Condom, France.) I wonder if Pensacola, Fla., might have been a sanitized version of that.
Well, there was the TV show Joni loves chachi. In Korea, Chachi means penis.
I predict they will find a way to pronounce it slightly differently so it doesn’t sound exactly like “penis.”
Or,
They will indeed pronounce it “penis” with a perfectly straight face and then find every excuse they can to report some news about this guy so they can say “penis” at least once every newscast.
Heck, a few years back when there was a spate of fresh photographs from Voyager 2, newscasters managed to slide past “Uranus” through various means.
Note that 'yur-&-n&s is the first listed pronunciation, and yu-'rA-n&s is listed after that. I’ve always pronounced it as 'yur-&-n&s. Newscasters weren’t necessarily managing to slide past anything. If they have always pronounced that planet’s name like I have, then they wouldn’t have had to even consider viewers snickering.
Anyone have a cite as to of these two alternate pronunciation, where in the world each is most common?
As I recall, they did pronounce it that way. But what makes “urinous” any less snickerable than “your anus”? 
If one wants to pronounce it correctly according to its original Latin pronunciation, then accent the first syllable, pronounce both the U’s as in the word “push”, and roll the R. 
I donno, but did you ever notice that the root word of Anusol is anus? So why is it pronounce an-u-sol rather than anus-ol?
I remember hearing about some guy (living in the USA, I think) whose last name was Hitler, which is obviously unfortunate for different but vaguely similar reasons. He decided to change it, for obvious reasons, but ended up changing it to “Shitler,” unaware of how that sounded to English speakers. 
Wy do so many want to pronounce the planet Uranus as ur-un-us?
Is there any Anusol on Uranus?
(I guess that’s one reason. Dumb cracks like that. And yes, I know.)
Well, it doesn’t sound exactly like “penis.” It sounds like “PEE-ness” because that’s how it’s spelled (“Pines”). The “I” makes an “ee” sound and the “e” makes a short “e” sound, just like it does in most languages. I can’t think of any language off-hand (except for English) that would pronounce an “e” as a short “i” in this instance. See Alessan’s post.
And there’s this one
http://web.archive.org/web/20011215122857/http://www.eurosport.com/News.asp?StoryID=102878&LangueID=0
Well, as my friend discovered to his embarassment, “Gary” is usually pronounced in Japanese as “geri,” which means “diarrhea”.
But then, it works both ways, as Prime Minister Takeshita no doubt knew.
There’s a town called Huy (in Belgium, IIRC); if it’s pronounced as I think it is, it means “dick” in Russian. Understandably, Russian atlases have it listed as something very different
I just remembered this fellow.
And there’s that football player who’s name translates, sorta at least, as Greenballs (Testeverde).
Am I in the right thread? ;))
This town in Austria is having to pay rather large sums of money to replace their signs because tourists keep stealing them.
“Coming up behind the center for Dallas, Ophir Mai Testeverde . . .”