I just saw a commercial for Ewald Chevrolet in Oconomowoc, WI. Sorry, couldn’t find a link.
The voice over grossly mispronounced the word Oconomowoc. It is, in fact, the official state joke to ask out of staters to say some of the city names here.
But I would think a long time car dealer like Ewald would want the cities name spoken correctly. Or did they purposely botch the word to get folks attention?
Or do you think this was an AI generated commercial and nobody caught the mispronounceation?
Alright, I just saw a different ad for the same dealer. The city name was once again mispronounced but in a different way. But it still started out with Okinawa then finished with Ma Was.
Probably AI but I would think so someone would watch the commercials before they aired. This mispronounceation jumps out.
Or maybe they did this on purpose. Figuring some people will come into the dealership to advise them about the error. Now they have people who otherwise wouldn’t have come in and they might sell some of them a vehicle they otherwise weren’t in the market for. Brilliant.
Near Raleigh, North Carolina there is the town of Wendell, named after Oliver Wendell Holmes. What is unusual is that the stress is on the second syllable, so it should be pronounced wen-DELL, but I recently heard a commercial that got it wrong.
Back in the 1970s, there was a movie distributor, Sunn Classic Pictures, whose business model was that they would rent movie theaters in which to show their films, rather than the traditional distribution system, which let them keep 100% of the box office receipts. They specialized in G-rated films, like The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams, In Search of Noah’s Ark, etc., and they heavily marketed their films on local TV stations, with a voiceover announcer naming off the local theaters and cities where the film would be playing.
There’s a small city near Green Bay (where I grew up), Shawano, which is pronounced “SHAW-no.” The Sunn Classic announcer always called it “sha-WAH-no,” making it clear that he wasn’t local.
I think weird car dealers may be something to add to the “formerly ubiquitous” thread. I don’t see many of those kinds of ads anymore. Where are Cal Worthington’s successors (and their dogs “Spot”)?
Once on a road trip through Wisconsin, the driver said we were stopping for lunch in “Lions.” He reacted rather badly when I looked at the map and said “Oh, you mean Lyons,'” using the correct (French) pronunciation.
There was a stupid sitcom called “Step by Step” that was supposed to take place in Port Washington, WI. I grew up 13 miles from there and we used to go to Port in the summer to cruise girls when I was in high school. I want to know where that roller coaster is on the shore of Lake Michigan.
Anyway, there was an episode where the mom was going to meet someone at a bar in Mequon
Mequon is pronounced MECK WAN (like wand without the D). On the show they pronounced it ME KWAN.
Not only that, the dad was warning how Me Kwan was a very rough town
The poorest people in Mequon are still upper middle class.
St. Louis has a German-French-Italian history and a lot of street names are named after founding father types. Over the last 200 years, the locals have tinkered with vowel shifts, emphasis on the wrong syllables, and flat out mispronunciations - and they’ve stuck. Even our local news anchors sometimes err by pronouncing a street name as it would be pronounced in its orginal language.
We don’t need AI to screw up when we have good old fashioned I to do it!
