Benny Hill’s estate called for you. They were asking something about royalties.
FWIW, my mother’s, mother’s, mother’s, mother was named “Missouri” but the family pronounced it, "Miz 'zʊ rə. I don’t know when she was born, but the earliest US census in which she appears is 1850.
The correct pronunciation of Missouri is M’zoorah or M’zooruh.
Not in my part of the state, it isn’t.
Now go warsh your mouth out with soap. 
to me its Missouree.
I do have to mention that I saw a lady on the weather channel correctly say the city name Nevada. I was quite impressed.
Very well, thank you! “Awaia”? 
why the insults/hatred?
but it’s inconsistent–if you want to pronounce Louis French-style, then you should pronounce Saint as San rather than Saant
I just want to point out that the post you’re commenting about was made in February 2011, and that poster has not been on this Board since 2013.
Audibly it’s not much different than Missourah with the different accents, but I always took the final “i” to be the short i sound from “hit”. "Missour-i "
(yes, replying to old posts on an old post)
Dang near twenty years and nobody but Jasmine hit on the Awaii/hawaii thing…sigh, well can’t blame nobody but m’seff fer that.
To answer the decrepit op factually, about Awaii anyway, because that used to be the anglicised way of pronouncing Hawaii way back then. There is an entire county, river, and mountain range in my state named Owyhee which is a corruption of Awaii. Here’s a wikipedia link that explains how a mainland mountain range gets named a version of “Hawai’i” (it’s under etymology instead of history section)