More like bear LEAN (but not quite)
They might now consider the place more détruit than détroit. 
Mischievous. Many people add a pretentious sounding extra syllable to it that just doesn’t exist, since there is NO i after the v.
I somehow have trouble saying “Bear LEAN” without adding “mein Führer!” :dubious:
I’ve always heard “Shane,” but then I’m from Minnesota.
Cairo (KAY-roh) Illinois
New Madrid (MAD-rid), Missouri
“In a musty old hall in Detroy-it they prayed…”
If it’s good enough for the Lightfoot, it’s good enough for me.
Brilliant bit, but “ignorant” is an adjective, not a noun. :dubious:
Croton NY: ( KRO-uhn ) Long “O”. Anyone who goes out of their way to make it two syllables and enunciates the “t” is a weirdo.
Newark NJ: ( Nork ) Using two syllables is forgivable if the vowels are very flat.
Yes. I listened to all three volumes of Shelby Foote’s The Civil War on audiobooks and after 60 or so hours both of those still bothered the hell out of me.
Niche - neesh. Makes me slappy.
In Green Bay, where I grew up, we had several streets with French names. Only, most of them weren’t French, exactly; they were Belgian, as, historically, Green Bay had a lot of people descended from Walloons (French-speaking Belgians).
So, we had a Grignon Street, and a Beaupre Street. Pronounced “GRIG-nun” and “BOO-pree,” respectively.
There are also two suburbs named for French priests who had been among the early explorers of the area, neither of which are really pronounced in a French fashion. Allouez (named for Jesuit missionary Jean-Claude Allouez) is pronounced “AL-uh-way.” De Pere (named for several French priests, including Allouez and Jean Nicolet) is pronounced “Dee-PEER.”
While GRIG-nun and dee-PEER are both pretty grating in French, sort of like pronouncing “New York” as “Nave your-EEK”, it’s different with AL-uh-way - that’s just an extreme example of speaking French with an English accent.
Whereas niche pronounced “nitch” doesn’t happen in British English. Well, it might, but only if people have read it but never heard it: “neesh” is simply the only way to say it here.
MoonMoon and Thudlow Boink both write of “aunt” pronounced to rhyme with “taunt” or “haunt”: to one, it sounds normal and right, whereas “ant” sounds ridiculous; to the other, it’s the “taunt / haunt”-rhyming pronunciation which seems absurd.
These posts have this Brit struggling a little, as regards assorted pronunciations of the word for a parent’s sister. I’m from the more southerly part of England, and brought up mostly with “BBC English / Received” pronunciation – in which I and pretty well all fellow-Brits encountered, pronounce the world like “ahnt”. I understand that in the north of England it’s often said like “ant” (as the insect); but have virtually never encountered this first-hand.
I have long been aware that in North America, the word is often pronounced “ant”: but the “taunt / haunt” pronunciation, from anyone, has been unknown to me before today. You live and learn !
As a child, coming across Ogden Nash’s little verse
“The anteater
Is an uncle-beater;
On the other hand, the skunk’ll
Beat his aunt and eat his uncle.”
puzzled me a bit – having not yet become aware that “aunt” is often said “ant” west of the Atlantic; I thought that Ogden was just being a bit randomly goofy and weird. Learning of the American pronunciation option, allowed me to properly see the point of the jingle.
This, plus Yorkshire Pudding’s “octopodes”; put me in mind of a peripheral feature of Harry Turtledove’s fantasy novels set in the imaginary land of Videssos. Said country is quite closely modelled on the historical Byzantine Empire; including names, and excerpts of its supposed language, being quite strongly Greek-sounding.
The octopus is a creature which has some slight prominence in these books, largely as an item on the menu: the Videssians make the word’s plural, “octopoi”. Well, it’s Harry’s fantasy universe, and he can have pronunciations in it, whatever he wants them to be…
Scent of a Woman. Truman Capote and his rich friends were rubbing it in Robin’s face that he had to spend his Thanksgiving break being Michael Corleone’s seeing-eye dog instead of going skiing in Gdańsk with them.
Or maybe they were going to spend Thanksgiving skiing in Vermont, and mockingly asked him if he would be joining them for Christmas in Gdańsk (no). And my memory is a little hazy, but ISTR that one of the rich kids was razzing another rich kid about the way he pronounced it.
Anyway, yeah. Scent of a Woman.
It is found in Britain (a special case, I suspect – pronounced in the way that will rhyme) in the rude limerick:
A pious young lady of Chichester
Made all of the saints in their niches stir;
And each morning at matin
Her breast in pink satin
Made the Bishop of Chichester’s breeches* stir.
*pronounced “britches”
This Yorkshireman can confirm it: while aunts and ants may differ in both stature and spelling, they’re unified in pronunciation.
Okay, well, now I’m confused, because “ahnt” has the same vowel sound as “haunt”. So I think we’re pronouncing aunt the same way.