I got 8 right- had to guess on Laredo/Toledo and Worcester/Brownsville, and got both wrong. As it turns out, Worcester and Brownsville are so close as to make the difference negligible.
Once I caught on that the answers to all these were SUPPOSED to be counterintutitve, I figured Phoenix must have passed Dallas. It’s not that Dallas has shrunk, of coiurse, just that Phoenix is growing faster.
My home, Austin, is knocking at the top ten. I almost expected it to be there already!
I got 9 out of 10. I missed the Worcester/Brownsville question even though I live fairly close to Worcester.
Worcester is deceptive in general. Ask people to name the largest cities in New England some time. People think Boston and then maybe Providence followed by Springfield, MA or Manchester, NH. Burlington, VT may get thrown in there if they aren’t familiar with the region.
Nope, Worcester is the 2nd biggest city in New England. Even most New Englanders do not know that. I didn’t until a few years ago.
I guess them all since I assumed that they were all the ones you’d think they weren’t. However, this is somewhat misleading as the population figures are for the city proper and not the metropolitan area which is what we tend to think of. Jacksonville and Columbus, for example, have large areas while some cities are quite small and are surrounded by other quite built up areas.
10/10, though I completely guessed on the last one. (Well, I guess I guessed on about 8 of them, but I have no concept at all of Worchester or Brownsville.)
I intentionally pronounce it like the sauce and stretch it out to a full four syllables. Because the name from it came from the same town in England the sauce was named for.
I do this just to screw with New Englanders.
Besides, there is no way that word should consist of only two syllables. If you want to pronounce it as two syllables, just spell it that way and get the whole business over with.