Dang, I came in here to post my favorite Wisconsin place name, Oconomowoc, but somebody beat me to it! That’s OK, though, I’ve got more:
Omro (OMM-row, not OHM-row)
Shawano (SHAW-no, not sha-WAH-no)
Berlin (BER-lin, not ber-LIN)
And all the “Wau-” names screw up outsiders as well: Wauwatosa, Waupaca, Waupun, Waunakee, Wautoma (in Waushara County), Wausau, and probably some others. Gotta love those Indian names.
I’ve probably told this story here before: A friend who was living in Kaukauna (kaw-KAW-na) at the time was traveling to Hawaii. Once there, some Hawaiian official asked to se her ID. His eyes lit up: “Ah, Ka-ooh-ka-OOH-na! What island is that on?”
And not about place names, but still related to the thread topic:
Mr. S once heard some radio guy, not from WI, talking about how weird we cheeseheads are – including going on and on about how we always go out for SAUSAGES on Friday nights. SAUSAGES??! What an idiot! The Friday night tradition in WI is and always has been THE FRIDAY FISH FRY. You can’t escape it. You wanna talk about crazy WI traditions, you don’t have to make them up – we have enough real ones! This moron would have known about the Friday fish fry if he had ever paid any attention at all once inside the state line. :rolleyes:
kunilou: I’m a native of Cuyahoga County, and the “kie-a-HAWG-a” pronunciation is preferred among the old guard, while newer arrivals generally say “kie-a-HOE-ga” (with each letter a pronounced as a schwa in both examples). I can’t recall hearing any of the other pronunciations you used, except from people who were mockingly relating conversations they had had with clueless outsiders.
Thank you Sternvogel, you came up with a better phonetic spelling of Rio than I did. I was running a mite low on the sleep when I did that post. Scarlet67, How someone could confuse our love of the Friday Fish Fry and our love of Brats is beyond me. After all you get the Friday Fish fry on fridays and Brats the rest of the week.
Around here, we call it WORST-uh-shure. (worst sounds similar to horse). The key to pronouncing it right is saying it really, really fast. That way, if you’re f’ing it up, no one knows the difference.
Brisbane is more like Briz-bnn, as Melbourne is Mel-bnn and Cairns is Care-nnz.
The sauce is WUSS-ta-sheer (first syllable rhymes with PUSS, not PUS), and while we’re at it Lancastershire is LANK-a-sheer, and Berkshire is BARK-sheer. Which makes its rhyming slang derivation berk rather odd, but there you go.
Moving on to English last names, Featherstonehaugh is pronounced as Fan-shaw, Cholmondeley as Chum-lee, Farquahar as Far-qwa, Colquhoun/Colquohoun as Cull-hoon and Saint John as Sin-jon. This kind of thing is the basis of the MP line about Raymond Luxury-Yacht being pronounced Throat-Warbler Mangrove.
A Brooklyn shibboleth
And it was so that the men of Brooklyn said unto him, “Art thou a Manhattanite?” If he said, “Nay,” then said they unto him, “Say now ‘Kosciusko.’” And he said “Kosh-ee-OOS-ko,” for he could not frame to pronounce the “c” as a “k”. Then they took him and slew him at the passages of the BQE.
A greater Detroit something-or-other
Lahser Road, a major suburban artery, may be pronounced as spelled (LAHzer) or as commonly misspelled (LASHer).
Tsawwassen, a ferry terminal outside Vancouver, is pronounced suh-WAH-sen…but only by bus drivers. Everyone else, even the recorded voice on the ferry, says tuh-WAH-sen.
I grew up in Fountain Valley, the suburban sprawl neighbor of Westminster, and everyone I knew called it Westminister.
When I lived in Seattle, my non-native stature was revealed the first few times I tried to pronounce Puyallup, Snoqualmie or Issaquah. Unfortunately, the provincial PNWers don’t take well to us CA folks invading their mildewy state, so I quickly learned to pronounce like a native to blend in.
There are lots of native names in Florida. It was always fun to hear the non-Floridians muck up Kissimmee. (Its kih-SIM-mee, not KISS-ih-mee.)
Caloosahatchee and Okeechobee aren’t too badly mangled; I think people just get put off by the length of the words and give up somewhere in the middle, randomly adding -ee syllables in.
(ka-LOO-sah-HACH-ee and OH-kah-CHOE-bee).
Choctawhatchee is chock-taw-HACH-ee, not choct-ah-WATCH-ee. (If you ever see hatchee in a Florida name, it means river or creek - river of the Choctaws.)
Islamorada is EYE-luh-more-AH-duh, not I-SLAM-uh-DOOR-uh. (Really, I’ve heard people say that.)
And the old timers in Miami used to call it my-AM-uh.
As for the mid-west:
Had relatives from Missouri (muh-ZUR-uh).
I always loved Salina (sah-LYE-nuh), Kansas, but I’ve never heard the Saline river pronounced. Does it keep with the town pronunciation? suh-LINE?
So the guy that leased the hunting rights to the adjacent property had trouble starting his truck and when he walked to my house to ask for help, he introduced himself as a “professional tracker”. My first thought was, is there much business for a “professional tracker” in New Jersey? I went and helped him start his truck and them we walked around some, just so I could get to know who/what he was all about. After a while he noticed that I was in flip-flops and asked, “Aren’t you worried about being snake bit?” And I replied casually, “No, cottonmouths are closer to the water than we are and you always smell a rattler long before you see one.” I thought, him being a “professional tracker” and all, he would have known such things. I honestly thought that his knee-high snake boots were for show.
But the mispronunciation makes an aviation joke work. Before U.S. airspace was reclassified, there were Airport Radar Service Areas. ‘Did you hear they’re putting a new ARSA in Florida? Kissimmee ARSA!’
If you pronounce Montevideo, Minnesota “Mon-ta-vi-AY-oh” you’re going to get some funny looks. It’s “Mon-ta-VIDeo” (with video pronounced like video tape). Most of the time, though, it comes out “Monnavideo.”
The state is ARKnsaw. The river is arKANzas (as in Kansas). Natives of the state are arKANzans. Natives of the river are mostly mud puppies and catfish.
Please, someone from north of Sacramento - they’re still called short ‘a’ amonds, not ahhmonds, or worse, allmonds - right? They were when I went to school in Chico, just a short distance from Orland, where they grow a lot of amonds.
I was making one of my CA-to-WA drives a couple of years ago, and it took me a while to understand what ‘ammins’ were. The Almond Growers Association (or something like that) kept saying ‘ammins’ during an NPR interview, and it didn’t connect that the spokesman would mispronounce ‘almonds’.
