I know of a word that I have always said wrong and finally someone told me I was pronouncing it wrong. The word/name is "Virginia". I have a cousin by the name then there's the state of course. I've always said "Vir-jeen-yuh" until someone told me it wasn't "JEEN" it was "jin". Well I guess it's a Texas "thang".

That reminds me, dances, about my favorite show, American Pickers.” Mike says “pea-nit” but everyone I know says “PEA-nut” with heavy emphasis on the first syllable.

This is the word/name I want to hear: Pudgeder! I can't imagine how to pronounce it. PUDGEDER. WHERE ARE YOU?

I eat puh-kahns and a-kerns fall from my oak trees. My house has a roof (rhymes with goof) and there is a PAH-tio in the back yard.

I'm here sheesh!!

It's "pudge-der."

It was the dog's nick name. ;-)

My Grandmother, from Kansas, always said "warsh" for wash. In church my sister & I would always giggle when she sang, "are you warshed, in the blood"

meer-ror =mirror

Car-mel =carmel

I remember as a kid asking someone what "care-uh-mel" was. LOL

Thanks, pudgeder! Sounds just like it looks, but i just couldn't get it. It's cute!

My Irish grandmother always said warsh for wash. In Pa the Lizard Creek was the Lizzie Crick. I knew what they meant.

I worked with a woman who used to say a pee-can goes under the bed. The right way is pee-con

Where I live, EVERYONE says "crick" instead of creek...like fingernails on a chalkboard!

My elder relatives (great aunts & uncles, & G-parents) who lived in Arkansas also said "crick."

Folks here say crick. I must sound very snobbish with creek.

I worked with a woman from the states who said "pin" instead of pen. She couldn't tell the difference when we would say pen

I first heard the term, bye-bye, at the University of Illinois at Champaign, Illinois. I noticed that it was spoken most often by students from Chicago, particularity the girls. That parting phrase spread throughout the campus until nearly all were using it. Its been 57 years since I was there, but find myself saying, bye-bye, to dear friends. I, too, caught the habit.

Louiseab, i cant hear a difference in pin and pen, either.

I can't hear a different in pin and/or pen either. I say "pin" for either word.

My mil, who was Irish, used to say GAR-aj, rhymes with carriage

My daughter says cim-a- nim for cinnamon.I say Woof for wolf.

I love the Family Guy deal on WH words if that counts.

One of my wife's now deceased relatives was a woman who had to drop out of school at something like the 9th grade level, during the Depression years, to work to support her family. When times got better, she never made an effort to get more education. She didn't read much and paid little attention to the world around her.

When it came to word pronunciation, all she had to draw on was her recollections of how others would say them. Whether right or wrong. She mangled even the most simple of place names and common words because she couldn't always remember what she'd heard and had no mental reference of how any particular word was written. In this case, it was simple mispronunciations rather than regional usage, The small effort required to not always come off sounding like a moron (sorry to say) was never made. It would have been as if she showed up to public places with her hair in disarray, her mangled pronunciations was the thing everyone remembered and spoke about after each instance of seeing her.

I hope this lady did not know how her speech impacted her her life and caused some to think badly of her. It sounds as if she was ridiculed. Very sad that she had so little education.

I was talking with a friend about place-name pronunciations with a friend referring to places like Lima, Ohio, (pronounced like the bean not the city in Peru), or a local city Staunton, VA (pronounced as if the "u" is not there "Stan-ton") or a local street Rio Rd. (pronounced Rye-o Rd not Ree-o Rd). He was arguing that however the local people pronounce is the de facto correct pronunciation, irrespective of how wrong it seems to others from outside the area.

I agreed for the most part, but argued that in instances where the locals systemically mis-pronounce every word with a given sound or phoneme, their pronunciation of a word that seemingly contains that mis-pronounced sound may well be similarly be mis-pronounced. The example I used was given the propensity to pronounce every "r" with an "ah" sound, the fact they they say "Haahvaahd" doesn't make that the correct name of the place. The name is "Harvard" and the locals systematically mis-pronounce it.

Good luck with Demonbruen if anyone ever comes to Nashville ;) It was named after a person, and as you probably know, names of people are passed down over time and change. I can tell you it's not demon-bruin

I find it so sad, particularly in those hard years of the depression, that someone would be so harshly critiqued. I can only think that lady was judged by a bunch of snobs.

Yes I feel bad for that lady. Wonder if family even knowing why she dropped out of school looked down on her. Personally I see her regardless of how she pronounced words a family savior so to speak.

Think of the unkempt appearance analogy to understand. Something easy to fix but left as is.

This woman, not a close relative, was obstinate about her ignorance and it particularly frustrated her (adult) kids. In her adult years she had plenty of opportunity, time and means to raise her knowledge and abilities but didn't think it necessary. To her immediate family, she wasn't a hero so much as a stubborn fool.

I saw her rarely but she was really off the scale stupid. That spoke to her attitudes and lack of interest and effort for self improvement , not the lack of formal education.

There is a difference, i suppose.

I've spent the last hour thinking about my grandmother and how she treated her sister, who gave up a great deal to help support nieces and nephews.

Well that was rude, elmer. Must her attitudes and lack of interest/effort be labeled with a derogatory name such as "stupid?"

Elmer, is it possible that your wife's relative had an undetected hearing loss? If this was the case, it could be that she wasn't fully aware of how words are pronounced and also missed other auditory information, handicapping her in many areas of life.

Littlebug, that was how her family referred to her. Their word. Think about it with whichever other word you prefer. Or don't.

Stacey, I don't believe she had a hearing disability. I myself experienced one of her kids once commenting about an egregious mispronunciation and she responded "who cares".

Anyone living around Austin, Tx will know a lot of strange pronunciations of towns. I'm blank on them except we lived in a town spelled Manchaca and the people there pronounced it "Man-shack". I just remember there were a bunch of towns over there pronounced differently from how they are spelled but I can't recall them at the moment.

I had a call from a friend in Louisiana this morning and she reminded me of. the time we spent on their Potty boat and how much fun our kids had in the whaaata.......... or at least that's how it sounded to me!! LOL

Same pronunciation might be used to describe a speaker from Baaston.

When my wife was in college, she drove across the country with her roommate who was born and raised in Boston. They stopped for a night in Kansas, and in the morning my wife went to the front desk to checkout. While she was checking out, her roommate came up to the other front desk clerk and asked "Do you have a bucket for ice? my cooler is too big to fit under the spout in the ice machine" The clerk just stared at her. After a couple of seconds the clerk in front of my wife reached under the counter and pulled forth an ice bucket, and handed to the roommate. After she left, the clerk that handed her the bucket turned to the other one and said "You didn't understand a single word she said, did you?"

Not only is it not nice to ridicule the way people speak, but homogenized English, in my view, is poorer for the loss of Regional accents. My mother's aunt and uncle lived in deep east Texas, way on out there in the country. My dear Aunt Leone said things like piller for pillow and winder for window. Her beautiful daughter was the first one in that side of the family to go to college. She became a teacher, or, as they said, she "made a teacher". My cousin was very self-conscious about her background, and she made a real effort to speak very proper English and to enunciate. Maybe to over enunciate. Pillow was almost pilleau, window was windeau etc. After one visit, as we were on our way home, my father laughingly said that he was glad Charlotte had not seen any insects, because she might have said "eau, look, there is a Spideau." I hope Aunt Leone never realized that her daughter was embarrassed by her speech.

I'm not saying this is me, nor am I saying it is right, nor that it may matter, but strong and twangy (especially Southern and some Midwestern) accents heard by people from elsewhere are often interpreted as reflecting poorly on the speaker. Perhaps even suggesting the speaker may be lacking an education, or worse. And those leaving such areas to go away to college often find they prefer to soften their accents and speak in a more moderate way. TV personalities from areas with strong accents try to lose extreme pronunciation habits. Your cousin seemingly did too.

There was a lot of unkind stereotyping on TV and in movies in years past but maybe you remember the extremely exaggerated accent used by actor Jim Nabors when playing the role of Gomer Pyle. That wasn't used to suggest his sophistication by any means.

Stereotyping of people based on their accents and tending to favor more urban than rural styles isn't a phenomenon just in the US and also not just in English.

Stereotyping of people based on their accents and tending to favor more
urban than rural styles isn't a phenomenon just in the US and also not
just in English.

For example see Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis (Welcome to the Sticks) , the top grossing French film of all time, which primarily derives its humor from unabashedly making fun of the speech and customs of the locals of far northern France.

About that rural pronunciation: I think sometimes rural pronunciation is a purer, older language form. I once dated a guy who ridiculed me for saying the word striped as stripe-ed. I did do some research and discovered that it probably just meant that my family had been speaking English longer than his family had.

Sylvia, do you think of that as some mark of distinction?

Bob, there's a cultural component to what you've described. While many cultures historically told jokes with another group depicted as the dumb brunt (English told Irish jokes, Americans at one time told Polish jokes), French tell Belgian jokes. The far north of France is by the Belgian border and so along with a dumb farmer rural component, there's some implied association because of geographic proximity.

Distinction? The only value judgment I was making, as you are smart enough to know, is that it is not nice to ridicule people for the way they speak English, or the way they speak whatever language they're speaking. It may be perfectly normal, it may be an older, purer form of the language.

Purer? Seriously?

Sylvia Gordon, I say both striped and strī-pəd. Both are listed in the dictionary.

I say striped like I say typed. My sister says strip ed.

Sue

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/purer

purer

Contents [hide]

• 1English
  • 1.1Adjective
  • 1.2Anagrams
• 2German
  • 2.1Adjective

English[edit]

Adjective[edit]

purer

1. comparative form of pure: more pure

Anagrams[edit]

• purre

German[edit]

Adjective[edit]

purer

1. comparative degree of pur

Blessed/bless-ed is another word like striped. There are more, but I can't think of them right now LOL.

Seems a renewed interest in this. Try a serious test at http://www.wordorigins.org/index.php?URL=http://www.nytimes.com%2Finteractive%2F2013%2F12%2F20%2Fsunday-review%2Fdialect-quiz-map.html%3F_r%3D0  . Will take about five minutes, perhaps only two.

Test was interesting. I'm very firmly in the south. Miss i SIP eee/ Al a BAM a.

Some months ago I related a story where I went to a hardware store to buy a tarp. Rather than asking for a "Tarp", I used what I had learned as the proper name of the item: Tarpoleon (pronounced as rhyming with Napoleon) The clerk responded "I don't know what that is", I asked again for a "Tarp" and she directed me to the right location saying I've never heard that word before.

I was posting that story here as an example of how little training workers in big-box hardware stores receive, and I was surprised to see the word "Tarpoleon" underlined with a red squiggle, so I looked up the word in another tab for the correct spelling, and found not only was my spelling incorrect, but the way I had been raised to pronounce it was also also simply wrong.

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=tarpoleon

Rats! I tried the test twice and both times the page crashed well into the test. :(

I saw that when I was looking up the spelling. Interesting that their definition references me by name:

• "Bob, tie down the tarpoleon over the cargo in the pick-up. We don't want it wet before we get to Memphis."

Despite that page listing that spelling and pronunciation I now consider myself to have been wrong all my life, and will make a conscious effort to not ever use that pronunciation ever again. Just as when I learned that I had been raised to mispronounce "wash" as "warsh" I made a conscious effort to correct myself.