It is recess, on a playground in Carmel River School, sometime in early 1977. I am trying to worm my way into a circle of popular boys. I strain to follow their conversation.
One says, “I live so far up the valley, I have to get on the bus at 5:30 every morning.”
I jump in. “Man, you live all the way up in Cachugua?”
I live walking distance to school, but I am an introverted boy who has studied the bus schedule posted on the bulletin board outside the principal’s office. I am fascinated by the distance that some of my classmates travel to come to campus. Carmel Unified serves a vast area of Monterey County, and some kids do ride the bus for two hours each way.
I thought the “Man” made me sound cool. (No one will say “dude” in our part of the world for another decade.) What I didn’t count on was the way I butchered the name of the tiny hamlet in the far eastern end of the Carmel Valley. I pronounced it “Kah-chew-goo-ugh,” which seemed reasonably phonetic. I had never heard it said, only seen it written on the bus schedule.
The boys explode in laughter and tell me that if I were not such a stupid ugly faggot, I would know that the correct pronunciation is “Kah-SHAW-wuh.” I retreat in shame, cry in private, and then question my teacher after school. Mr. Douglas affirms that the popular boys are correct. “But honestly, Hugo, it’s an Indian name. I don’t suppose anyone knows how they originally pronounced it. Locals just started saying it the way that made sense to them, and it stuck.”
For the last forty-seven years, inspired by my humiliation, I have been fascinated not only with how people in a particular region say certain place names, but more importantly, how they respond when an outsider pronounces that name incorrectly.
This past weekend, the guerilla British poet Brian Bilston released a new poem online. It mocks the current fascination with the whereabouts of the Princess of Wales, and the rumors that her husband, Prince William, has been having an affair with Rose Hanbury, the marchioness of Cholmendeley. (I do not wish to opine on these rumors, but since I have this thing lately about people who are surprisingly Jewish, I note very, very parenthetically that Hanbury’s husband David – the 7th Marquess of Cholmendeley – is a descendent of the Rothschilds and a cousin several times removed of the Jewish war poet Siegfried Sassoon.)
Bilston’s poem teases everyone who is astonished to learn that Cholmendeley is pronounced “Chumley.”
Name Calling
Some names like Beauchamp,
get mispronounced
unless you teauchamp,
thought the Marchioness of Cholmondeley,
glolmondeley.
Beauchamp, a fine old Anglo-Norman name, is pronounced “Beacham” in England. Americans stumble on that name often, just as they do with Magdalen College, Oxford (“maudlin”) or the name St. John (“Sinjin”). There’s a nice Rowan Atkinson bit about the mispronunciation of St. John in Four Weddings and a Funeral.
It is not just the English, or the tough boys from Carmel Valley, who take particular pleasure in pronouncing place names in ways that seem to defy phonetics and common sense.
In his classic song “South Texas Girl,” Lyle Lovett offers this verse:
You said the name Corpus Christi means the body of Jesus
Pronounce it Refugio city folks they don't know
It looks like Palacios but sounds like ‘Palashes’
Just listen the next time you’re watchin' Sid Lasher
(Lyle, and his fellow South Texans, pronounce the “g” in Refugio as if it were a second “r;” Sid Lasher was a beloved Houston TV weatherman in the 1960s.)
The song is presumably autobiographical, as Lyle recalls happy car rides with his parents, and how he listened as they explained the world as they needed him to know it. The “You” that opens the verse is directed to his mother, who instructs her son what city folks don’t know – and what locals, if they are to be known as such, must.
To be a native son of somewhere, as Lovett reminds us, is often to prove you belong with how a place name comes off your tongue. Yes, it looks like Palacios, and someone from Madrid or Mexico City or Medellin would pronounce it in a particular way and feel certain they were doing so correctly, but locals know, they’d be wrong. Palashes. Kah-SHAW-wuh. Sinjin.
I’ve seen countless memes on Facebook that begin “You know you’re from ______ if you pronounce _____ like ________.” Angelenos never tire of pointing out that not only do we always put the English definite article before our freeways (“Take the 405 to the 10 to the 60”) but the Spanish definite article in “La Brea” is pronounced very differently than it is in “La Cienega.” San Pedro, Los Feliz, Sepulveda – you will be instantly marked as an outsider if you say these in the traditionally Spanish way. In Central California, the residents of Paso Robles say “Pass-oh Rowbulls” and those who live in Los Gatos say “Loss Gattus.”
Some of these pronunciation differences are nearly universally understood. Just about everyone has heard of the Catholic university in South Bend, Indiana – and of the Catholic cathedral with the same name in Paris, France. You don’t need me to tell you to pronounce “Notre Dame” one way when you are describing the Fighting Irish, and another way when you are describing the magnificent, recently damaged, hunchback-infested church. Both names pay tribute to the same Mother of God in the same language, but geography and history determine how the “Notre” and the “Dame” form on our tongues.
They pronounce what they serve differently
I can’t imagine that there are many regions in the world where long-time residents do not use odd place-name pronunciations as a tool for separating locals from tourists. As someone who is both obsessed with manners, and still smarting from the wounds of fourth grade, I am very careful how I approach a mispronunciation. When a tourist asks if it’s worth visiting the harbor area near San Pedro, and pronounces the first syllable of Pedro as “Pay” or “Peh,” I usually say, “Yes, it can be worth a visit. And just so you know, we have this weird way of saying it. We call it San Peedrow, or even just Peedrow.”
When traveling, I try to ask, when unsure, and I accept correction gladly. The key is this: it may be absurd that Cholmendeley is “Chumley”, and Palacios is “Palashes”, and Pedro is “Peedrow.” It may be absurd that sometimes “Dame” rhymes with “calm” and in another context with “came.” You are welcome to say that these are violations of the rules of particular languages, and you are right in the universal. You are mistaken in the particular.
A gentleman, as I have been reminded all my life, is careful not to make universals out of his particulars.
We do well not to mock these regionalisms. We who have regionalisms do well not to mock those who do not understand our peculiar names for towns and streets and local landmarks. We do especially well if we can take the largest lesson of all from this: human beings can look at the exact same thing – say, a written word – and reasonably and fairly pronounce that word differently.
We live in an age suspicious of relativism and subjective experience. What’s in vogue these days is fierce moral clarity, absolute certainty, and a missionary zeal to force those damned ignorant fools on the other side to think and believe in the right way. In a small and delightful way, regional pronunciations – and the way we will all, sooner or later, butcher a place name – remind us to be a little less certain, a little more curious, and a lot more humble.
I love a weird city/town/place name. My favorite when I lived in CA was Port Hueneme, and back here in NC, it's Fuquay-Varina.