American tourist stopping you

[Headgardener]

War-sest-er-shire?

Oi don't you take the urine out of my home county.

 

[Cubist]

This area has some deliberate mispronunciations, and some that always confuse outsiders.

Slaithwaite for example can be pronounced Slath-wate or Slawwitt, but never Slayth-wate.

Golcar has a silent "l" so is pronounced Go-kar.

Treaure hunt with whatshername in the jump suit and helicopter visited Mytholmroyd in Calderdale. The locals call it My-thum-roid, but the BBC commentator managed somehow to add another syllable. , Mith-oll-um-roid if my memory serves me.

 

[Arch]

Sorry to puncture the general merriment, but many of the US pronounciations are actually closer to the original English pronounciations than our current degraded versions.

I don't care, we're still right. It's our country....

Costessy, on the edge of Norwich, is a good one.

 

[Over The Hill]

I bet I'm the same in Wales.

I know I am.

I was once asked by an American where "loobooroo" was.

Loughborough apparently.

So apart from you being familiar with the name by having heard it before, how can the American tell if it is
Luff-bor-ah
Luc-ba-ro
Lo-bo-ruff or any of the seemingly random ways ough is pronounced?

Is it not a bit odd to write something in a ridiculous way and then laugh at someone who does not know this secret code of how to say the word?

Just up the road from here is a place called Chineham, how would you pronounce it?

 

[g00se]

Wymondham in Norfolk = Wind'am. Which confuses most people really.

"Yew not frum rund ere?"

Wymondham = Windam
Costessey = Cossy
Happisburgh = Haizebrugh
Cley-Next-the-Sea = Cl-eye (and its about a mile inland).

And just for being odd:

Potter Heigham (needs to be prononced with so much raised inflection at the end , folks think you're surprised to be there).

Repps-with-Bastwick (eh)?

and Lammas (or Lamas depending on which side of the village you drive in thorugh first)

 

[Arch]

So apart from you being familiar with the name by having heard it before, how can the American tell if it is
Luff-bor-ah
Luc-ba-ro
Lo-bo-ruff or any of the seemingly random ways ough is pronounced?

Is it not a bit odd to write something in a ridiculous way and then laugh at someone who does not know this secret code of how to say the word?

I can't remember it now, but isn't there a sentence that uses all the 'ough' variations - something about a ploughboy coughing through something....

 

[Arch]

Thanks to google:

"The dough-faced ploughboy coughed and hiccoughed his way through Loughborough to the lough"

 

[Riding in Circles]

The americans all go to scotland looking for the ancestry that their polish grandfather lied about having.

 

[Moodyman]

Is it not a bit odd to write something in a ridiculous way and then laugh at someone.

It is. I've worked with a few a Americans and they insist that theirs is a truer English than ours. Ours is a bastardised English with European & colonial influences

Take the word 'Centre', which like a lot of our words has French origins. Theirs, 'Center', is closer to the correct pronunciation.

 

[brokenbetty]

An indigenous British Girl once asked 'What's a Fassia?' (Fascia).

That is how you pronounce it, isn't it? Unless you're speaking Latin.

 

[Dan B]

My favourite is not pronunciation, but due to the US habit of dropping the suffix "street" (or "road" or "avenue" or whatever) from street names. As witness the apocryphal lost-looking couple wandering outside Trinity College Oxford asking where Selfridges was - they had previously been at Marble Arch, asked for directions to "Oxford", and been put on the coach to the city of that name ...

 

[Slowgrind]

Yeah, I just ignore them.

 

[Fnaar]

Cambois in Northumberland = cam-uss

 

[Moodyman]

I've exchanged emails with Czech colleague many times, but today met her face to face for the first time.

Me: Hello Jana (with a J).
Her: Yana actually.

Oops.