Foreign City Names in America

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Paul Tucker. I’m calling from Dillsburg, Pennsylvania.

V-I-L?

Like the pickle.

Oh, Dillsburg!

Oh.

Dillsburg.

All right.

But we have nothing to do with pickles here.

Okay.

Okay, great. What would you like to talk with us about?

Well, I’ve been watching the news coverage of the flooding along the Mississippi.

Mm—

And I kept hearing about the high water threatening the town of Cairo, Illinois.

And then just downstream, another town of New Madrid, M-A-D-R-I-D, in Missouri.

And the way they said the names of these towns made me think of a couple other places in Pennsylvania.

We have North Versailles.

It’s spelled like Versailles.

Yeah, yeah.

But they say, everybody says Versailles.

Yep, there’s one of those in Kentucky, too. I live not far from that.

And elsewhere in Missouri.

Oh, really?

Mm—

And then I also am familiar with the town way up in Maine called Calais that’s spelled like Calais.

Oh.

C-A-L-A-I-S.

Mm—

Interesting stuff.

Yeah.

I’m familiar with a bunch of those towns you mentioned along the Mississippi River because my folks, my father’s people, are from the other side of the river in Missouri.

And so towns like Cairo and New Madrid were names that I heard growing up.

They’d be on the local television station out of Cape Girardeau or wherever else down there.

So your question is, what’s the deal?

Why aren’t they pronouncing them like the original places, right?

Yeah.

That’s a big question.

And there’s a short answer.

And it starts with because.

And does it end with a period, just because?

Because, yeah.

Thanks for calling, Paul.

Paul, it kind of does.

Here’s the thing.

You set up a town like Cairo, Illinois, on the banks of the Mississippi, and clearly you’re hoping to pick up a little historical influence.

Maybe you think it’s lucky to name it after this big town in Egypt.

Maybe you know the town through your studies or your travels.

You read about it in books.

Yeah, you read about it in books.

But maybe you’ve never been there.

Maybe you’re not the kind of guy who hangs out in the kind of circles where they talk about Cairo.

And so you do the best that you can.

You pick a pluck, an important sounding place name from a book, you put it on a map, and that’s your town.

Yeah, I think that’s a key, don’t you think, from a book rather than from TV or radio, which probably didn’t exist then.

And maybe the kind of folks who would name a place like that originally wouldn’t be learned, you know?

And even further, names get corrupted and connections are lost from the past and they.

And they take their own thing and they become a new place.

And so it’s kind of appropriate that a new place would have its own style of pronunciation versus following the old pronunciation.

Right, and it kind of becomes a shibboleth among the locals.

I mean, I’m embarrassed to tell you guys that I was in New York looking for Houston Street, you know.

And it’s pronounced Houston, and I’m sure that just labeled me as a rube right there.

Yeah, it’s named.

And that’s the other thing.

Sometimes the origin of these places, it’s not what you think.

Houston Street in New York City is not named after Sam Houston.

It’s not the same origin as the place in Texas.

And so we have a lot of different reasons that can be different.

What’s really interesting to me is how often they’re so different, even among the locals.

Martha hit upon just the thing I wanted to talk about there, which is even the locals will disagree about the pronunciation.

Just ask people who live in Las Vegas what the name of their state is. There are three different dominant pronunciations. Three. Three. And some of them will swear with different levels of ferocity that their pronunciation is the one.

Is it Nevada, Nevada, or Nevada? People will use the local pronunciation that they prefer as a way of determining who is from their part of town, much less from another town altogether.

Are you from my side of the river? Do I know you from the grocery store? Having these different pronunciations for a town are a kind of way of doing that. So they kind of self-reinforce.

Even if Versailles sounds abhorrent to those of us who have actually been to Versailles and looked into the mirrored halls, right?

Paul, does Versailles bother you?

Well, I always thought it was just kind of funny. A silly Pennsylvania people don’t know how to pronounce it, and it has a life of its own now.

Yeah, what’s up with yins anyway?

Paul, thank you so much for giving us a call. This was an incredibly interesting topic.

Well, thank you very much.

Thanks, Paul.

Take care of yourself.

Bye-bye.