praynunce tis namm cerekly

I was just visiting a site and saw a comment by someone named Vera, which is what prompted this whole entry. Thank you, random Vera, for your name’s inspirational qualities! Anywho, can you think of any particular names of places or people that irk you because of their pronunciation? I can, as I’m about to show you… umm, now!:

• Vera – All my life, I thought this was vair-uh, then finally a friend corrected me about a Vera Bradley bag. I can actually see why this should be pronounced as veer-ah, though: the a drags out that e, making it long. I just have a problem with this name because I thought for years it was pronounced differently than it is, so the correct pronunciation takes some extra thought processing on my end.
• Haggin Hall – This is my first piece of evidence that Lexington, KY is on crack. Not being a native of this city myself, when I first came to UK and saw the name of that dormitory, I immediately thought “hag-in hall.” Oh no, apparently, because everyone says it hay-gan hall. Tell me how the %$@*(#@ you get that pronunciation out of that word! This irritates me to no end, especially when others correct me saying hag-in. Is it Bilbo Bay-gans? Tay-gan for tagging? Lay-gan for lagging? I could go on, because there are a ton of words ending in -ging, and if you’re a southerner the -g sound mysteriously disappears anyway, making it like Haggin. I’ve been told hay-gan was how the guy for whom the building was named actually pronounced his name, and all I have to say to that is… Um, dude, you said your name wrong. Change the spelling if you want English to work with your stupid pronunciation.
• Mason Headley – My second piece of evidence that Lexington natives are crazy. That street name is pronounced may-son (sounds fine) heed-ley. Wait, what? What makes ‘ea’ have an ee sound? Is it the e two letters over? That doesn’t make sense to me because e is a weak vowel, so I didn’t think it could adjust the pronunciation of preceding vowels. I say this as may-son head-ley.
• Versailles – The third bit of evidence that Lexington people, and actually everyone in central Kentucky, are wacky: they pronounce that French word, which is the name of a city near Lexington, as ver-sales. Now if I had no geographical knowledge (which comes pretty close, actually, but I have a little!) and had never heard of Versailles, France, I’d agree with that pronunciation. However, I’m kind of, fairly, pretty, completely sure that the city in France came first. What’s up with us stealing their city names and then English-izing them? If we were going to change the pronunciation, why not change the spelling to be less French, too? Wouldn’t Versales have worked just as well? Every time I see “Versailles” and know it’s intended to be Lexington’s neighboring city, and not the one in France, I mentally have to correct my pronunciation of ver-sigh and bastardize it to ver-sales.
• proselytize – For years I said this as prah-SELL-ih-tize, then Kathy one day corrected me that it’s PRAZ-uhl-ih-tize, shocking the devil out of me because it totally doesn’t look like it should be said that way. I guess I see the syllables differently: pro-sel-y-tize, as opposed to pros-el-y-tize, which leads to the correct pronunciation.
• awry – This one looks like such a neat, predictable word. Two pleasant little syllables, chopped right down the middle: aw-ree. Nope, it’s gotta be difficult. I found out about this one from my dad, who said he had made the same mistake I did when he was in middle or high school, and that a teacher corrected him. Ah-rhy indeed!

I don’t think I could ever live with French because it seems like they leave out too many syllables for the letters they have. Maybe I should switch to Spanish entirely, because I think it’s very logical and phonetic. German would be okay, too, except they throw words willy-nilly, creating new words on the fly that sometimes have lots and lots of syllables, which just scares me.