alt Hacker NewsBritish aristocracy has been pronouncing their own surnames wrong for centuries on purpose. Cholmondeley is "Chumley" Featherstonehaugh is "Fanshaw." If you read it phonetically you mark yourself as an outsider. The misstake is the membership card. (Heck, even in Portland we locals hear about misprouncing Couch St probably every year in local press as some bar for membership to our own locals only vibe.)
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There's also St. John, which for some odd reason is pronounced as sinjin.
https://old.reddit.com/r/madmen/comments/12i3n9o/why_is_sain...
> misstake
I see what you did there. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law
In case you're wondering, Couch St. in Portland, Oregon, USA is pronounced "Cooch." It's named for 19th century ship captain and early businessman John H. Couch. It's the "C" street in the so-called Alphabet District north of Burnside, which is the "B" street. There are, or were, other landmarks named after Capt. Couch, but I'm not sure if any still exist.
Did they? The article[1] seem to be in contradiction to the claim. For centuries it was rather easy to distinguish aristocracy without lingustic conspiracies. I'm really not an expert in British surnames however I know for sure that pop history is full of invented "fun facts" which are not true but persist cause they sound cool.
That's just centuries of change without updating spelling, a la Leicester or Worcester.
Is it the same reason as Worcestershire mapped to "wooster" ?
There's also the British penchant for deliberately mispronouncing French words. I have heard "renaissance" pronounced "reh-NAY-sance", "fillet" pronounced "fill-it", "valet" as "val-it" and so on. I think it's a national point of pride to pronounce the words of their neighbor incorrectly.
Here in Toronto area city of Vaughan pronounced as (/vɔːn/ or /vɑːn/) like in "dawn" or "gone"
Imaging me fresh from USSR asking someone how do I get to ... and getting blank stare
In New Orleans, protesters against outsiders acquiring and developing real estate hold up signs that read "Say Tchoupitoulas" (/ˌtʃɑp ə ˈtuː ləs/). I give my wife lots of hassle about the pronunciations of Louisiana place names like Tchoupitoulas, Natchitoches (/ˈnæk ə ˌdɪʃ/, really!), etc. especially when she complains about northeastern place names like "Leominster".
> in Portland we locals hear about misprouncing Couch St
That explains why many years ago when I visited Portland, a homeless guy corrected my pronunciation of that while we were walking past him.
Note that you only pronounce Couch that way in Portland when talking about the street. You wouldn’t maintain the pronunciation when saying eg “Sorry for spilling wine on your couch”
>Cholmondeley is "Chumley" Featherstonehaugh is "Fanshaw." If you read it phonetically you mark yourself as an outsider.
This is a monstrous crime against language.
I don't really see that as the same thing as what the article was pointing out. Those are shibboleths that only an insider would know. You have to get the pronunciation of Cholmondeley or Couch "right" to pass for an insider.
The random misspellings, missing spaces, sloppy grammar, etc in the examples in the article seem different to me. Misspelling "en route" as "enriewu" doesn't show, "look, I know the secret country club spelling for en route". It simply shows that you don't have to care about your mistakes. You write something that approximates what you mean, and you're too important to spend time revising. The mistake could be "enrout" or "n route" or on any other word. But you're not going to be a try-hard who edits and frets over their messages, you're blessing someone with 10 seconds of your attention and they're lucky to receive your correspondence, typos and all.