SHREWSBURY, Massachusetts – Many town names are mispronounced because they sound nothing like their spellings and Massachusetts has more than its share. When moving here I never mispronounced Worcester but in ignorance did say NAH-tick instead of NAY-tick, after all how was I to know what the residents called it? Other localities present similar problems to the consternation and embarrassment of visitors, like Philadelphia’s Schuylkill Expressway which is pronounced SKOO-kul believe it or not. Those things drive me crazy and I wish all words were spelled phonetically to make life easier, having been plagued by mispronunciations all my life.

One time in high school while studying Greek Mythology I was reading the story of Orpheus and Euridice, you know the one where a young man goes down to the Underworld to retrieve his dead lover, only to lose her forever by looking back to see if she was following and okay. Having never heard those names, in my mind I pronounced Euridice as YOO-rid-eye-ss, but when going to class the teacher said yoo-RID-i-see which made me smile at my own stupidity. Another time in school we were learning about dinosaurs, a subject not as familiar then as it is today, and I came across the name Diplodocus, the docile dinosaur with a fat body and long neck and tail pictured in cartoons and advertisements. Again in my naïve mind, I read it as dip-low-DOCK-us and always referred to it that way until overhearing a conversation at New York’s Museum of Natural History where it was called dip-PLOD-i-kuss. My lack of knowledge knew no bounds I thought, until watching a TV documentary where the narrator (an actor) said dip-low-DOCK-us just as I had first imagined it to be. Now I was totally lost, being in the dark as to which was the correct pronunciation. Some time later while watching another program hosted by a famous paleontologist named Robert Bakker, I expected to get the answer but to my chagrin he called it dip-LOW-di-kuss, yet another version only adding to my confusion.

Now you might excuse me by saying that it’s understandable to make mistakes on such long and arcane names, but in another class while reading Virgil’s epic the Aeneid I came across the character Queen Dido, a simple enough name pronounced of course DIE-doe, right? Wrong! The professor called her DEE-doe as I gnashed my teeth in anger. The list goes on and on, and not just with names. Cellulite, the lumpy fat that accumulates under the skin, I read as SELL-you-light until I heard it called sell-you-LEET which I then adopted until recently, when hearing it now called SELL-you-light again. Anglophile, an admirer of the English, I called ANG-low-fial until hearing it said as ANG-low-feel. Well which is it, leet or light, feel or fial…. I’m totally confused.

While ruminating on the situation I came to the conclusion that it doesn’t matter how you pronounce those names and words since no one really knows how to say them anyway, and you’ll appear just as erudite no matter what you say. By the way, is that ER-yoo-dite or ER-a-dite?

Spencer