The Fredösphere

We're having a gift grab bag among my extended family tomorrow, so I bought a copy of Millennium Actress as my contribution.  Have you seen it?  It's not perfect; the ending disappoints, and the comic relief is frequently neither, but I'm amazed and how many scenes have stuck with me.  It's a beautiful film.  Go rent it this weekend.

I'll link to this article not because you will be interested in Cole Porter's boyhood home in Peru, Indiana, although you might, but rather because of a smidgen of expertise I have on the subject.  As an undergraduate, I spent a few hours in Peru with some friends for reasons I don't recall (I think we were visiting someone's relative).  Thanks to this experience, I can inform you the locals pronounce it PEEE-ru.

Which brings me to one of my favorite topics.  Once I made reference to Louisville, Kentucky in a conversation with my dad.  I pronounced it Loo-ih-ville.  Dad corrected me:  "no, it's Lul-vll," with vowels minimized or absent entirely, and all the Ls swallowed.  Now, I love my dad, but he was dead wrong in this instance.  I hereby announce Fredösphere's First Law of Place Names:  locals are the least reliable authorities on the names of cities, states, or any geographical regions.  For example, I freely admit that I mispronounce the name of my hometown of Bronson, Michigan.  I call it "Brunsin," and that's wrong.  Locals find the laziest approximation of a place name and use it; that doesn't impose any burden on the rest of us to mispronounce it.  Thus, it's Bal-ti-more, not Bal-mer; New Or-leans, not Naw-lins; Mih-zer-uh and Cin-suh-nat-uh, not Mis-sou-ri and Cin-ci-nat-ti.  Can anyone add other anoying examples to the list?

The other bad tendency, prevalent in the Midwest, is to hickify names of non-English origin.  Thus, we have Peee-ru as I mentioned, and also Milan, Michigan, which gets called MY-lun, but that's not the problem I'm talking about, and it is more forgivable.  Don't let some lazy-butt local intimidate you.  They will say it the way they must; you keep pronouncing the names the right way.

Happy Thanksgiving.  No promises about regular blogging for the next few days.  They're predicting eight inches of snow tonight in someplace called Brawn-son, Michigan, but I've never heard of that place, so I'm not worried.