Originally published at: Watch people in San Francisco try to say San Francisco street names | Boing Boing
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That’s okay. There’s a whole state that can’t correctly pronounce Houston Street.
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not even from SF, but i’ve been there enough and know enough SF people to have gotten almost every one correct. the one that everyone got wrong confused me though. it’s not Pah-low?
Out of Towner’s pronounce Binghamton NY’s Beethoven street weirdly, when it clearly is written just like it sounds, beet hoven.
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I was involved in a project promoting the community garden on Quesada Avenue in the Bayview and a local resident laughed when I used the traditional pronunciation of the Spanish surname (“kah-sa-da”), explaining that everyone in the neighborhood said “cue-SAY-duh.”
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Yeah no points off for proper Spanish.
OTOH all the alphabet streets in the Sunset were made up to sound cool by real estate types back in the day so what counts as “correct” anyway?
Don’t get me started on Alhambra and San Pedro in the LA area. Makes my ears hurt.
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My first day in SF I mispronounced Embarcadero (as Embarcado… like you’re embarking?) and gnocchi both in the presence of the very cute and flirtatious server I was trying to order from. Still haven’t gotten over the embarrassment.
That hurt.
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Spanish in SoCal gets butchered all the time. The citizens in our city pronounce Ximeno as Eks-ZIM-men-o. It’s was the funniest thing I heard when I moved there.
How New Yorkers see that name and pronounce it House-ton I just don’t understand. Regional dialects can get pretty weird.
It’s the original pronunciation. It comes from a Dutch name.
Sammy came later.
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