Bostonist Rant: Mispronunciation of Place Names

Part of the charm of our fair city (and our fair Commonwealth, and, really, our whole fair region from Rhode Island to Canada) is that people talk funny and place names aren't pronounced the way they're spelled. This is a much written-about phenomenon and Bostonist need not elaborate further upon it here. But something we can't understand is why people who claim to be selling their services in Massachusetts and for the benefit of locals can't be bothered to know how to say things right. (When it's our father getting lost on the way from the airport and calling to say, "I just saw a sign for LEE-O-minster," it's funny. When it's people we expect to know better, Bostonist gets grumpy.)

We first got irritated about this when we made the mistake of signing up for the cheapest health plan at work, only to find out that there were no doctors anywhere near us. When we got on the phone and asked for a general practitioner in or near Somerville, the customer service lady paused a moment, did some clickety-clacking on her computer, and said, "Oh sure. I have someone in War-cester." Considering that Worcester is wicked fah from Somerville, her mispronunciation just added insult to injury. Then yesterday evening, a pollster called to ask Bostonist questions about local politics, which we love. But this guy couldn't pronounce the names of any of the Somerville politicos he was asking us about (or, for that matter, the name of Desmond Tutu), and that made us bullshit. (Also, the poll was obviously designed to get us to say that the campaign to divest local assets from Israel was a terrorist plot designed by communists who kick puppies, and we hate being manipulated so inexpertly that we realize we're being manipulated.) Now we learn, via Universal Hub, that even the MBTA can't get its automated bus announcements to sound regionally accurate (Reading is announced as "REEding"). What's up with that? If Bostonist finds out that the T is announcing Quincy with a soft "s" sound, we will be forced to raise our mass transit annoyance-alert level to wicked ripshit.