geofflambert
Posts: 14863
Joined: 12/23/2010 From: St. Louis Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Bullwinkle58 quote:
ORIGINAL: AW1Steve quote:
ORIGINAL: Icedawg This is nothing. What about all of those people in Maryland who pronounce our nation's capital as "Warshington"? Where do they get that "r" from? Actually it seens like everyone in the west does too. It's funny but in over nine years of living and working there , I never heard a native call it anything but "D.C." ,or "the district". Truman said it that way. It's everywhere. I missed an opportunity earlier on this. Maybe 25 or 30 years ago I went to the Truman Library in Independence, Missouri. At the time and still to this day there is a debate about whether it is pronounced Missour-ee or Missour-ah. The correct answer is both. In the more settled areas like St. Louis, Columbia and Kansas City, no one says Missour-ah. But in the rural areas, especially south, they do say Missour-ah. Anyway I was at the Truman Library and they had a machine on which you could listen to his various speeches. I listened to one (that was of some import) and he pronounced it Missour-ee three times. There is another issue I've exposed here besides simple pronunciation. At the time of the Civil War St. Louis was full of Deutsch immigrants and it didn't matter much how they pronounced it. Missouri to this day is a divided place, everything to the north of I-70 is indistinguishable from Iowa, and at the root is sympathetic to the Union. Everything to the South might as well be part of Arkansas except that it's a mite (and only a mite) more sophisticated. This area is also strongly sympathetic with the Confederacy. In part as a consequence (and I don't remember which) Missouri either has more Civil War battlefields than every other state, or, more than any other save Virginia. Whichever, we've got a lot, and they were'nt insignificant. The Capital, Jefferson City, was definitely in the Confederate camp, but the Union was somewhat better prepared to handle Missouri than the Confederates. For those of you interested, Hannibal, the home of Huckleberry Finn, is in the Northern part. I forgot to mention the Simpsons episode where Bart was on a raft heading up the Missouri, and passed a sign saying "you are now leaving Missouree" then passing a sign saying "you are now entering Missourah".
< Message edited by geofflambert -- 9/11/2012 5:23:24 AM >
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