I see Biloxi, you say Biluxi …
Joni Mitchell famously sung that you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone, and this is surely the case with quite a few places along the US Gulf Coast which are suddenly world famous now that they’ve been torn up by Katrina. A couple of the blogs I’ve been reading, written by people from Mississippi and Louisiana, have noticed that news reporters have mispronounced the name of the city Biloxi. It’s apparently pronounced Biluxi, and they think we should know this.
I’m a map geek, and I know where a lot of places are that others don’t because I like to gaze at maps and read travel guides. I’m one of those people who buy Rough Guides and Lonely Planet books and never go to most of the places they are about. I’d heard of Biloxi before last week’s hurricane. I first heard it being pronounced Biluxi last Saturday morning, and I thought it was the reporter putting on an American accent. My guess is that most people from outside the region, and certainly outside the USA, have never heard of Biloxi at all. Nor would they know, for example, that Lafayette is pronounced two different ways depending on which Lafayette you mean, or that the last syllable of “New Orleans” is actually short, or any of the other examples DP gave us last Saturday.
Is it reasonable to expect people from outside an area to instinctively know its unusual ways of pronouncing things? New Orleans is a famous city, but most people do not know that locals pronounce it with the last syllable short. Over here, we have a few weird pronunciations as well, although they are usually small towns. Wymondham in Norfolk is Wyndham; Launceston in Cornwall is Lawnston; Teignmouth in Devon is Tinmouth (remember, the ou in mouth is short) – and these are things I didn’t find out until I was in my teens. And there’s a way of pronouncing the name “Cirencester” when you’re in Cirencester which does not make you sound like a tourist. To say nothing of all the other funny features in English place names: ham is “um” unless it’s a name in itself (Birmingum, Beckenum, Twickenum), “cester” is just “ster” (Gloster, Lester, Wooster, and Towcester becomes Toaster) but “chester” is pronounced as it looks.
We have a few stereotypes of Americans here, among the most common being that they are ignorant about countries other than their own. As I read in one popular newspaper, to most Americans, England is a place where it’s always foggy, where they make that whisky (brewed in the village of Scotland, England) and where Shakespeare wrote Oliver Twist. It can probably be fairly said about the average Brit that he doesn’t know much about the geography of the US either.
For one thing, asked to name a single southern state, he might well pick California. Or Florida, which is a southern state, but he wouldn’t know why Florida is and California isn’t. He would probably not be able to name a single city in Mississippi – or Massachusetts for that matter, even though he would have heard of Boston. Perhaps he might not know what state New York is in (New York, New York is something Frank Sinatra sung to fill out the syllables, innit?) or that Washington (the city) is nowhere near Washington state. And of course, most Brits don’t know what a Yank or a Yankee is. They probably think that because they’re more American out west and down south (New England is, after all, New England), they’re bigger Yanks than they are in Connecticut.
And I didn’t even learn about Yankees in history – I learned about that by chance in an English class where we did a bit of comprehension on a short piece on the Texas Rangers when I was 14. Most of what kids are taught in history here is about British history – the Romans, a bit about the Vikings and other invaders, the Tudors and Stuarts, and the Second World War. We learned a bit about the Civil Rights movement, but that’s pretty much all we learned about American history. You don’t learn much about other countries’ history in British schools, except where it relates to this country.
I guess if there’s a silver lining in any of this, it’s that it draws people together and allows people to learn about their different communities. One thing many people might have learned is that poor whites and poor blacks in that part of the world are often in the same boat rather than being enemies, as is the usual stereotype. But we can’t learn anything if we pounce on each other for making innocent mistakes. After all, I can’t think of a single other example in the whole English language of an “o” being pronounced like that in front of an “x”.
