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Culture | Placenames SHIBBOLETH, USA THE MANY CONFUSING AMERICAN PLACENAMES By S.A.P. | LOS ANGELES I went to a family wedding this past weekend in a beautiful forest on the banks of the

Mississippi River. The state park there, in addition to several other local landmarks, is named after Père Jacques Marquette, a 17th-century French Jesuit priest and explorer. Applying my

rudimentary knowledge of French, I asked my family when we’d leave for “Pair Mar-KET” State Park. How naive I was. My cousins gently corrected me: “It’s ‘Peer MAR-ket’.” Pier Market, of

course, sounds like a different sort of tourist attraction—equally nice, I suppose—so I was confused. But I should have known better. We mistreat French borrowings, like Detroit. A knowledge

of French is a positive impediment to learning New Orleans's streets, like Chartres, "charters". We bungle some Spanish placenames: Los Angeles is a prominent example, but

there’s also the cowboyish Rio Grande (“RYE-oh Grand”), Ohio. Borrowings from Native American languages are surely manhandled—I’m no expert, but I don’t know if I believe that the residents

of Nachitoches (bizarrely, “NAK-i-tish”), Louisiana, pronounce their city like their namesake tribe did. And then there is Zzyzx ("ZYE-ziks"), California, which bears mention

simply for being uniquely impenetrable. Wikipedia has a fuller, highly amusing list of counterintuitive placename pronunciations. These inconveniences burden each of us in different ways.

Pity the worldly man who visits small-town American Delhi ("DEL-high", several states), Cairo ("KAY-ro", several states), Athens ("AY-thens", Kentucky and

Illinois), Lima ("LIME-ah", Ohio), Tripoli ("Tri-POLE-ah", Iowa), or Vienna ("Vie-AN-nah", Illinois and South Dakota) and very provincially mispronounces them.

Pity anyone who has ever traveled to Schenectady, Schaghticoke, or Schuylkill. Above all, pity the poor traveler who departed the train too early at Newark ("Nork", in New Jersey)

Penn Station and never found any skyscrapers. (This last one once happened to me.) It’s not that Americans can’t handle the twists of a non-English name: after all, the blandest of the bland

can pronounce La Jolla (“Lah HO-ya”), even if it takes a second or third try. It’s that even straightforward names seem deliberately designed to mislead visitors. That includes English

ones: I still find Plymouth a mystery and Worcester inscrutable. These shibboleths so immediately, so indelibly, so inconveniently brand us as outsiders. I suppose that’s their job. There

aren’t any IPA legends on “Welcome to …” signs—and maybe that’s how most residents like it. I’ve shared my struggles. What about you: dictionary absent, have you ever (embarrassingly,

uncouthly, Frenchly) mispronounced a placename?