Welcome to Boston, Home of the Gahden
Students learn to speak Bay State
You may have already tried to pahk your cah on Comm Ave, but have you been to Woostah yet? What about Bill-rick-a, or Hay-vrull? When students come to Boston University, they get a little extra education when it comes to pronouncing some of the state’s archaic city and town names, many dating back to the 1600s.
BU Today called the cops for help — specifically, lifelong Bostonian and BUPD Captain Robert Molloy — to set the record straight. Think you’re a pro? Try tackling Leominster.
Alan Wong can be reached at alanwong@bu.edu.
9 Comments
A lot of towns in New England–if not all of them–are named after English ones, so I’m kind of surprised that these only date back to the 1600s.
Where does a person get that extra “i” in Leominster?
You should have thrown in Woburn.
Haha, our silly names. There could also be a very effective video on translating everyday sentences like “theah’s a bubblah in the next rum” into normal English. That made my day!
Worcester
I’ve lived in New England all my life and my father was from Worcester. It’s pronounced “Wistah” not Woostah.
I think I need a course on New England phonetics
Could have included Leicester and Scituate, too. And any of the towns with an ‘h’ in the middle of their name.
What about Concord? It’s not the airplane, it’s Kahn-kerd.
I once heard a new newscaster on a Boston TV station pronounce Stoughton as Stuffton. He didn’t last too long with the station.
This video made me think back to my freshman year some 20 years ago… I was laughing until I heard the comment about Worcester being “a crappy place to live.” This is not the message the university should be endorsing. It is presumptuous of newcomers to be making blanket statements about places they have likely never visited (I am basing this generalization on the name-butchering we’ve just seen). Worcester has many of the same urban problems Boston faces, and we should do more to introduce these new “neighbors” to the realities of urban communities in Boston and beyond. BU is only a microcosm of this city. As a matter of fact, Massachusetts has learned a lot from Worcester, including huge successes in their work to end homelessness.