Keller @ Large: Why Mispronunciations Are So Annoying
BOSTON (CBS) - Outside of New York sports teams doing well, there is nothing that annoys Bostonians more than the sound of someone mispronouncing local names and places.
Here in our newsroom, we try to make sure that reporters and anchors joining us from out-of-town are well aware that it's "Quincy," not "Quinzee," "Haverhill," not HaverHill, and "Worcester," not, Lord have mercy, "Worchester." It may seem harsh, but just a couple of slip-ups can doom your local career.
And the same goes for politicians.
I'm not claiming it cost him the Massachusetts primary back in 2008, but I know plenty of folks who didn't appreciate it when then-Senator Barack Obama referred multiple times in a debate to our state as "Massa-too-setts."
So Donald Trump supporters had to be cringing the other night when their man spoke at a rally in Reno, Nevada and not only mispronounced the state's name as "Neh-VAH-da," but lectured the crowd on how wrong they were when they tried to correct him, falsely insisting that "nobody says it the other way."
That left him wide open for attack from Nevada Sen. Harry Reid, who said that "if…Trump wants to come down from the penthouse his daddy bought him to lecture us on how to say Nevada, he could at least pronounce it correctly."
If Trump has apologized for his gaffe yet, I haven't heard about it, but while I know apologies aren't part of his brand, he really ought to bite the bullet on this one. Just as job applicant resumes that misspell the name of the business get tossed right into the circular file, Trump's campaign in that swing state is in trouble if he doesn't admit error.
Lucky for him, Ohio, Florida and New Hampshire are hard to mispronounce.
Listen to Jon's commentary: