Dan's Papers - May 1, 2009 - The Sheltered Islander

It may look like the result of someone falling asleep on the keyboard, but it's actually the name of a lake near the town of Webster in central Massachusetts, and it has a local chamber of commerce scrambling to fix not-so-glaring spelling errors on highway signs.

The Worcester Telegram & Gazette reports that the signs are mistakenly spelled "with an 'o' where a 'u' should be, at letter 20, and an 'h' instead of an 'n' at letter 38." So, the correction will actually lower the lake's Scrabble word value from 134 to 131 points. The U.S. Board on Geographic Names says that the lake's name is a Nipmuck Indian word that translates loosely to "You fish on your side, I fish on my side, nobody fishes in the middle."

I know what you're thinking, yes I checked and I can't find any phonetic pronunciation for this lake. It's a local secret, but any East Coast resident understands the need to keep Indian pronunciation secret. One of the privileges of living in former Indian territory is that only the locals know how to properly pronounce the local Indian names. One of my guilty pleasures is waiting for a visitor to try to pronounce our local Indian names correctly. Naturally they fail miserably and then I can laugh with an imperious attitude and enjoy a fleeting sense of superiority that says, "Ha! you fool! How could you even think you could complete with my brilliant intellect? Just listen to your pathetic attempts to pronounce Mashomack."

But what really piqued my interest in this article was: Who was the person who noticed the misspelling? Just how slow were they driving to notice this mistake? I gave it a lot of thought, because it vexed me. I think I figured it out.

I believe the misspelling was caught by a middle school English teacher who has car pooled by that sign every work day for roughly two years. How did I arrive at this? Only an English teacher would notice this. Only an English teacher who had to know the correct spelling would notice it. Only a middle school English teacher would have the duty to make students learn local spellings like this one.

It appears the sign is next to a highway and on a curve, so doing between 40 to 55 m.p.h., the observer would only have a few seconds to see the sign. The driver could only glance at it, so it had to be observed by a passenger. Figuring the passenger looked closely for a few seconds at each passing, they could only have proofread a few letters at a time. Therefore, they proofread it in sections. A 45-letter word seen daily for a few seconds, minus the number of times she was a passenger on the days it wasn't her turn to drive, plus the angle of the sun in the early morning, minus holidays and weekends, factoring in the occasional grafitti defacements, plus the price of tea in China, it all adds up: a middle school English teacher. And it's a good thing he or she did notice the error. It's just this kind of chaos in the world that keeps me up all night.

Many years ago, my ex pronounced Ronkonkoma, "Ronk-a-nonk-a-noma" to peals of laughter from my entire family. To this day, we pronounce it that way because we're part of a that secret joke club that all families have.

I was in San Rafael, CA and heard a woman in a department store telling the clerk she was shopping for her vacation in New York, she was going to "Pa-cho-go-gee" a.k.a. Patchogue. I laughed and corrected her because that was my right as a native Long Islander.

Of course, living in California for my married years and married to a native Californian, I often struggled with the pronunciation of all the Spanish named towns, which seem to be most of the towns in that state. Not many Indian names that I recall, but lotsa Spanish names. Being a native New Yorker and seeing all these names ending in vowels, I naturally pronounced them Italian style. My ex and his entire family found my pronunciations hysterically funny, which shows how juvenile and sophomoric a sense of humor they possessed. Of course someone who's never been exposed to these names would mispronounce them, and why is that funny? I had hoped that years of being exposed to my superior sense of decorum and class would help them, but one can only do so much.