>>I'd argue that it should have 18; Wor-ches-ter was left off the list
>>somehow. :)
>>
>
> I'd never even thought to ask how the US Worchester (or at least
>Gryphon's) is pronounced.

Well, it doesn't have an H in it, so that's a starting point...

Usually "wooster" (first vowel as in "wool", not "tool"), but there's a local hard core that says "wistah".

Place names are very often problematic, particularly in New England, where many places' official names are based on 18th-century English people's halfassed attempts to transcribe and romanize Algonquian words in the first place, and others (like Worcester) are recycled place names from Britain, where such matters had already been a hopeless muddle for centuries by then :) Throw in 200 years of random dialectic drift and you get Massachusetts (itself a fucked-up Algonquian word) towns like Woburn (woobun) and Framingham (pronounced as if you were setting a roasted pig part up to take the fall for a crime), and places in Maine with names like Meddybemps, Mattamiscontis, Wytopitlock, Nesowadnehunk, Big Ambejackmockamus. Few customer service or shipping people I talk to on the phone ever get Millinocket right on the first try; I hesitate to imagine how they'd fare if the town had received its originally considered "local" name, Nollesemic. :)

It's also worth noting that sometimes people simply can't be bothered. Maine's French place names (and there are a lot of those, we have a long border with Quebec and New/Nouveau Brunswick) are good examples of that. "Maine" itself is a French place name, but it's simple enough that not even Mainers can screw it up. Not so for the border town of Calais, which is pronounced like those hard things you develop on your hands if you do a lot of manual labor. Even the Frenchmen (by which is always meant people of French-Canadian origins, not actual men from France) say it that way.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.