This Side of the Pond

Well, that’s embarrassing. According to a recent poll on the most difficult-to-pronounce place names in the UK, I’ve been calling a nearby town the wrong thing my entire life. How was I to know that Frome is really “froom”, instead of how it’s spelled?

I’ve had chuckle-worthy moments on these shores when discovering my pronunciation skills are not up to snuff. I didn’t understand that Arkansas is a completely different word to Kansas, for example, and in my previous life I was literal in how I pronounced Maryland and Newfoundland.

Not to mention names that were originally taken from French but have changed along the way. As far as my ten years of enforced French lessons are concerned, Dubois should be said “Doo-bwah” (it means “of the wood”) and Notre Dame is “noh-truh-darm” (which means, of course, Our Lady).

All of this is to be expected when you’re somewhere new, but I wasn’t counting on finding out that I’ve been equally useless in the country of my birth. It turns out that the only ones I’m getting right are the ones I’ve heard other people say – I haven’t guessed many of them right for myself.

This is not my fault: we do strange things with spellings. Every Londoner has at some point quietly giggled while eavesdropping on tourists as they plan out a route on the Tube. It’s because we know what’s coming: they’re about to pronounce “Leicester Square” incorrectly.

This is vastly entertaining because we think it’s a silly spelling too. It’s not “Lie-ses-ter” as it appears; it’s “Less-turr”. The same is true for Gloucester, which is “gloss-turr” rather than “glow-cest-turr”

We do verbal gymnastics with a lot of our place names; anything with “shire” on the end, such as Derbyshire or Leicestershire, is pronounced as “shur”, while counties and cities ending in “burgh” or “borough”, like Edinburgh or Marlborough, are for some reason spoken as “bruh” (Edin-bruh).

We are also just as guilty of butchering French pronunciations. Near my home is a town called Beaulieu, meaning “beautiful place” (it is quite pretty, I suppose), which should be said as “bow-l-yurr”. Nope, we call it “Bew-lee”, because of course we do.

So I knew we there was little to no connection between the letters in these words and what you’re supposed to say. This should have been a clue that there were bound to be some parts of the United Kingdom with which I am not sufficiently familiar to deserve much confidence.

Apparently, the people of Frome watch out for people calling their town the wrong thing because it helps them identify newcomers, which in turn means they can welcome them properly. I don’t remember anyone rushing outside with a tray of tea and crumpets the last time I was there, but perhaps I didn’t shout the wrong name loudly enough.

Meanwhile, in the next county along where I went to university, there are two towns with the same ridiculous name: Woolfardisworthy. One of them has gone to the trouble of informally changing itself to better match how it ought to be said (which, inexplicably, is “Wool-zery”), but apparently this has done nothing to help people’s sat-navs.

A little town in the south of the county of Suffolk announced this month that it plans to change its name. According to the council, nobody can say “Babergh” properly and this is damaging chances of outside investment.

Personally I didn’t find that one difficult – it’s “bay-ber”, though I’ll admit that what few rules we do seem to follow suggest the “bergh” ought to render it “bay-bruh”. Even so, the council has decided it should switch to the less compelling “South Suffolk”, which it claims will cost as little as £10,000.

I am not the only one baffled. The Daily Telegraph quoted this deliciously fruity opinion from an 85-year-old local historian:

 “Everybody knows how to pronounce it, for heaven’s sake. Do they think we are ignorant? I do think they think we are stupid actually. It’s an unnecessary thing to do, fiddling around with changing names.”

I think they should go back and ask him how he really feels. Another local called South Suffolk “unimaginatively dull and utilitarian”.

That’s the trouble, isn’t it? All these weird and wonderful naming conventions conjure up more quirk and color than a standardized alternative ever could.

Babergh is the evolution of “Baberga”, for instance. It was named thus in the Domesday Book in 1086 and its Anglo-Saxon name is thought to mean “mound of a man called Babba”. We’ll never know who Babba was, any more than we’ll know who “Wulfheard’s homestead” belonged to before it gave its name to one of the Woolfardisworthies, but it sure gives the place some added flavor.

Frome is meanwhile an ancient Brythonic word, “ffraw”, which means “brisk” and refers to the flow of the river that runs through the town. Nobody quite knows from whence came the name of Rampisham, also in my home county and pronounced, for some reason, as “ran-some”. We do know the ending is the old word for an enclosure and the beginning could mean a man called Ram, an actual ram or a field of wild garlic, which doesn’t narrow things down all that much.

It’s all about character, a concept I’ve noticed did carry across the seas. We know Sundance is named for a traditional ritual and places like Newcastle and Upton pay homage to the originals in Europe.

But just like back home, there are one or two mysterious names that have always given me pause – even here in Crook County. I’d love to discover the answer, so if anyone has proof that there was ever a genie in Aladdin, please let me know.