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Old-timers insist on strange pronunciations for streets

Umito November 21, 2024

DEAR MISS MANNERS: Our town is a typical suburb of a large city. It was originally settled by German farmers, but over the years it became a vast expanse of housing estates and shopping centers.

Many of the original family farms have been honored with street names. Continuing descendants of the families, or those who knew them, adhere to the original pronunciations, but the majority of the community no longer does. For example: Old-timers insist that Mueller Street be pronounced “Miller” and not “Mew-ler.”

The thing is, I’ve lived in this town since the early 1970s and I’ve never heard anyone call this street “Miller.” If someone had given me directions and said, “Turn onto Miller Street,” I would have gone around the “Mueller” sign and kept looking.

I think naming a street after a family is a beautiful thing, but the family’s right to control pronunciation is limited. The point of naming streets is to make navigation easier. If the community as a whole has tacitly agreed to call a street “Mew-ler” because that is the most intuitive and contemporary interpretation of the spelling, then that becomes the correct way to pronounce the name of the street.

Those who pronounce these streets “wrong” are told, on social media, that they have a duty to these families to adopt the “correct” pronunciation. This seems pointless to me – and I have a Dutch last name that no one can pronounce without help.

GENTLE READER: Getting people to do something that hasn’t been done in decades is unlikely to be effective. Far better to use one of the few benefits Miss Manners sees in social media, that people can opt out of group conversations about such issues, than to fuel the flames by continuing to discuss.

DEAR MISS MANNERS: I am a 6ft 6in tall male, 62 years old. All my life I have found myself bent double greeting women for whom a welcome hug was appropriate.

My aunts, cousins, sisters and many others might raise their arms in the air, initiating a hug.