Loughborough is the best for visitors from the US who often call it Loogaberoogar
As in the French version of "American Werewolf in London" where they changed the location to somewhere cheaper to film in, "Les Loups-Garoux de Lougabarouga".
I gave up even shaking my head at St Pancreas
I always call it that. Or just "The Pancreas". That station further up the line is always Loogabarooga too. It's more entertaining that way.
I don't know how Aspatria should be pronounced but judging by the laughter on the train, the automated pronunciation of ass-pat-rea can't be right!
Speatrie, lowp oot!
Because I am infantile at the age of 56 it will always be PENIS-tone
But of course. What else could it possibly be?
(Named, of course, for the lead singer of the trans-Pennine folk fusion band, "Penis Tone and the Clit Heroes".)
Either MARLEY BONE or MARRY LE BUN usually, but can be various other combinations. I once heard a German pronounce it MARY LEE BONER - giggles.
It seems to get slurred more and more the closer you get to it. Probably the people who live at the exact centre of the area have cut it right down to "Mahn", as a sort of grunt.
I once heard a German chap on the tube talking about "Ed-G-Var Road". It was highly memorable because of the incredible fluidity with which he managed to pronounce that awkward DGV string of consonants all as entirely separate sounds with neither slurring nor inserting vowel sounds between them, but all fitting closely together, the sounds clicking into place off his tongue like a well-oiled rifle bolt. Trying to represent it on the keyboard hopefully gives some idea of what he did, but it fails dismally to begin to convey the amazingly fluent way he did it.
Always wonder about how Worcester in Massachusetts is dealt with, but I think 'Wooster' is used there too, because Wor-Ces-Ter sounds too clumsy. I might be wrong there.
I've heard that in England. Never entirely sure if the chap was joking but he used to call it that all the time while not similarly transforming other old Roman forts.
Given that the surname "Featherstonehaugh" is pronounced "Fanshaw"
The one at school wasn't...
Oddly they don't say 'Newc'sle' but Newcahstle which is annoying in a different way. But even most northerners stress the first syllable rather than the authentic second.
Newcastle, the Tyne one, is of course named after all the disruption of the CND protests.
And let's not forget Baff Spar - not many stations are named after the corner shop.
Droitwich is, by the railway, but not by anyone else because the idea of it being a "spa" is a joke these days. Occasionally it gets renamed after a disabled person.
As seen on a local website a few years ago - "Two syllables is local, three is over annunciated posh!"
Meaning that they say it that way much too often on the station tannoy?
I'm not surprised a hard 'k' variant is now treated as a legitimate alternative, in my experience few people my age and slightly older pronounce 'ch' as a guttural, aspirated 'kh' rather than a hard 'k' anymore - ie making lock and loch homophones.
I've heard it claimed regarding this one that English people "can't say" ch as in loch correctly - meaning "are unable to" rather than "habitually don't". Of course, it is merely that they are too bleeding idle to make the imperceptibly small effort. They seem to manage OK when they're talking about the composer and can't bring themselves to call him "Back" because that would just be
too silly.
I know enough to approximate the pronunciation of the Gaelic version of place-names, but boy is it a complex orthography to get your head round. At least it is in my opinion, I think Welsh is by comparison much simpler!
Welsh is totally straightforward apart from a degree of uncertainty over the alternatives for "y", but Gaelic is a different kettle of fish. Said to be "pronounced exactly as it's spelt", which may even be true, but the choices for which letters represent which sound are so wildly different from any of the choices anyone else uses as to seem wilfully perverse. And there's the additional difficulty that more than half the letters in a word don't actually do anything except be confusing, so the first step is trying to work out which ones to ignore entirely, and while there are many sequences of letters which frequently don't do anything there aren't any which
never do. And the same spelling sounds different depending on which version of Gaelic it is. It's a system of orthography designed by the same people who in later generations would go and work for Microsoft.
. I think that rates even worse than Miln-gavie instead of Mull-guy for Milngavie.
