You would think by now that those distant East Coast media types in plush studios atop their ivory towers would know how to pronounce the name of the state south of the Columbia River. waitwait ThisAmerLife petersagal
both which address mispronunciations of all kinds of words and place-names. The Petras siblings are seasoned world travelers whose first writing project together was a play, crafted in Cairo, Egypt when they were 5 and 8 years old, respectively.
Neither Kathy nor Ross can definitively say why the “ORE-uh-GONE” pronunciation problem persists in the digital age. Bottomline, Ross says, correct pronunciation is absolutely key to effectively connecting with other human beings. “If I go to Oregon and say, ‘ORE-uh-GONE,’ the purpose of me talking is to communicate,” he continued. “As soon as I say ‘ORE-uh-GONE,’ people are not going to be thinking [about] what I’m saying, they’re going to be thinking, ‘he just mispronounced the name of our state.’”It seems like these kinds of geographic mispronunciations were more understandable in a less connected age. My late mother was a young woman in London in the 1940s.