Local place names often butchered
It can be absolutely cringe-worthy to hear it.
Sometimes we make polite excuses for those who may be new to the area, or are just passing through, but when someone pronounces the name of your hometown wrong, it can be downright offensive to some.
While many place names in the area can be easily deciphered phonetically, others are the unfortunate, chronic victim of mispronunciation — and autocorrect.
For decades, residents of the City of Hornell have suffered the indignity of their municipality wrongfully name-switched with a brand of canned meat (Hormel, makers of SPAM) and perhaps more charitably, with the a prestigious university located in Ithaca (Cornell).
To a degree, the misunderstanding can be forgiven. While the area's early settler, George Hornell, was well known in his day, the fame of the city's namesake didn't live long into the 19th and 20th century, or spread far beyond the region.
Hornell, however, is far from the only victim of place name butchery. Ask someone unfamiliar with the area how to pronounce, let-alone spell, places with names that come from various Native American lexicons.
Canaseraga, for example, which scholars have debated since its founding, may be Seneca for "lying among milkweeds" or "slippery elms," according to William Martin Beauchamp's 1907 book Aboriginal Place Names of New York. Canaseraga is often the victim of cut syllables and mispronounced as "Cancer-aga", making it sound like the place where cancer might have been discovered.
The same with Canisteo, which was named long before settlement by people of European heritage. The Seneca village known as "Kah-ni-sti-oh" perhaps dates back to prehistory, and definitively ends with its final two letters pronounced with a hard E-O vowel sound, NOT A-O.
Cohocton, which is said to be Seneca for "log in the water," can be easily confused with alternative pronunciations of the native root words. A search might turn up results for the "Conhocton" River, Corning and Painted Post's Conhocton Streets (a once accepted pronunciation for the same reference); or even Coshocton, a city of roughly 11,000 in Ohio — which is derived from native Delaware tribe's words for "where the river crosses."
To the west, in Allegany County, pronunciations like Scio and Houghton are often butchered by the uninitiated. "Skee-o?" "Section 10?" "Huff-ton?"
Locals getting an earful of wrong-headed attempts often ask, "In an age of such high technology, where all the answers in the world are at your fingertips — how could someone get it so wrong?"
But, while the human flubs we put up with are easily corrected with some cajoling, technology seems to be no better, and may never be corrected without a massive public outcry.
Type these local place names into a search engine, social media platform, or ask your smartphone to find it. Chances are likely that you get a confused response.
"Did you mean Harnell?" Twitter asks of a Hornell inquiry.
Through some research, Harnell is apparently a spelling of the same surname as Hornell, but localized mostly to Canada. The two names are thought to come from the pronunciation of the Village of Harnhill, in Gloucestershire, England, per surnamedb.com.
"Did you mean Canister?" a Google search often asks about Canisteo — and autocorrect stubbornly insists.
Ask Apple's Siri about Canaseraga, and the automated voice will instead show you results for "Kansas a Ranger," guidance on becoming a Kansas state park ranger.
While the residents of these often mispronounced places may never get the outside world to say it right, the people who live there can all find solace in the fact that they're all in the struggle together.