Texas Drawl: San Francisco Streets Butchered

From Sansome to Noe, Houston woman makes out-of-towner mistakes

Every city has some idiosyncratic pronunciations. Take New York's Houston Street (pronounced "House-ton") which many a tourist makes the mistake of pronouncing in the style of the Texas city, Houston ("Hugh-stun").

And it's from that very Texas city that a contractor, DRI, recorded new rider-alert audio for Muni buses in the wake of service changes earlier this month.

Hilarity ensued.

Noe ("No-ee") pronounced "No." Sansome? "San-SO-mee." And let's not get started on Visitacion, Gough, Kearny and Valencia (the latter is pronounced with a "ch" sound, at least in one version of San Francisco's colloquial English dialect).

Donna Reed owned up to the mistakes, saying she pronounced the names as a Houston resident would.

Or is that a House-ton resident?

And Muni? Well, poor San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency employee Jim Campbell now has to listen to all the recordings and flag the mistakes for re-recording.

Photo by Marcin Wichary.

Jackson West kind of loves how Muni can come up with new and interesting ways to fail.

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