NBC - YOU SAY NUH-VAH-DAH, I SAY NUH-VAA-DAH

YOU SAY NUH-VAH-DAH, I SAY NUH-VAA-DAH

NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams acknowledged Wednesday night that he and other reporters on the program have sometimes mispronounced Nevada as "Nuh-VAH-duh, rather than -- as the locals do -- Nuh-VAA-duh -- something that angers Nevadans who flooded the network with complaints. In a lead-in to a story by George Lewis, Williams said, "We haven't always said it the same way and there is a correct way." Lewis then warned presidential candidates campaigning in the state that they had better pronounce the state's name correctly or lose votes. Valerie Fridland, a sociolinguist at the University of Nevada, Reno, told the Reno Gazette-Journal, "News anchors make a big effort to correctly pronounce the names of places around the world, so when they don't do it in their own country, people get upset." The Associated Press quoted Josh Guenter, pronunciation editor for the Merriam-Webster dictionary company as saying, "People in other states have become upset, but I've never heard of a national flap over it like this." [Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has yet to master the pronunciation of "California."]

18/01/2008