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by mdip
1222 days ago
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It's pretty common throughout the US, but there's a section of Ohio that I recall driving through which has several cities named for European and Asian countries. I had a girlfriend early in college who's grandmother lived deep in rural Ohio; we visited the area frequently and it involved driving past several. A bit of obscure trivia I learned while down there, "Russia, Ohio" is pronounced like "Roo-She". I was told this was because of the Cold War but even in my late teens "I wasn't so sure". The dialect of Southern English spoken by Grandma and the local population was a cross between deep Appalachia, slowly spoken and ... I don't know ... English-like words[1]. [0] Nice to see Wikipedia had the goofy pronounciation. It did not explain "why", unfortunately. [1] She had an English (only) speaking neighbor who had the most "articulated"/"exaggerated" variant -- I remember having "Tonne Cohwa" or "Tonne Cohs" (plural) translated for me after several attempts to figure out WTF that referred to... Yeah. It was the word Taco. We were talking about the cold weather, I thought. |
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I’m about 40 miles from Russia, OH. We’ve also got Versailles (pronounced like the “ver” in “verb” and “sales”), Houston (pronounced “house ton”), Lima (long I, like the bean), and Eldorado (long A) all in a 100 mile radius. We have some Native American names for cities and counties, too.