Almost lost in translation

I was feeling rather puffed up over myself when I first started talking about moving to Staunton, Virginia and would correct my New England friends over the proper pronunciation.

“It’s pronounced stanton. The u is silent,” I would offer up. My friends would nod at my sage wisdom, and I thought that armed me well enough to move to a part of the country and to a city of 24,000 souls where the only soul I knew was my new Virginia realtor.

My sister and her husband had made the pinky swear to move here too, although they still need to sell their Tennessee home. I am now the family pioneer or ‘recon team-mette.’

Now that I have one week in this very pretty town under my belt, my brand-spanking new friends, Mari and Mike have further educated me on phonetics that are true to Virginia and Virginia alone. We met during a two-hour historical tour of a downtown dripping with ornate architecture and small-town history.

Did you know: the reason there are so many vanity license plates in Virginia is because it only costs an additional $10 to register your plate in such meaningful phrases as “W84JSUS” or “LUVCATZ“?

“Weyers, as in Weyers Cave,” coached Mari during a recent phone call, “is pronounced like weird not like why.’’ She outlined other location pronunciation examples that are not what they may seem when it comes to the actual vernacular. I should’ve taken notes.

And forget Luray Caverns. I’ve been pronouncing it my whole life as if it’s a distant, dank cousin of somebody named Lorraine. “It’s looray“, said Mari. Who knew?

Don’t even get me started on Buena Vista.