New York As A First Language

Apparently annoyed with scores of witless people mispronouncing New York notables' names, New York magazine publishes a pronunciation guide to a few of the essential names you'll need to drop in your water cooler conversation. Names include Wylie Dufresne(right) of wd-50, PR gal/bad driver Lizzie Grubman and Choire Sicha (who will always be "kwire-eee" to us). Here are a few others Gothamist only recently figured out:

Sridhar (Pappu) - "shh-reader" but faster
Lorne (Michaels) - "lorn," not "lorny"
P. Diddy - "P-Diddy," not "P-dot-Diddy"
(Michael) Wolff - "wolf," not "wolffffff"
Houston Street - "how-ston," not like the city
Bronx - "the Bronx"

Contact the author of this article or email tips@gothamist.com with further questions, comments or tips.

By Jen Chung in News on February 2, 2004 3:31 PM

Comments [rss]

Jon

Flatiron seems to be troubling for some people (see also Jimbo's post above). A couple of my friends were calling it the Fla-teer-on building for a while.

Girlygirl

What about all the out-of-towners who think that Newark is actually "New York" pronounced with a nooyawk accent.

aron

and to be totally ignorant...

outside of Steve Buscemi who gives two shits about the rest of these people anyway... ;)

chatterfest

Wrong NYMag, it's Boo-SKEM-eee.

Jeez, the research, the research.

ShinGo

What about Fitty-Cent(instead of 50 cent)?

Uncle Grambo

what about Lizzie Spiers buzz ... or did last month's NYT article clear that up for anyone who's anyone? "SPY-ERS" instead of "Spears" ... who knew?

Jimbo

I'll never let my wife live down the day she was reading a listing and blurted out that she wanted to go to someplace near the "Flatterin" building...aka Flatiron