Dueling dialects

[Wilson Gray]

While chatting with the locals down home in Texas, my brother mentioned
that the star of a certain movie was Gary Cooper. He pronounced the
name in the St. Louis dialect, so that it rhymed with "merry souper."
Said locals immediately burst into peals of laughter and kept asking
him to repeat the name so that they could laugh some more. When asked
for the proper pronunciation, the locals responded with, approx.,
[ge:IrI kUp@], wherein "U" is the "oo" of "Booker." Further discussion
revealed that, though the locals had obviously noted the difference
between their pronunciation of "Gary" and that of my brother, what had
struck them as ridiculous beyond words was his pronunciation of the
"oo" of Cooper as approx. [u:].

After I had related this story to a European-American friend who wasn't
a St. Louisan, he commented, "Well, no wonder they laughed at him.
Everybody knows that the proper pronunciation is [gaeri]!"

-Wilson Gray