Dueling dialects

[Laurence Horn]

At 9:21 AM -0400 8/20/04, Mark A. Mandel wrote:
>Wilson Gray writes:
>>>>>>>
>  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. [...]
>
>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]!"
>  <<<<<<
>
>If anyone cares about it, of course, the proper solution is "Well, how did
>*he* pronounce it?"
>
I don't think that works.   I'd have a hard time convincing
neutralizers to pronounce my name as [laeri] just because *I*
pronounce it that way.

Larry