Seattle Sports Insider

It's All In A (City) Name

getting my Puyallup muse on

Posted by

3/14/17

Some names are unpronounceable because of policy. Like the Old Testament name for God.

Some names are unpronounceable because the combination of phonemes is particularly difficult.

But once in a while you come across a name that is unpronounceable because whoever came up with the official pronunciation must have been on peyote.

When that name is the duly recognized name of a city of 40,000 people, you have a real problem.

* * *

Since my wife and I are very soon going to be living in The City That Cannot Be Pronounced (Properly), I thought I'd have some fun with it:

The Spelling (Correct): Puyallup

The Possibilities:

PILE-up (a multiple car freeway fiasco)

pie-ALL-up (the call of a cook to the waiters at a desert restaurant)

pooey--ALL-up (disgusting)

pwee-ALL-up (no idea how to illustrate this, but it sounds like it looks right, whatever that means)

poo,y'all-UP? (how a Southern woman complains when the kids wake up earlier than expected and spoil her few moments of peace and quiet)

The Pronunciation (Correct):

pyoo-ALL-up (if it was s'posed to be pronounced like this, can someone explain to me why the "y" is AFTER the "u?")

I think I needed to take lessons from Edgar.

Comments

Of generosity and daddy-ohs

Took me some time, to stop saying puu yaal up.

Some random net site waxes nostalgic but utterly fails to explain the pronunciation:

In short, the name came from an Indian phrase “pough,” which meant “add more,” and “allup,” which meant “the people.” The Indians who lived in Puyallup’s river area, he said, always gave more than needed or expected to other Indians who came to trade. They were a very generous people. ...

Why Puyallup? Ezra [Meeker] was determined to pick a name that no other town in the United States would have, or ever likely have in the future, so that citizens would be assured that any and all mail addressed to “Puyallup” would no doubt find its way to this distinctively named city.

In later years however, Ezra Meeker always questioned (and regretted) his decision, seeing the difficulty those from outside the region had in pronouncing the name or interpreting its spelling.

...

Took me some time, to stop saying puu yaal up. In any case, DaddyO, your life mission will soon become the quest for alternative routes to Meridian Avenue. They designed the curb sidewalks for this freeway under the assumption that the population would never exceed 900 or so.

Al, not All

It's Pyoo-AL-up, not Pyoo-ALL-up. Sorry.

"AL" as in Al Bumbry?

Haven't heard it pronounced that way often, though I have heard it. On the radio and TV when they refer to the fair I've most often heard it as "ALL." Come to think of it, when you see commercials for The Fair on TV they have a little ditty (a song), and it includes the line, "Do The Puyallup" pronounced "ALL."

However, I could very well be mistaken. Always happy to be corrected.

Thanks, M's Watcher.

Thanks for the fun info on

Thanks for the fun info on the naming of Puyallup.

Re: Meridian gridlock: As we will be living over by Canyon Road far enough south to avoid the worst of the traffic there, we will be able to take the back way into the South Hill mall area and avoid the worst Meridian traffic as well. And we can head almost due east and hit the newer shopping area on Meridian and 160th. Pretty spiffy, I think.

And you, sir, are the

And you, sir, are the resident phoneme phenom.

Funny you mention that,

Funny you mention that, lampoon.

I rewrote that line when my meandering mind drifted back to a Linguistics class I took at Cal State Fullerton my first semester there (fall of 1978). I had little interest in linguistics at that point (I later took two and a half years of Greek and one course in Hebrew, so it actually helped), but when I registered my first semester at CSUF there were almost no classes left available to me. So I took what was left, including Linguistics 101.

Anyway, that's where I learned about phonemes. So if I'm a po' example of a phonemic phenom, that's the reason.

the dean

Being the dean of phonemes at SSI is no mean feat, considering the denizens' level of literacy, don't you think?

Ok, I have to stop. The word phoneme is like a song I can't get out of my head.