Look, we all had a good laugh at the Ochocinco mispronouncing Raleigh thing. NC State sublimely trolled him on Facebook. WRAL created an entire alternate reality in which Ra-lee-uh is real and all of their anchors and reporters are just correcting a long-standing mistake. Those were the salad days. We had fun.
But where you see a meme, I see … opportunity.
Last week, I whipped up a voicemail line and asked you, the classy and refined Rabbit Hole reader, to call in with your favorite North Carolina mispronunciations. I got more than a dozen messages with mangled cities, towns, roads, and places, some of them entirely excusable and others which must have been delivered from some higher consciousness that the rest of us are not a party to. Someone pronounced “Buncombe” in a fashion that I did not know was possible.
I asked Ben McNeely—good dude, longtime journalist, Asheboro native—to help assign points based on how understandable or ludicrous each pronunciation was. At one point, Ben was laughing so hard that I thought he might pass out. At another, he was genuinely shocked to learn about a man’s plan to troll his father with a purposeful mangling of “Bogue Sound.” Look at what you all have done to this poor man:
Ben McNeely, folks.
The result is this episode of the North Carolina Rabbit Hole podcast, which you can watch on YouTube, or listen to on Apple or Spotify or wherever.
If you don’t want any spoilers, please ignore the final points tally below. Or, if you never plan on listening, gaze upon this table and try and decipher how it was that we came upon these totals. Either or!
Place Name | Ben | Jeremy | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
Mebane | 100 | 200 | 300 |
Rea Road | 150 | 50 | 200 |
Rutherfordton | 200 | 150 | 350 |
Chicamacomico | 827 | 825 | 1652 |
Pfafftown | 500 | 700 | 1200 |
Shallotte | 1272 | 1272 | 2544 |
Concord | 0 | 20 | 20 |
Appalachian State | 0 | 50 | 50 |
Manteo | 75 | 25 | 100 |
Buncombe | Bless Your Heart | 1750 | 1750 |
Fuquay-Varina | 1500 | 1500 | 3000 |
Durm | 10 | 2 | 12 |
Cherryville | 800 | 812 | 1612 |
Bogue Sound | 927 | 999 | 1926 |
Ahoskie | 722 | 21 | 743 |
Salisbury | 20 | 30 | 50 |
As you can see, Fuquay-Varina won. Congrats to Jordan from Mars Hill, who will now get a Rabbit Hole sticker in the mail. I’m also sending a second one to her fiancé. Buddy, you deserve it.
Last note: We are sadly no longer going to be taking new voicemails about mispronunciations on the Rabbit Hole Hotline, but if you have a story tip you’d like me to check out, or a topic you think that we need to discuss or investigate, please feel free to leave me a voicemail at (980) 477-5465. Just be aware that we may use whatever you say for a podcast or newsletter or whatever. If you need to call back to work out the proper phonetics of Chicamacomico, just do what you need to do.