Re: USAGE: name pronunciation

John Cowan wrote:
> Even the surname "Gerry", historically pronounced with a [g], is now
> often made [dZ] even by those who bear it*, and the American political
> verb "gerrymander", meaning "to divide an area into districts in such
> a way as to advantage one group over another" is most often pronounced
> [dZ], although the first part of it memorializes Eldridge Gerry [g],
> the governor of Massachusetts,
El_b_ridge Gerry's descendants-- at least as of 50+ years ago, when one of
them was an Old School mate-- use(d) [g].
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Coming-out time: the "Old School", to which I've occasionally referred, was
St. Paul's in Concord NH. Time Magazine, until a few years ago, always
prefaced references to it with the adjectives "upper-crusty,
hockey-playing..."-- accurate enough though over-generalized.  Many
graduates, including yours truly, are neither.

It was, and is, one of the two or three best private schools in the US; and
vastly superior, IONSHO, to, say, Andover :-)))))
-----------------------------------

who redrew the boundaries of election
> districts in 1812 so as to benefit his party.  One of them looked
> something like a salamander, and was christened the "Gerry-mander"
> by a newspaper editor in captioning an editorial cartoon (see
> http://memory.loc.gov/rbc/rbpe/rbpe00/rbpe000/00000100/001dq.gif).
>
> ===
>
> [*] But the Enroughtys [da:biz] and the Taliaferros [tAl@v3z] will
>     *never* submit to mere spelling pronunciations!
>
Along with the Featherstonehaughs [f&nSO] (IIRC) and the Beauchamps
[bitS@m].

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