25 Words You've Probably Been Mispronouncing Your Entire Life

[haele]

89. Oddly enough, there were areas in Seattle where they pronounced "Washington", "Warshington.

I grew up in one; most of the students and teachers in my high school said "Warsh". And I still find myself occasionally add the "r".

Apparently that's a throwback accent in areas where many of the original PNW residents ended up settling - that story of Asa Mercer and the various lumber companies putting out ads for "suitable, marriageable" young ladies in the North East to provide for some gender equality and civilization in the Puget Sound area during the mid-late 1860's was actually true, and the accent took hold in quite a few of the older neighborhoods (along with the large wave of Scandinavian immigration in the early 1900's, which also brought a very scandhoovian way of speaking in some communities, especially where the fishermen settled).

There were also areas where most of the residents sound like they came from southern Georgia.

Though from what my mom tells me, most of those accents began dying out around the late 1980's/early 1990's, when the California "real estate invaders" (which is odd, as we moved to Seattle from California in 1968...) and tech wave started booming in the area, and the older communities started fracturing and "gentrifying".

Haele