My sister-in-law Linda posted some beautiful flower photos this morning on Facebook. She and my brother Harry live in Maine and spend a lot of their time happily communing with nature.

I, on the other hand, can recognize pansies and geraniums, but I fear that’s about it. Oh, and roses. Carnations and day lilies, too, But that’s it.

So it’s a good thing Linda identified the flowers in her post as peonies.

Now I may not recognize peonies, but at least I’ve heard of them before. Years ago, Gary’s mom, Rita, planted some around the farmhouse and they flourished.

Only she called them pee-OWN-ees.

I asked Linda if she’d come across that pronunciation before, and indeed she had heard a few “old timers” say peonies that way.

That got me thinking about other words we pronounce differently around the country. The only one that was actually traumatic to me, though, was from back in the fall of 1981, as I started my first job in TV news at WVJS/WSTO in Owensboro, Kentucky.

One of my first assignments was to interview the local fire chief so our viewers could learn how to prevent chimney fires as the weather turned colder. Jeff Spurlock and I headed off to cover the story.

“You know who the fire chief is, don’t you?” Jeff teased. “He’s Jim’s ex father-in-law.”

If that was meant to intimidate me, Jeff, it worked. Although Jim, our news director, was about the nicest boss ever, so I needn’t have worried.

We set up in the fire chief’s office, with Jeff on camera and me ready to conduct the interview. An overnight fire had destroyed an older home in town, and the blame rested squarely on the chimney.

As the fire chief, another really nice man, answered my first question, he mispronounced chimney.

“That was the first chimbley fire of the season and we want homeowners to know how to prevent them.”

Wait – what? Chimbley?

I glanced over at Jeff, who immediately looked the other way, trying desperately not to laugh out loud.

I’ve since learned that “chimbley’ is an “old timers” version of chimney. (In fact, Dad tells me that’s how Grandpa Cassidy pronounced it.) But in that moment, I had about five seconds to figure out which pronunciation to use in my next question.

If I said “chimbley,” would it sound like I was mocking him? But if I said “chimney,” how would I control my know-it-all nature and not add emphasis to the word?

Would a chimbley fire reduce my career to a charred rubble?

I managed to make my way to the end of interview without sparking any controversy. And my job was secure for another day.

Here’s a more common example: How do you pronounce a-u-n-t? Where I come from, it’s ahnt. Here in Indiana it is “ant.” Well, all except for me and our sons. I’m not adjusting to that level of Midwest speak.

When Mom and Dad returned to Connecticut following their house-hunting trip to the Indianapolis area back in 1973, they sat us down to teach us some new word usage:

• Sack is a bag. It is both a noun and a verb. In Indiana grocery stores, they’ll ask “do you want a sack for that?”
• Special is pronounces spatial. Dad had a particularly hard time with that in a restaurant. “Would you like to hear today’s spatials, hun?”
• Space cookies are spice cookies. (More confusion for poor Dad.)
• Quarter seemed to confuse my new classmates. Apparently I drop the first “r.” Still do.
• Warsh And speaking of the letter “r,” it gets added to some words here in the Hoosier state. Image my horror in church when, during the consecration, the priest cried out, “Lord, warsh away my inequity and cleanse me of all my sins.” At that point, I was ready to walk back to Connecticut.
• Vowels While we’re still in church, may I add it was also difficult to hear “o” as “a.” Yes, the lard was barn in a stable.

One adjustment I was happy to make was pecan. Growing up, we called it PEE-can. Both syllables sounded hard and nasal, kind of awful. Other ways to say it: puh-CAN, puh-CAHN, and PEE-cahn. Although I think I prefer puh-CAHN, I probably say PEE-cahn most of the time.

In know, it’s enough to drive you nuts!

Here’s one from decades ago: The second year of high school or college is the sophomore year. For some reason, Mom called it our southmore year. We corrected her a million times, but it never stuck. She got absolutely everything else right, though, so we’ll let that one slide.

And finally, a story from Gary. His dad used to talk about a neighbor (another old-timer) who referred to yellow jackets as jelly jackers. Now, this fellow was a third-generation German American, but English was a second language for him. Gary’s dad, Andrew, never did figure out whether jelly jackers was a play on words (given how bees love sweet treats like jelly and nectar), or if the old timer was simply a bit hard of hearing.

How do you pronounce peonies? And pecans? You can post about your interesting pronunciations below. It would be fun to read other examples!

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