I SAY NEVADA, YOU SAY NEVAHDA

There is a dubious, but long-standing debate over the pronunciation of this, the 36th of these United States, otherwise known as Nevada. Or is it Nevah-da? Nevada or Nevah-da? Potato or potah-to? Tomato or tomah-to? You get the idea.

It seems that everywhere I turn in the media, people refer to this state in the Spanish pronunciation of "Nevahda", with the "a" in the middle making the "ah" sound, hence my phonetic spelling for the sake of this post. It appears everyone outside of the Nevada media refers to us this way. No other state seems to have this issue. While I am aware that Nevada is a Spanish word meaning "snow capped"; Arizona, California and New Mexico also have names of similar Spanish etymology, yet no one gives those states a proper Spanish pronunciation. So my beef here is that if you insist on a proper pronunciation of NEV-AH-DA, then you ought to extend the same courtesy to CAHL-EE-FOR-NEE-AH (the Arnold pronunciation would be correct), AH-REE-SO-NA, and NEW MEHICO. People shouldn't discriminate on phonetic correctness, it should be universal among all states. So I propose that we either use what is considered to be correct pronunciation - akin to NevAHda - for everyone; or settle the dispute by doing something that perhaps no one has thought yet to do: ask the people who live there. Whoa, genius!

For the purposes of this post I will consider myself a person of authority in settling the long-standing dispute. My authority comes from that very, very rare thing which is defined as being a native Nevadan (or is it Nevahdan??) Not only am I a 33 year native of this state, born and raised (save for a 3 year stint in AhReeSoNah), but my father was a 50+ year native himself having landed in Henderson in 1946 when his family moved here following WWII. My dad always said Nevada without the "ah" sound but with the "a" sound found in "land" or "sand" (both of which this state has more than enough of). And he's not the only one; never in all my years of living here have I ever heard another native pronounce it "Nevahda". Never. Not once. One can only conclude then, that if Nevadans themselves don't say "Nevahda" then they have the final say in the matter. Nevada it is.

Funny thing, Nevada has a national reputation for being populated by under-educated people. With that in mind, what does it say about people who can't even correctly pronounce the name of the very state they consider under-educated...?