Attn.Bill Houghton

Should be labelled OT,sorry

Andy Lincoln,In Dearborn MI

>

Thanks for the picture - REALLY OT, bit long *LINK*

Bill Houghton, little gloomy today, Sebastopol, CA

>They're competing with Houghton County and the town of Houghton in Michigan's Upper Peninsula (see link below) - if having something named after me were enough to tempt me back to the Land of Rusty Cars (are they still salting the daylights out of the winter roads?), the prospect of visiting the Upper Peninsula would win.

There's also Harvard's Houghton Library (http://hcl.harvard.edu/libraries/#houghton), probably a scheme on Harvard's part to convince me to donate my fortune toward their endowment (ha! little do they know I invested it all in my children - well, and a little in some tools; and besides, they didn't focus their collection on my interests: hand tools, of course; jug band music; mindless trash literature).

When we lived in Michigan, LOML and I visited Houghton Lake once on vacation. Our only memory of it is the cheap motel, with a mattress the cross-section of which could have been used to design a boomerang.

All in all, though, I enjoyed my four years in Michigan (1.5 before I met LOML, then, a couple of years later, a return with LOML for 2.5 years, during which our older son was born in Ann Arbor), except for the summer bugs and humidity (each bad enough, but dreadful in combination).

Actually, all these places likely have nothing to do with my family. "Houghton" is the surname of two families in England, the northern family pronouncing it "HO-ton," while the southern family (mine) pronounces it properly as "HOW-ton." Houghton Lake, the Houghton Library, and, I believe though I'm not sure, Houghton in the UP are all pronounced northern style.


Houghton, Michigan, proud home of Michigan Tech

Re: Thanks for the picture - REALLY OT, bit long *LINK*

Angus Barclay, in New Zealand

>Hello Bill,

the northern family pronouncing it "HO-ton," the southern family (mine) pronounces it properly as "HOW-ton."

A few people round these parts mangle the pronunciation completely to "HOR-ton", as if New Zealand accents weren't mangled enough already!

regards

Angus Barclay

(living next to Houghton Bay, which has a gnarly surf beach)


Houghton Bay

Mangling names

Bill Houghton, little gloomy today, Sebastopol, CA

>I read once, in my youth, that there are something like 14 different ways in English to pronounce the character string "ough" (or maybe it was 28 - long time since I was in my youth). I figure I've heard at least 75% of the variant pronunciations in my time, as people attempt my surname. "Huffton" is about third most common, but some people even manage "Humpton."

The rest of the story

Derek

>Here goes -

I got this straight from Paul Harvey!

Actually the two families were one long ago. There were two brothers in the family (Bill & Bob) and they were both cabinet makers. Unfortunately, there was not enough business in the town for both of them so they started to feud. It got so bad they decided that, for the sake of their old and beloved mother, they would separate. One moved north and one moved south.

Eventually, the pronunciation of the names changed (you know the northern/southern accents).

In the end, they forgot their ancestral roots.

Isn't it amazing what you can learn here?