TIMMINS – Am I dating myself if I ask the following – do you remember some of the old K-Tel commercials that were featured about every five seconds on television in the 1970s?
And yes, they were repeated at a high rate because I still remember some of the commentary “Octavian! Edward Bear! April Wine!” followed by a list of hits that you just had to own (I don’t know why those three bands have remained embedded in my brain, but there it is).
The records were a success and an easy way for kids to buy music – albums were $4.99, tapes $5.99 (pricey for the time, but oh so worth it if you were a young person collecting hit music). I admit it – I still have a few of those gaudy albums – and if you are feeling nostalgic, a lot of those early ads are on YouTube (pretty dated but fun to watch – the production values are worth the search alone).
But what I remember the most is the end of one of the commercials – they always ended with a local list of places or towns in which you could find a record store that supplied the albums. Well, for some reason, the announcer for our region got it a bit wrong when it came to Kapuskasing – he kept pronouncing the town’s name as “Ka-POU-ska-sing” – much to the consternation of the residents of said town.
The mispronunciation of Kenogami (Ken-o-ga-mey) this past week on Toronto’s Breakfast Television highlighted the problem of names once again.
The Mattagami River (sounded out by some as the Mat-a-ga–mee) is another case in point. We know the pronunciations obviously because we live here; we know the origins of those names – or do we?
Bet you did not see this coming with that rambling and quite possibly pointless intro – but what I want to talk about a bit is the origins of some of the local place names (and street names) that we live with every day.
For the rest of this article: http://www.timminspress.com/2018/01/28/history-whats-in-a-name