understand what the speaker is talking about, a mispronunciation here or there shouldn't be a problem. If anything, having everyone pronounce everything exactly the same way would be boring. There'd be no need for voice actors, just computers with a dictionary on file and the ability to adjust pitch and tone. Our dialects would lose their flavor, and as writers, what does pronunciation even matter unless we're reading something aloud or referencing it for how a character from a particular place would say things? When people are reading our work, they're not going to read it with perfect pronunciation, unless that happens to be the dialect a reader has cultivated. They read it in their own voice, the one they think with. I've had a character for a while with an unusual name, and I'd always correct people on the way they said it... until I realized I was pronouncing the name incorrectly, too. I've since changed the spelling, but beyond that I've just got to live with the fact that, no matter what I do, some people are going to keep pronouncing his name differently than I do. And that's just fine, because as far as characters go -- as far as writing as a whole goes -- that's not really what matters. Peter on December 21, 2011 8:11 am I didn't know there was any place called "green-witch" (the only US Greenwich I know of is the one in New York, pronounced the English way), but the US