Grimmer Girl here. I'm Minion Fagrity and this week I have a big correction from last week,

a meeting middle about further versus farther, a tidbit about the idiom straight from the

horse's mouth and some featured listeners. And now the correction that everyone in New

York will be happy to hear. Last week I said that the abbreviation Soho stood for South

of Houston Street. But even though the street name is spelled like the city in Texas,

it's actually pronounced Howston. I've been a West Coast girl my whole life, but I got the impression

that New Yorkers hate people calling it Houston Street, as much as San Francisco's hate it when

people call their city Frisco, or people in Nevada hate it when someone calls our state Nevada,

which is a lot. So sorry New Yorkers. But then I started wondering why it's pronounced differently

and it turns out the street and the city are named after two different people who pronounced

their names differently. The city in Texas is named after Sam Houston and the street in New York

is named after William Howston. William Howston was a well-known lawyer and politician from Georgia

in the late 1700s and was a delegate to the US Constitutional Convention. A street in New York

is named after him because he married a woman from a prominent New York family and the street was

originally on that family's estate. William spelled his last name, H-O-U-S-T-O-U-N, which was how

the street name was originally spelled to, but at some point along the way the name lost its

U and became identical in spelling to the city name in Texas. But it's pronounced Howston.

Sam Houston lived a bit later and is famous for his military role in an 1836 battle that forced

Mexico to grant Texas its independence, which led the way to Texas becoming part of the United

States in 1845. A lot of listeners had interesting things to say on Twitter about pronunciation.

Eric wrote, amazingly, the New York way is how Google's driving directions pronounce it too,

and this is in Texas. That's blasphemy down here. Yeah, I bet it is. And a bunch of people

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