New Yorkers, among other neuroses, can be particular about the local vernacular.
You wait on line, not in line. The subway goes uptown or downtown, not north or south. And “the city” never, ever refers to the whole city — just Manhattan.
But for some reason, no matter how many times they’ve ridden the Long Island Rail Road out to Jones Beach or back and forth between Midtown and Ronkonkoma, New Yorkers can’t agree on how to pronounce it. The evidence has been on everyone’s lips since about 3,500 L.I.R.R. workers went on strike on Saturday.
“There are a lot of things to debate and to discuss right now,” said Shekar Krishnan, a City Council member representing parts of Queens, including Woodside, Jackson Heights and Elmhurst. “But there’s one thing that’s not debatable: We say Lurr.”
Try telling that to Kieran McShane, 69, a retiree who spent almost 40 years catching the 6:09 a.m. train from Babylon to Penn Station, the whole time calling it the L-I-R-R — each letter enunciated individually.
“Now, I know certain people say L-I-double R,” he said. “But I’d never say that.”
Mr. McShane’s tolerance for alternate vocalizations was truly tested, then, when a reporter informed him that some pronounced the letters of L.I.R.R. as a monosyllabic word.
“What?! Really?!” he said, before shouting to his wife in the other room: “Anne! Have you ever heard it called the Lurr?”
After a beat, a woman’s voice crackled over the phone: “Never!”
Such confusion on Monday rang out across L.I.R.R. territory. People who said it one way were perplexed that anyone could, would, say it differently.
Chrissie Cheung, 41, a lawyer who grew up in Bayside, Queens, is a Lurr traditionalist. She’s been calling it that since she was 8, when she started taking the commuter train to ballet lessons in Manhattan (“the city”). Soon, as a student at Stuyvesant High School, she was riding it every weekday.
“To me it’s like Houston Street: New Yorkers know how to say it,” said Ms. Cheung, who, obviously, pronounced it How-sten. “I feel like people who take the Lurr don’t call it anything other than the Lurr.”
A few years ago, Jaeki Cho, 37, the founder of Righteous Eats, a food channel on social media, put out a short video to his followers asking them how they pronounced L-I-R-R.
“I thought it’d be a fun conversation,” said Mr. Cho, who grew up in Elmhurst, Jackson Heights and Flushing. “But people came out of the woodwork and sounded almost belligerent.”
Just last week, he said, a woman approached him at a networking event and told him his pronunciation — he believes Lurr is “natural and efficient” — was wrong.
Her argument: Would anyone ever refer to the Long Island Expressway as the Lie?
“She was so gung ho about it,” he said. “It made me laugh.”
The pronunciations divergence has even the experts puzzled. Michael Newman, a professor of linguistics at Queens College, noted that L.I.R.R. was an initialism while Lurr was an acronym.
“Why something becomes an initialism when it could be pronounced as an acronym is weird,” he said, noting that the City University of New York, CUNY, was pronounced kyoo-nee, but its state counterpart, SUNY, was soo-nee. “I don’t know why it happens.”
Disputes over pronunciation are not uncommon in New York. As an example, Cecelia Cutler, a professor of linguistics at Lehman College in the Bronx, cited the various phonetic approaches to the name Schermerhorn, with sherm, skerm and skim all receiving significant usage.
On L-I-R-R, there may never be harmony, either. Mr. Krishnan, the city councilman, said his own office was starkly divided on the issue.
“I think it’s a Queens thing to say Lurr,” he said. “And I think people in Long Island say L-I-R-R or L-I-double R. That’s my working theory.”
If only it were that simple. Because others insist it should be called The Railroad. And then there are those call who say L-I-R, apparently believing the last letter is superfluous.
Doug Pearsall, 65, the owner of Eastern Front Brewing Co., in Mattituck on Long Island’s North Fork, who can see an L.I.R.R. train station through the front door of his business, said he didn’t agree with any of the pronunciations.
“We all just call it The Train,” he said. “It’s just the way to get into the city. Or the way to drink on the way to Greenport, so you don’t get a D.U.I.”
That last word he pronounced dewy.
Andrew Keh covers New York City and the surrounding region for The Times.
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