Dot Wordsworth

The curious pronunciation of ‘East Palestine’

[Getty Images] 
issue 18 March 2023

‘The Royal Pavilion in Brighton is a palace on a Steine,’ said my husband in a dislocated response to learning that East Palestine, Ohio, is pronounced ‘palace-steen’. We’d never heard of the place, pop. 4,761, before a train crashed there, letting out fumes. Its name sounded like a claim to be further east than the original Palestine, but it turns out that when the village changed its name from Mechanicsburg in 1875, the post office added the label East to distinguish it from an existing Palestine in Ohio (pop. today 180). Palestine was, it seems, a name chosen by Rebecca Chamberlin, wife of the settlement’s first resident physician and postmaster – ‘the quiet beauty of the little town, and the earnest, virtuous, simple life of its people suggesting to her a name recalling holy memories’, according to a 1905 history of Columbiana County, Ohio.

Still, –steen is an odd way to pronounce the last syllable of Palestine.

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