By DENNIS MYERS “Against the Grain”

Back in the 1960s or ’70s, Washoe County Sen. Cliff Young asked the Nevada Legislature’s bill-drafting office for a cost figure on how much it costs to draft, introduce, and process one basic piece of legislation. Nothing fancy, just drafting, introduction, a hearing and a vote. As I recall, they gave him a figure in the range of $700. I don’t know what figure they would give today, but $700 in 1970 would be $3,933.19 today.

That’s one of the reasons I was surprised to hear that outgoing Assemblymember Harry Mortenson of Clark County wants legislation enacted to make “Ne-vaw-da” an acceptable but alternate pronunciation of the state’s name. The part that did not surprise me was that he waited until he was term-limited out of the job of legislator to suggest this bill for someone else to sponsor.

In 1973 French President Georges Pompidou and in 1994 the French Culture Ministry tried to use law to expel “Franglais” — words from English that have seeped across the channel and the ocean into the French language. In 1977 Quebec enacted Bill 101, which required the use of French terms along with English in a variety of ways because it’s a bilingual province. The Canadian law had some success, but the language will go where it will go, so the French notion will likely never change or even slow down the language. Law and language are a mixed mix.

For those from outside the state who may happen to read this piece, the local pronunciation is not Ne-vaw-da. It’s Ne-vad-uh. The middle syllable is pronounced like the start of vacuum or vanity.

Movies and television have actually been an aid to Nevadans in getting the local pronunciation out into the public bloodstream. Because of Nevada’s proximity to California, there have been hundreds of movies made in Nevada, giving actors exposure to the locals and lessons in how to pronounce the state’s name, something they carried with them into later movies. “I can tell I’m back in Nevada from the lack of manners,” said an old woman in the Dorothy Malone/Randolph Scott western, “The Nevadan.” She may not have cared for our manners, but she pronounced the name the way Nevadans do. That was 60 years ago. In “Reno,” actor Richard Dix also pronounced the state’s name as the locals do. That was 71 years ago.

The former administrator of the Nevada State Archives, Guy Louis Rocha, had an interesting experience in 2003 that shows why politics is so repulsive these days. When the second George Bush was in the White House and Rocha was still at the archives, Bush spoke in Nevada and pronounced the state’s name Ne-vaw-da. A Nevada newspaper did a story about it and called Rocha for a comment. Rocha, carefully specifying that he was not criticizing Bush, said something along the lines of it’s better for politicians to learn local pronunciations and respect them.

So far, no problem. But then the Associated Press got ahold of the local newspaper story and rewrote it so that it pitted Rocha and Bush against each other. The Drudge Report, then a popular website and also a favorite of right wingers, posted the AP story on its home page. Suddenly Rocha at his state capital office was deluged with angry, even obscene or vicious email messages. Incidentally, Rocha says all the focus on the second syllable obscures the fact that the first syllable was originally pronounced “Nee.”

To me, it was more important that Bush learn to pronounce “nuclear” than “Nevada,” but otherwise I felt much the way Rocha does about respecting the locals.

Curiously, in 2001, Bush had spoken in Nevada, Missouri, and got that town’s unusual pronunciation Ne-vay-da correct, prompting Missouri columnist Carolyn Gray Thornton to wonder “who had told him how to mispronounce it correctly.”

Thornton once spent part of her time in the District of Columbia where there is a Nevada Avenue and where most of the locals pronounce it the way we Nevadans do. She wrote that “we spent our winters on Nevaaaada Avenue and returned in the summers to Nevayda, Missouri.”

There are always those people who insist that Nevada should be pronounced Ne-vaw-da because, they argue, it is analogous to “Grenada,” which they say is pronounced that way. They must have been thoroughly disoriented when the United States invaded Grenada and the folks back home learned it was pronounced Gre-nay-da. How do WE get invaded so this matter can be settled?