Hiding the Powder

Our house selling and buying has gone relatively well. Little, if any controversy occured during the process. However, there was one thing we didn't consider when deciding which house we would buy and that was the name of the street we live on. This oversight would light a fuse.

Street names, if you stop and think about it, tend to be an emotional tie to where we live. When I think of Timber Dr., I think of my child hood, and the fun I had as a kid. Walker was the first place my wife and I lived together, then Southdale, then Broadway and on to Corry CT. Not that street names are defining points in ones life, but they do have some tendancy to define a tiny, small portion of our lives.

The day after signing all the paper work to make the offer official on our new house, I realized I didn't know what street our new home was on. This is where the controversy began to ignite.

The street name is Poudre Way. Pronounced by my wife as "POO-dray". Yet locals tell us it's pronounced "POO-der". Of course that rang pretty close to a particular slang term I haven't used or even thought of since early middle school.

Many long and potentially explosive discussions of word origins went on between my wife and I. POO-dray vs. POO-der "Fire in the hole!" Even Friday night at a church gathering, it came up and another lady said "People pronounce it both ways, but she couldn't bring her self to pronounce it "POO-der." My wife, still hanging on to a spanish origin, claimed it had to be like Padre pronounced PA-dray only the "ou" made it POO-dray. Deep down, I knew she was wrong and this short fuse had to be put out quickly. So to settle any dispute where do you go??? That's right - Google

Googling "Poudre" I discovered that our road is most likely named after the Cache la Poudre river located in northern colorado. More research discovered that the river got its name from French pioneers who got stuck in a snow storm and decided to bury large amounts of gun powder by the river's bank and travel lighter. Cache meaning "hiding place" in french and Poudre meaning "powder" led me to the tie breaker for our 12 round bout.

Click here for the official pronounciation of Poudre according to Bartleby.