Ronda Rich: Hearing words with an old mountain ear can get me in trouble Ronda Rich Until Tink, a well-enunciating Yankee came along, I didn’t realize how badly, or at least differently, I pronounce words. Often, we quibble over the pronunciation of a word then we look it up and discovered that both were correct, just used by different parts of America. Sometimes Tink will try to teach me a new pronunciation because mine is truly wrong. I try to repeat it after him and I can’t. One day, he said, “You hear with an Appalachian ear. You can only hear words the way you heard them in the mountains.”