One of the best old neighborhoods in a city near where I grew up is Buena Vista. BYOO-na VISS-ta. There’s an entire published book dedicated to the correct mispronunciation of Carolina place names.
There’s a certain affected insecurity surrounding a prissy insistence upon absolutely perfect accent and pronunciation of foreign words, particularly present on network news, that is actually worse than butchering foreign words out of ignorance, imho.
I agree 100%. It’s pretentious, and I’ve always been severely allergic to pretension. Except my own, of course. :)
It is also extremely odd that Americans don’t expect those speaking foreign languages to reciprocate.
Nobody in America is offended when a Spanish-speaking person refers to Los Estados Unidos, but we’re supposed to carefully refer to MAY-hee-co and AR-hen-tee-na instead of pronouncing them as is logical for an English speaker.