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By Ruth Pennebaker��

All you have to do is move and you get this question 600 times a day: �What�s your new address?� Funny they�the friends, the bankers, the credit-card callers, the movers, the shakers�should ask. Our new address is on San Jacinto Boulevard. San Jacinto! The name of the battle that won the Texas Revolution. The name of the 567-foot Houston ship channel column that�s taller than the Washington Monument (Texans love to measure). The name of my husband�s junior high school in Midland.

San Jacinto. I could have sworn, after decades in this state, I knew how to pronounce it. Along with most people I know, I�d always said it with a hard J: juh-SIN-toe.

But, wait. Not so fast. During three phone calls to utilities, the three women I talked to listened to my hard-J pronunciation. Then they repeated it back to me, using the street�s Spanish pronunciation: ha-SEEN-toe.

One incident like that I could have ignored. Two, in the words of the immortal Fran Lebowitz, constituted a trend. But three? We were rapidly approaching profundity. Evidently, I�d lived blithely, obliviously, in my hard-J neck of the woods while the world had changed around me. With Texas becoming a state with a Hispanic majority, were old pronunciation habits changing? . . .

I was in the midst of these contemplations when my whole linguistic-change theory fell apart. First, I talked to Yolette Garcia, now an assistant dean at �鶹��, and formerly news director of Dallas� public radio station KERA. She said she hadn�t heard any of the linguistic shifts I was talking about. If they were happening, they hadn�t made it to Dallas yet.

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