You don’t need to spot them from a mile away — you can hear them. “I have to pick her up from the bus in Monti-chell-o,” the woman says to her friend as they wander the store, picking up items and putting them down. “Maybe we’ll drive through Kally-coon tomorrow.”

You try not to cringe and whisper to yourself: Mon-ti-sello. Cal-uh-coon.

These are the sounds of the last major holiday weekend of the year in Sullivan County.

We depend on these sounds, depend on the weekenders and the leaf peepers and the people who flee the city for a few days of peace in the mountains. They’re good for business, good for the local economy, good for keeping our hamlets alive.

But there’s something about hearing the names of these places mangled that makes you realize these sounds are a part of you.

Before you’d even learned how to tie your shoes or identify the letters of the alphabet, you learned to say them.

Co-shek-ton, not Co-chek-ton.

Beth-uhl, not Beh-thell.

These aren’t just names on a map. They’re the soundtrack of growing up here, the words that peppered every conversation about where you were going, where you’d been and who you’d been talking to.

“I have to run to the government center in Monticello this week.” “We saw a movie at the Callicoon Theater over the weekend.” “Tim said it’s already snowing in the Beechwoods.”

Tourists roll in with mispronunciations straight out of Google Maps or Waze, and they remind us that this place is ours in a way it will never quite be theirs, not because they’re not welcome here but because the way we talk about our towns is as much a part of us as the clothes we wear and the cars we drive.

We will always be the ones who can rattle off the names of each back road between here and Roscoe without needing to check our phones and know when it’s legal to go fishing in the Will-oh-wee-mock without a visit to the DEC website.

So when I hear someone ask for directions to “Mon-ti-chello,” I whisper a correction to myself, and then I smile.

Not because I’m judging them (OK, maybe a little?) but because it’s a reminder that some things can’t be learned from a weekend getaway or a Google search.