URBANA — A visitor asking for directions near Monument Square was briefly detained — socially, not legally — while a lifelong resident explained that Scioto is not pronounced the way a reasonable tourist would guess, that Miami Street is not the river they think it is, and that if you say “Champaign” like the Illinois one, “we know you’re not from here.”
“If you say it like that, we know you’re not from here,” she said, with the pride of a password keeper beside the Man on the Monument.
The visitor repeated it correctly once, incorrectly twice, and then just asked for the nearest way to Crabill’s.