Baton: The stick used in relay races. In the US the accent is on the second syllable, while in the UK the accent is on the first (watching the Olympics on nbcolympics.com, which is a feed of the live broadcast in the UK). Why the difference?
The question wold be more accurate if you asked why not. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! There are hundreds, if not thousands, of differences in American and British pronunciations - especially when considering regional differences in both places. <grin>
It's also the wand that conductors use when leading an orchestra, as well as the very large, decorated stick that people twirl in parades. In American English, we tend to preserve a little more of the phonetics of foreign names and words borrowed from foreign languages than the Brits do. Recall Lord Byron's poem about Don Juan, which he expects to be pronounced JOO-an--otherwise it doesn't fit the rhyme and meter. In college we all paid him back by pronouncing his name by-RON. "Baton" is French and all French words are accented on the last syllable. Native Germanic words (we still have a few of them) are accented on the first syllable--except for a handful of native prefixes like be-, a-, for-. The British have preserved that ancestral memory. They unconsciously fit foreign words into that Germanic mold. For reasons I've never seen explained, we haven't and we don't. But there are non-French words that we accent differently on our side of the Atlantic. We say LAB-ra-to-ry; the British say la-BOR-a-tree, accenting a syllable that we don't even pronounce and omitting one that we do.
And, of course, it hardly stops there. In at least one British dialect it's pronounced la-BOR-a-tory. Two of the most common regional-differentiated I hear in the U.S. are PEA-con and Pea-cann and route (rowght/rowt/rout) and root.
