Each time we speak we make a multitude of such fractional adjustments, most of
which we are wholly unaware of. But these only begin to hint at the complexity
of our phonetics. An analysis of speech at the Bell Telephone Laboratories by
Dr. John R. Pierce detected more than ninety separate sounds just for the letter t.
We pronounce many words—perhaps most—in ways that are considerably at
variance with the ways they are spelled and often even more so with the ways
we think we are saying them. We may believe we say "later" but in fact we say
"lader." We may think we say "ladies," but it's more probably "laties" or even, in
the middle of a busy sentence, "lays." Handbag comes out as "hambag." We
think we say "butter," but it's really "budder" or "buddah" or even "bu'r." We
see wash, but say "worsh." We think we say "granted," but really say "grannid."
No one says "looked." It's "lookt." "I'll just get her" becomes "aldges gedder."
We constantly allow sounds to creep into words where they have no real
business. We introduce a "p" between "m" and "t" or "m" and "s" sounds, so
that we really say "warmpth" and "somepthing." We can't help ourselves.
We similarly put a "t" between "n" and "s" sounds, which is why it is nearly
impossible for us to distinguish between mints and mince or between prints and
prince. Occasionally these intruders become established in the spellings.
Glimpse (coming from the same source as gleam) was originally glimsen, with
no "p," but the curious desire to put one there proved irresistible over time.
Thunder originally had no "d" (German donner still doesn't) and stand had no
"n." One was added to stand, but not, oddly, to stood.
Messenger never had an "n" (message still doesn't), pageant never had a "t," and
sound no "d."We tend to slur those things most familiar to us, particularly place-names.
Australians will tell you they come from "Stralia," while Torontoans will tell you
they come from "Tronna." In Iowa it's "Iwa" and in Ohio it's "Hia." People from
Milwaukee say they're from "Mwawkee." In Louisville it's "Loovul," in Newark
it's "Nerk," and in Indianapolis it's "Naplus." People in Philadelphia don't come
from there; they come from "Fuhluffia." The amount of slurring depends on the
degree of familiarity and frequency with which the word is spoken. The process
is well illustrated by the street in London called Marylebone Road. Visitors from
abroad often misread it as "Marleybone." Provincial Britons tend to give it its
full phonetic value: "Mary-luh-bone." Londoners are inclined to slur it to
"Mairbun" or something similar while those who live or work along it slur it
even further to something not far off "Mbn."
For the record, when bits are nicked off the front end of words it's called aphesis,
when off the back it's called apocope, and when from the middle it's syncope. A
somewhat extreme example of the process is the naval shortening of forecastle to
fo'c'sle, but the tendency to compress is as old as language itself. Daisy was
once day's eye, good-bye was God-be-with-you, hello was (possibly) whole-be-
thou, shepherd was sheep herd, lord was loafward, every was everich, fortnight
(a word curiously neglected in America) was fourteen-night.
The British, who are noted for their clipped diction, are particularly good at
lopping syllables off words as if with a sword, turning immediately into
"meejutly," necessary into "nessree," library into "libree." The process was
brought to a kind of glorious consummation with a word that is now all but dead
—halfpennyworth.
With the disappearance in the ig80s of the halfpenny (itself neatly hacked down
in spoken British to hapenee), the English are now denied the rich satisfaction of
compressing halfpennyworth into haypth. They must instead content themselves
with giving their place-names a squeeze—turning Barnoldswick into "Barlick,"
Wymondham into "Windum," Cholmondeston into "Chumson."
We Americans like to think our diction more precise. To be sure, we do give full
value to each syllable in words like necessary, immediate, dignatory, lavatory,
and (very nearly) laboratory. On the other hand, we more freely admit a dead
schwa into -ile words such as fragile, hostile, and mobile (though not, perversely,into infantile and mercantile) where the British are, by contrast, scrupulously
phonetic. And both of us, I would submit, are equally prone to slur phrases—
though not necessarily the same ones.
Where the British will say howjado for "how do you do," an American will say
jeetjet for "have you taken sustenance recently?" and lesskweet for "in that case,
let us retire to a convivial place for a spot of refreshment."
This tendency to compress and mangle words was first formally noted in a i94g
New Yorker article by one John Davenport who gave it the happy name of
Slurvian. In American English, Slurvian perhaps reaches its pinnacle in
Baltimore, a city whose citizens have long had a particular gift for chewing up
the most important vowels, consonants, and even syllables of most words and
converting them into a kind of verbal compost, to put it in the most charitable
terms possible. In Baltimore (pronounced Balamer), an eagle is an "iggle," a
tiger is a "tagger," water is "wooder," a power mower is a "paramour," a store is
a "stewer," clothes are "clays,"
orange juice is "arnjoos," a bureau is a "beero," and the Orals are of course the
local baseball team. Whole glossaries have been composed to help outsiders
interpret these and the many hundreds of other terms that in Baltimore pass for
English. Baltimoreans may be masters at this particular art, but it is one
practiced to a greater or lesser degree by people everywhere.
All of this is by way of coming around to the somewhat paradoxical observation
that we speak with remarkable laxness and imprecision and yet manage to
express ourselves with wondrous subtlety—and simply breathtaking speed. In
normal conversation we speak at a rate of about 300 syllables a minute. To do
this we force air up through the larynx—or supralaryngeal vocal tract, to be
technical about it—and, by variously pursing our lips and flapping our tongue
around in our mouth rather in the manner of a freshly landed fish, we shape each
passing puff of air into a series of loosely differentiated plosives, fricatives,
gutturals, and other minor atmospheric disturbances. These emerge as a more or
less continuous blur of sound. People don't talk like this, theytalklikethis.
Syllables, words, sentences run together like a watercolor left in the rain. To
understand what anyone is saying to us we must separate these noises into words
and the words into sentences so that we might in our turn issue a stream of
mixed sounds in response. If what we say is suitably apt and amusing, thelistener will show his delight by emitting a series of uncontrolled high-pitched
noises, accompanied by sharp intakes of breath of the sort normally associated
with a seizure or heart failure. And by these means we converse. Talking, when
you think about it, is a very strange business indeed.
And yet we achieve the process effortlessly. We absorb and interpret spoken
sounds more or less instantaneously. If I say to you, "Which do you like better,
peas or carrots?" it will take you on average less than a fifth of a second—the
length of an eye blink—to interpret the question, consider the relative merits of
the two vegetables, and formulate a reply. We repeat this process hundreds of
times a day, generally with such speed that often we have our answer ready
before the person has even finished the question.
As listeners we can distinguish between the most subtle gradations of emphasis.
Most people, if they are reasonably attentive, can clearly detect the difference
between that's tough and that stuff, between I love you and isle of view, and
between gray day and Grade A even though the phonics could hardly be more
similar. Sometimes, however, precise diction proves elusive, particularly when
there is no direct eye contact. (It is remarkable the extent to which we read lips
—or at least facial expressions.) Every newspaper person has his or her favorite
story involving slipups resulting from misheard dictation. I remember once
while working on an evening newspaper in southern England receiving a wire
service story that made absolutely no sense until a correction was sent a few
minutes later saying: "In the preceding story, for 'Crewe Station' read
'crustacean.' In a similar way, pilots long had difficulty in distinguishing
between five and nine until someone thought to start using the more distinct
fiver and niner. Germans, suffering a similar problem with zwei and drei,
introduced the nonce word zwo, for two, to deal with such misunderstandings.
Despite these occasional drawbacks, listening is something we do remarkably
well. Speech, by contrast, is a highly inefficient process. We are all familiar with
the feeling of not being able to get the words out fast enough, of mixing up
sounds into spoonerisms, of stumbling over phonetically demanding words like
statistics and proprietorial. The fact is that we will never be able to speak as
quickly as we can hear.
Hence the tendency to slur. There has been a clear trend over time to make our
pronunciations less precise, to let letters lapse into silence or allow sounds tomerge and become less emphatic. This happened with -ed endings. In Chaucer's
day, helped was pronounced not "helpt" but "hel-pud," with the two syllables
clearly enunciated. By Shakespeare's time, poets could choose between the two
to suit their cadence—writing helped to indicate the historic pronunciation or
help'd to signify the modern one.