I just head a radio announcer announcer saying it while reading the newswire. Is this a regional dialect?
That’s new to me!
It’s never been anything other than “tuffen”, wherever I’ve heard it. Perhaps the announcer had a little tongue-tied moment?
New to me too. My parents were after me my whole life (even to this day) on proper pronunciation and while that makes me no expert I do tend to notice odd (or what I was taught to consider odd) speech.
Pretty sure I would have remembered hearing tow-fen for tuffen.
As an aside I used to hear “aarnge” for orange and “warsh” for wash a lot when growing up but haven’t heard either in ages. Those still out there?
Last night the local newscaster was talking about presiding at some ceremony for WWII vets. The last line was probably supposed to be something like “…blah blah blah, the debt we all owe them…” – I’m guessing he misread the TelePrompter, because he said “the debt we allowed them…” [/hijack]
Probably a slip of the tongue. I was channel flipping on Oscar night and I happened on Lauren Bacall making a presentation, man did she butcher it. I had to change the channel again because it was painful to watch.
My grandmother used to say “warsh” and “feesh”, even as a kid it drove me nuts, but I was raised not to correct my elders. This was N.E. Ohio.
Your announcer’s gaffe reminds me of pronouncing “chophouse” as “cho-foose” instead of “chop house.”
Pretty normal for that region. I always found the “boosh” for “bush” and “feesh” for “fish” pronunciation fascinating - it sounds so strange to me compared to how people outside the region talk.
Yeah, I’d forgotten about “boosh”. She also called a small paper bag a “poke” and a large paper bag was a “sack”.
How else would you pronounce “orange”? And yep, warsh is out there in various regions as well.
Some Scottish influence there, perhaps? I’m not sure how much that is used now, but it was certainly around when I was a child. (born 1961)
Seriously? 
How it’s spelled, or-angne.
I say “arr-inge” or “orr-inge”. Two syllables. It irritates me a bit when I notice people pronouncing it “ornge” with only one syllable.
That’s me. Or, that’s I. Of course, I just realized that KUMFterble is not the right way to say comfortable. I will add orange to the list to be pronounced very carefully.
But I will not give up my idiosyncracies! Forward is fahward and salt is sawt and that’s all there is to it 
Actually, pronuncing it any other way that KUMF-ter-bull just sounds bizarre. I think that word’s pronunciation has changed - if someone actually said “kum-fur-ta-bull” it would sound really stilted . . .
Jersey girl?
Heh, close. My parents are from Eastern Penna and I grew up in New York State so I think that averages out to Jersey. But honestly I don’t know where these patterns came from.
One of the best gags from the old Odd Couple TV show involved a similar mistake. I it may have been from the episode in which Felix and Oscar go on the gameshow Password. One of them (mis)reads a word that he pronounces “pole-op-Oh-nees” – like the name of some Greek god or something. All the other characters are flumoxed. The real word, of course, is “polo~ponies.”
Thing is, you just KNOW that the writer who wrote the gag – maybe Larry Gelbart – must have made the same mistake in real life and had written it into the show.