I had mentioned that I put on the radio at work and it annoys some kids that we have to listen to country (cuz it’s the only kind I can trust to not swear, etc). Thus instead of ‘jerk’, she said “My husband listens to country [and it annoys me]…he’s a circle jerk.”
I’m in arraignment court, telling a guy that the reason he’s being held in jail was because there was a warrant for his arrest in another county and now that he’d been picked up, that county had five business days to come get him or he’d be released.
“Oh, that stuff in Marietta?” he said. “Those charges against me are completely fornicated!”
“Well, in that case I guess you’re basically screwed, sir.”
Jeez, we have one of them too. Sometimes I throw tidbits out there just to see her leap to best me. :rolleyes:
I started a thread on this once, but my favorite is the IT guy who says we should “bump and grind” (the data).
And yeah, I’m bracing for the eventual shift in meaning of penultimate. 
If you can toss out Chomsky, you ought to know that there’s a difference between word-internal consonant cluster reduction, and dropping the first consonant off a word, especially one in which it makes a minimal pair with another word.
Getting back to the subject at hand, my friend Ros mentioned that her mother frequently uses the expression “ne pas savoir où donner de la tête” – a perfectly fine expression meaning to be bewildered or not to know what to focus on, but she did have to stop her before she accidentally translated it literally as “not knowing where to give head.”
I don’t get it. Which consonants in those words are meant to be dropped when spoken? 
As far as “specific” vs. “pacific”, to me it sounds like the sort of pronunciation mixup a young child would make.
A childhood friend of mine couldn’t pronounce “sp” sounds well at all, and pronounced “spaghetti” as “pissghetti” until about the 6th grade.
A friend of my sister’s went to Japan to teach English. His very first day, his cute Japanese greeter was trying to ask if it was his first time in the country, and asked him how many times he had come in Japan. (“None so far.”)
Here on the Boards, eons ago, someone was trying to accuse his/her debate opponent of making a “picayune” (trivial) point, and must have posted about six times how the point was pickaninny.
Seems like you’re mighty quick to roll the eyes, there. Do you NOT pronounce the first consonant in words like “span” and “spear”? Or do you just expect people to know what you’re talking about when you say “panning the globe” or “throwing a peer”?
What garygnu said. I did say write. 
I remembered another: I overheard a tourist in Hawaii talking about playing a native musical instrument. Except instead of “ukulele”, he said “'okole” (butt). :eek: Mercifully, no one in his party seemed to catch the mistake.
No, you’re correct.
In a phone conversation, my paternal grandmother once told my mother, “I’ve been thawing in the basement.” Mom was naturally puzzled, but eventually deduced that Grandma was throwing old clothes and magazines away. Apparently, since Grandma periodically threw away old food when she thawed out her refrigerator, she thought “thawing” referred to the jettisoning of outdated items, as opposed to the removal of frost buildup.
My grandmother used ‘queer’ and ‘gay’ in the old-fashioned sense. “He’s a queer man” or “Don’t those flowers look gay”. Much snickering would ensue from the younger contingent.
My mother, whose mother tongue is not English but speaks it almost fluently, still mangles her idioms. (I’ve posted this before, I know.) Instead of “I don’t want to get under your feet” she told a friend “Let me get out from between your legs”. She’s raised a glass and said “Up yours!” Instead of “Bottoms up!” and has told her genteel friends that she was “so pissed off” - in the case of the latter she did know the correct meaning, but didn’t realise that it was considered coarse by that particular company.
Similarly, a friend from NZ whose parents had immigrated from Central Europe tells of how her father learned his English from dock workers, but his profession also took him to refined circles and he would say things like “that’s a fucking great cup of tea, Mrs Smith” in polite company, without realising his faux pas.
My husband says “fan-thumb.” Jesus…
He also talks about his “lin-eer” tracking turntable. GAAAAHH!
I work for a catalog-sales company, and occasionally a misuse makes it into our catalogs. In fact, our website currently describes one of our items as “notorious”. But that’s not as bad as the item that we claimed was “better than a card, but not as nice as a Hummer” (or something like that).
I intentionally use the expression “coming down the pipe” at work, instead of “pike”. It made for a more colorful metaphor when my department was on the first floor, with most of our work coming from a department physically above us.
They weren’t using it incorrectly, and of course they work, they’re (ETA: basically) the same thing (for all intensive purposes 
): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consonant_cluster_reduction
[/quote]
Consonant Cluster Reduction. Just because you’re white doesn’t mean that your way is better.
First off, it’s not a mispronunciation, it’s a dialect feature. Secondly, nobody is failing to enunciate anything, but I do find it amusing how quickly most Americans are to assume that people who speak differently from them are just “failing” to speak properly: too lazy, too uptight, too fast, too slow. Funny how often those stereotypes match up exactly with what they really want to say about the group of people who tends to talk that way, but they can’t say it because it’s not polite.
Thirdly, how do you pronounce “caught” and “cot”? “Don” and “Dawn”? “Aaron” and “Erin”? They’re pronounced the same where I am. Is that a “failure”, or a dialect feature? If you think it’s a failure and I’m really just terrible at English, I’ve got some test scores to show you.
Really? You pronounce the S, the K and the D distinctly and separately in “asked”?
And once again, dialect variance is not “laziness”, it’s how people learned to say that particular word. It’s not like someone who pronounces “asked” like “axed” is just dragging their linguistic feet, and if you gave them enough coffee they would pronounce it differently. The evidence for this is that even though blending consonant sounds together in words like “asked”, “instinct”, “Arctic” and “old-fashioned” is “lazier”–using your words here–Texans don’t “do it”, while other native English speakers do.
And the idea that Southerners talk slowly and/or drop off consonant sounds because they’re “lazy” or, more charitably, Southern life is more calm and peaceful, is well-debunked here and in some linked articles.
That’s exactly what she said.
That’s because you speak a dialect where they sound different.
Good for you.
There’s nothing wrong with “skipping” the first C sound in “arctic”. It’s a common and understood pronunciation.
Sure I do. Why does it matter? It’s a dialect feature all the same, and a pretty widespread one which AFAICT doesn’t cause any confusion.
Generally (where I am), the K, the second T, the first C, and the word-final ed, respectively.
Yes, I pronounce the S in both examples, and no, I wouldn’t just expect people to know what I were talking about if I did, because it’s not a common usage with very little room for confusion.
Don’t I recall “can you be more pacific” as a joke in Peanuts?
Saying “pacific” for “specific” is not a “common usage” either, it’s a mistake – saying one word when another is meant.
And if you intended to avoid looking like a po-faced pendant in this otherwise amusing thread, you have failed singularly. Feel free to pronounce “singularly” with three of four syllables, as you prefer.
Which dialect is that?
My in-laws, when wishing to convey that two things are basically equivalent, say “Half of one, dozen of the other”. I have tried to explain that they are actually saying that there is a twenty-four fold difference between the two; a far cry from what they actually meant.
And on the tangent in this thread: I do, in fact, pronounce the S, the K and the D distinctly and separately in “asked”. I also believe that saying “pacifically” when one means “specifically” is wrong, dialectic differences be damned. It is also wrong, irrespective of dialect, to say “reelatoor”, “nukyalor”, and “febarary”. I mean, the person making that really long post seems to be saying that any pronunciation is acceptable, as long as you claim it’s your dialect (ooo, I want to call it my “dilectica”). Sure, dialects allow for some reasonable differences, but there’s still a right and a wrong pronunciation.