Curmudgeon Malcolm Tent gets it to a T
If you read the
TOWFI blog
(I only read it occasionally; everyone seems to have a blog and I
simply don't have the time or inclination to read every one of them every
day!) then you may have come across the discussion of what I call the
intrusive t. It's like the intrusive r of non-rhotic
speakers. You know what the intrusive r is, I'm sure.
It's the addition of an r between a word that ends with a vowel and
another that begins with a vowel, as in "America-R is a great place to go on
holiday." An extreme example would be Mike Myers' English child
character Simon saying "drawRing". Anyhow, adding a t to the
end of words, which seems to be on the rise, is like the intrusive r,
but apparently has a different cause. The intrusive r is added
to ease the flow of speaking and avoid a glottal stop between, in the above
examples, the final a in America and the initial i of
is, or between the vowel sound of -aw- and the i in
drawing. But that t added to the end of across or
wish is beyond me. What are these people thinking? Surely
they can spell wish and across and see that there is no t
in those words. I simply can't see how that t aids in speaking and
avoids glottal stops or the like. What Melanie and Mike have dubbed
hypertauism seems to me like hyper weirdness. Stop it, people!
Drop those t's! |
Issue 201, page
3