I should have said dropped consonants, not dropped syllables. I make a lot of mistakes because I'm so fluid.
I worked with a woman from Pennsylvania who would do that. The place was called Bonny Bunting (the Scottish owner made bed linens for kids.) She would answer the phone "Bonny Bun-un." I still grit my teeth. It's not that much more than grun-un (grunting.) I always thought it to be a regional thing (like saying "pawp" instead of "Pepsi.") Another thing people do these days that I also catch myself doing is speaking too rapidly. It's tough to understand a sentence that should consist of 20 syllables when is said in 8.
Yes. Not to over-prolong the point but what does such distortion accomplish? It takes longer to say impor ent than to say important.
I drip with sarcasm Well, you're leaving a trail on the floor of something sticky and disgusting. It may not be sarcasm.
It's the same thing as dropping the "g" off of words ending in "ing." The one thing I forgive us all for is ending sentences with prepositions. "To where I am going" sounds dated and pretentious.
In general, dropping the last sounds of words..... It's not racist, to say it, just true, that blacks do this often. My workmate at the shipyard where I worked as a sandblaster pronounced boat as 'bo', for instance.
I think much of it (for all of us) stems from not reading. Seeing and absorbing the written word is how we learn grammar, sentence construct, word visualization, vocabulary, etc. Absent that, things are all phonetic, learned from the sounds those around us emit. The ratio of literature-to-phonics may be cultural (or more likely, poverty-driven), but the issue is universal to some extent. I wonder if we've gone through that brief period of human history where so many of us have been literate, and we are now experiencing the declining side of that peak. "Pleasure reading" is something to be so grateful for, both the availability of material as well as the free time to enjoy it. (News reading is grammatical garbage.) We may be the transition from poverty-induced illiteracy to technology-induced illiteracy.
That's a lot to think about, John. You're almost as smart as I am. " technology-induced illiteracy."... is that another way of saying 'texting'?