Remember shorthand?  In the “olden” days secretaries would learn to write in shorthand in order to be able to keep up with dictation.  Well, today we are experiencing the morphing of our spoken language into shorthand.  Feeling the urge to speak faster and get the message across in less time, the youth of our day are dropping the “t”s and other hard consonants, and often dropping whole syllables.  I fear we are witnessing a wholesale transformation of the English language.

Here are some words that I have heard slurred, and the way I have heard them pronounced:

​

Ability – “abily”

Quality – “qualy”

Opportunity - “opportuny”

Country – “cuny”

Originating - “origining”

Okay – “ohay”

Christian – “chrisn”

Getting – “gehing”

Academy – “acamy"

Think – “thi”

Can’t – “can”

Don’t – “don”

Thirty – “thiry”

Just give me – “jagime”

Forty – “fory”

Great – “gray”

Eighty – “eighy”

Obviously – “ah-ee-zee”

Currently – “curly”

Absolutely – “azalee”

​

I have several concerns about this trend.  First, accuracy is being sacrificed.  For instance, “thiry” sounds very close to “three”, and “can” is obviously the exact opposite of what was intended.  This is bound to lead to misunderstandings.

​

Second, I feel that this sloppiness casts responsibility onto the listener to figure out what is being said.  When I hear, for example, “My father can be here tonight because he is not feeling well”, it forces me to have to think for a few moments to figure out what was actually being said.  That’s not nice.  The speaker should bear the responsibility for sending an accurate, intelligible message.  This is especially true when the speaker is on TV or any other broadcast medium.  The one-to-many aspect of the situation magnifies the need for accuracy in the original message.

 

When someone speaks to me in slurred English, it causes extra work for me, kind of like when a fellow basketball player sends a sloppy pass my way and I have to exert myself in order to make the catch.  A sloppily pronounced word immediately sends me into super attentive mode as more focus is required just to make out what the other person is saying, much like when listening to a person with a heavy accent.  And I can’t help but be taken aback to a certain extent.  For example, today someone said to me on the phone, “Our department is origining the needed documents.”  The moment I hear that word “origining” I am taken aback because I am hearing a strange new word and my attention is immediately drawn to that word, rather than just being tuned in and understanding the speaker.  In addition, some mental gymnastics are required of me (even if just for a tiny moment) in order to match up what was said what must have been intended.  It is so much nicer when I understand immediately and can simply go forward with the conversation.

 

I am concerned because of the generation gap this creates.  Young people using slurred English seem to understand one another just fine, in my observation.  However, people my age have difficulty getting the message and have to ask people to repeat themselves.  At the check-out counter of a store the other day a young clerk said something to me near the end of the transaction and, having no idea what he said, I asked him to repeat himself.  He repeated the same gibberish in exactly the same way and once again, I did not understand.  At this point I said, “I’m sorry, I have no idea what you are saying.”   And for the 3rd time he said the same thing in exactly the same way.  I just had to shrug my shoulders and walk away.  And believe me, this was no foreigner with a foreign accent.  It was a young American.  It makes me feel silly, old, and out of touch.  And here I am, still with good hearing and perfectly able to communicate with others my own age.  Up until about 15 years ago, it seems to me, young people were taught to speak English in the same manner as adults.  That way people of all ages could communicate with one another, which was a beautiful thing.