Noting that I’ve written about the hip-hop/youth/New York trend of glottalizing (that is, “swallowing” the t before the last syllable) such words as important, button, and Manhattan, a reader recently e-mailed me, “I was intrigued by how Hillary Clinton glottalized her last name … as early as 1992. Not surprisingly, she changed it back to Clin’T'on in her campaign video last year.”
The reader included links to two YouTube videos. The first, a fairly amazing comedy bit at a 1992 roast of Ron Brown, suggests the complexity of Clinton pronunciation. I count four ways the name is commonly said, beginning with two sorts of glottalization: going all in and swallowing both the n and the t (“Clih-ən”) or the sort of modified glottalization Hillary employs in the clip (at about the 1:20 mark), voicing the n but not the t–”Clin-ən.” This is similar but not identical to the pronunciation of the town of Clinton, in upstate New York: the townsfolk apparently say “Clinen” — with no t and no glottalization, as if to rhyme with linen. (I’m not counting that as one of the four.)
In the second clip, a current campaign ad, Hillary’s pronunciation of her last name — which comes in the last couple of seconds — has indeed changed to “Clin-ton,” with the second syllable fully voiced. That’s three. The fourth seems to me the most common, and I recall that when Bill Clinton came on the scene in the early 90s, there was talk of this being the authentic Southern pronunciation. It’s “Clint-n” — in other words, alveolar stop with nasal release. I picked up that term from a fascinating discussion of the varying pronunciations of button and butter on this blog about dialects. If any specialists have a quibble with the terminology, please weigh in in the comments. (As if I had to ask.) Another blog has some tips for non-native English speakers on learning how to say Clint-n and mount-n.)
Like all politicians, from our current president on down, Hillary Clinton speaks in different ways before different audiences and on different occasions. Last year Bloomberg Politics published an article called “Tracking Hillary Clinton’s Use of Every American Accent East of the Mississippi” (a sound clip is included). The title was a little hyperbolic, as the article talked about only three particular speech habits Clinton has slipped in and out of over the years: the Southern “glide switching,” or pronouncing the i in child or like as ah; “Northern Cities Shift,” (a characteristic of her native Illinois), or pronouncing the word cat so it sounds like kyet; and the Obama-esque g-dropping, that is, talkin’ about makin’ the economy better for workin’ families.
The variation in how one can say Clinton is rare among presidential names. This century there have been only two that allow for any uncertainty. Most recently, I remember that when Ronald Reagan first came on the scene, my father pronounced the first syllable Ree instead of Ray. Various people on the Internet testify to using or hearing that pronunciation in his pre-Presidential days, but at least in the introduction to this 1954 clip from General Electric Theater, the man himself says Raygun. (The clip itself is a fascinating acting meetup between Reagan and James Dean.)
The other ambiguous name was owned by two presidents, Theodore and Franklin D. Roosevelt. One still hears it pronounced phonetically, with the first syllable rhyming with muse. But that is wrong. I say so with certainty because Theodore addressed the question in 1898, in a reply to someone who had asked about the pronunciation:
As for my name, it is pronounced as if it was spelled “Rosavelt.” That is in three syllables. The first syllable as if it was “Rose.”