Yogi Bear and picanic basket
I have been living in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, southwest of Philadelphia, for coming on 25 years, and I am finally getting a handle on the way people talk around here. For example, if they say, “That drawling is mayan,” they are not referring to the way Southerners speak or to a Mesoamarican civilization, but rather claiming ownership of a pitcher they have made, possibly with a crown. (The Harvard Dialect Survey shows that while Southeastern Pennsylvania is ground zero for that distinctive pronunciation for crayon, it does spread up and down the East Coast a bit.)
Those four examples — drawling, mayan (for “mine”), pitcher (for “picture”), crown — actually bear on the topic that’s on my mind. It strikes me that the majority of Delcoisms either add a unit of sound, or phoneme, to the standard pronunciation of the word or leave one or more out. Linguists call the first strategy epenthesis and the second syncope.
Syncope makes more intuitive sense, as it streamlines the word and saves time and effort. Pitcher comes out easier than picture, and crown than crayon. (Other non-Delco-specific examples of syncope are the common two-syllable pronunciations of vegetable and caramel and the George W. Bushean nucular.)
The particular town I live in is Swarthmore, and it wasn’t long after I moved here that I discerned a split in pronunciation: Natives and longtime residents efficiently said Swahthmore, while newbies (and, interestingly, Swarthmore College students and faculty) insisted on taking the effort to voice that first r. It has been estimated that you have to live here three decades before you go full Swahth. That gives me five and half years to go.
Other local syncope examples are tempacher for whether it’s hot or cold, Pennsavania for our state, Sah-er-dee for the sixth day of the week, folage (sometimes foilage) for the leaves of a flower or tree, and liberry for where you get books.
The degree of epenthesis here is, to me, surprising. The first time I noticed it here was when I was writing a profile of Julie Nixon Eisenhower, who at that time lived (and maybe still lives) in the Philadelphia suburbs. I interviewed one of her neighbors who said, in connection with Ms. Eisenhower’s regular-galness, what sounded like, “She shops at the ackamee just like everyone else.” “The what?” I asked. “The ackamee,” she replied. I eventually realized she was referring to Acme, a regional supermarket chain.
Other examples I’ve heard are remanents (for remnants), incidences (for incidents), mischievious, drownded, and annexed (for annex).
The phenomenon turns out not to be so unusual or surprising. At the rhetoric site Silva Rhetoricae, the Brigham Young professor Gideon O. Burton remarks, “Epenthesis is sometimes employed in order to accommodate meter in verse; sometimes, to facilitate easier articulation of a word’s sound. It can, of course, be accidental, and a vice of speech.” “Vice of speech” is harsh, but I can see the “easier articulation” in the way the basketball announcer Dick Vitale says athalete and Yogi Bear says picanic basket. Other examples are inserting a p or b in words so they come out hampster and cumberbun, and sticking a vowel in Hamtramck, Mich., to yield Hamtramick.
Another local pronunciation is neither syncope nor epenthesis but substitution: saying street as shtreet and strong as shtrong. And of course it’s far from merely local. I first became aware of it through Michelle Obama, and I hear it just about every day via the NPR All Things Considered host Audie Cornish. The phenomenon, sometimes called “S-backing,” has been widely examined and discussed; this blog post by Neal Whitman has a lot of good information and citations. Whitman gives a host of examples, including a line from Beverly Hills Cop (1984), where Eddie Murphy’s character says: “The only reason these officers were in a shtrip club….” I haven’t been able to find much discussion of when and where S-fronting originated, but I don’t think it’s coincidental that Murphy, Cornish, and Obama are all African-American.
However, it’s possible that the origin is more regional than racial. Whitman cites an article on the topic by David Durian which in turn refers to research by the legendary University of Pennsylvania linguist William Labov. In the 1970s, Labov found, S-backing “was fairly pervasive in Philadelphia speech.” As we in Delco might say, darn shtraight.