Are you a member of the Lost "T" Generation?
So many people are — including my twenty-something kids — but lots of older people are, too.
They seem to have grown up without being able to use the letter "T" in the middle of a sentence. What am I talking about?
Well, you say "little" as LiT-IL — but a whole bunch of people seem to say Li-ILL. I say kitten, they say Ki-enn. You say Important, they say impor-ant. They can pronounce a T at the end of a sentence, but not in the middle.
Surely you've heard this dozens of times. Is it laziness, speech defect or does it allow them to be part of a group that talks like them? Birds of a feather, etc.?
Most of us pretend to not notice because so many people do it. But it's not how your older relatives speak. They'd say "sentence," not "sen-intz."
Now, you might ask, are they doing it on purpose or can they really not say it by now — after so many years of leaving it out? A recent Main Street exchange was very revealing.
I watch as a girl gets out of her car, walks around to the other door and tries to open it. Finding it locked, she calls through the window "pull up on that li-ill bu(t)-en"!
"Whaaaaat?" says her pal.
"Pull that li-ill bu(t)-en right there." she yells, even louder. "Whaaaaat?!" says the driver.
"PULL THE FREAKING LITTLE BUTTON UP!!" she bellows, pronouncing all the T's in the right places and answering that question pretty soundly.
So, is it nurture or nature? Definitely nurture — that is, learned behavior. And the more her friends say it too, the more an entire generation feels reinforced by the company of others.
Is there anything wrong with the Lost "T"? Hmmm . . . good question.
I give my son a hard time about it because he wants to enter the business world. Sometimes people rate you on little things like good grammar and good pronunciation and even good table manners — just the way a person holds their knife and fork when cutting can sometimes be the end of an interview.
Is it just Gloucester, just Mass. or the whole country that does it?
Can't answer that one. But many non-Gloucesteronians are baffled by our expressive local inversions of support, used pretty exclusively by Fishtowners.
You say: "I'm going to the Red Sox game." They say: "So aren't I."
"I finished my hamburger." "So didn't I", they say.
"I can't stand carrots" — "So don't I" they say.
Don't you mean "So do I" or "So did I" or "So am I"?
No, that's not what they meant, even though they were agreeing; "So don't I" is what they said even though it might not be what they meant. We're used to it - but it is a head scratcher for the rest of the country.
There's a few others, like saying "pellow" for "pillow"; or leaving out prepositions in sentences like "I'm going down Jimmy's house or down the beach," or perhaps going to visit friends "down the Fort."
Then there is the famous dichotomy of "up the line" and "down the line" which is pretty much the same thing. And, of course, "ovah the bridge" means way more than actually leaving town, it's more like a lifestyle choice In fact, it's something most of us rarely like to do,
Unless it's really important. I mean: impor-ant, really impor-ant, like li-Ill ki-enns at play on their Pellows Impor-ant.
And if you agree it's important, well, so don't I . . .
Gordon Baird is a local actor and musician, co-founder of Musician magazine, and producer of the community access TV show "Gloucester Chicken Shack."
