Re: YAEPT (was Re: French)

Mark Reed wrote:
> I always pronounced the /t/ in "often" and figured
> those who didn't
> were just being lazy; imagine my surprise when I found that
> most of
> the people who cared about that sort of thing considered
> the /t/-less
> variety correct and the /t/-ful one the mark of a pretender
> to class,
> or whatever - a hypercorrection, though I didn't know
> the term yet.
I've always been in the t-less camp, but this word was one of the shibboleths of my
grade school teachers a long time ago, when the t-ful version was definitely
stigmatized.

> but apart from
> my
> intellectual interest in YAEPT sort of things, I don't
> care whether
> anyone else does or not. :)
Right. One hears lots of presumably well-educated people (like talking heads on TV)
pronounce it with /t/........It no longer grates. Like people saying "momento"
for "memento" (Johnny Carson was the first offender I can recall, and now it's
rather common.)

As someone once said, that's the way the language crumbles.