Shtreet

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name’s Ron from Escondido.

Ron from Escondido.

Hi, Martha. Hi, Grant.

Greetings.

Hi. What’s up, Ron?

Well, I’m wondering. Every once in a while when I talk with someone and we’re giving directions,

And they’ll go straight down that street.

Mm—

And I wonder where that extra H is coming from.

Ron, so you’re saying street with an S-H at the beginning.

That’s right.

Oh, right, because it wasn’t completely clear on the line.

Yeah, I wasn’t hearing it either.

But we know what you’re talking about because you’re not the first person to notice this.

Oh, absolutely not.

For decades, people have been commenting on this.

The S-T-R sound becoming something like an S-H-T-R sound.

Yes, exactly.

It requires the S and the T and the R.

It’s not just the S-T alone that will do it.

Really interesting stuff.

Drives a bunch of people crazy.

I’m not sure if you’re one of those.

Yeah, it bothers me a little bit.

I try looking it up on the web, and it’s a hard thing to try to do detective work on.

It’s extremely hard.

Yeah, but if you just Google the spelling, just search for S-H-T-R-E-E-T,

You’ll find a lot of people talking about it because people use that to describe what they’re hearing.

Yeah.

And you’ll also find it used in some, I mentioned in some style guides and pronunciation guides

And a lot of different books about changing language and so on and so forth.

And it is a thing.

It is something that people do.

That’s what we call in the trade a thing.

Well, that’s Hollywood language keeping in.

I’m too close to…

Is this the way people are going to speak 10 years from now?

Well, they’ve been speaking this way for decades.

Here’s the thing.

It’s because that S-T and that R are next to each other.

It is always going to happen to somebody somewhere in the English-speaking world at any given time.

But it’s not so common yet where we can say it’s a transition that’s inevitable.

And it’s not so common where we can say this is something to be remarked upon in the pronunciation guides of dictionaries.

We find examples of it in the U.K., in Australia, in New Zealand, in Canada, in the United States.

Pretty much anywhere English is spoken, somebody’s doing this and somebody else is commenting on it.

A lot of people say, oh, I hear it more and more in the news media.

I do.

Yeah, but it’s because you watch a lot more news media maybe than…

Well, in traffic reports, you know, people are always talking about this and that streak.

Streak, yeah.

Michelle Obama talks this way too.

Yeah, it appears in the language of black Americans and white Americans, young and old.

There’s no particular, it’s not regional.

Right.

And it’s because it’s a feature of English.

It’s possible that something called assimilation is happening,

Where that S-T and the R next to each other sometimes calls us to say sh instead of s.

So we’re saying an S-H sound instead of an S sound.

It’s kind of like the consonant equivalent of a diphthong.

Ooh, I like that.

A diphthong is when two vowels collide and kind of make a third sound, right?

So this assimilation is kind of when two consonant sounds collide and kind of make a third sound.

So, Ron, you’re not alone.

You’re not imagining things.

And linguists are on the case.

Well, thank you.

I knew you guys would know about it.

Appreciate it.

Thanks so much.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

I see one Australian commentator remarks upon it as sloppy, which is really misguided.

It’s not necessarily sloppy because it’s just something that’s happening.

Yeah, and I think people are picking it up from each other.

It could be, yeah.

That’s my sense.

It’s one of those things that’s hard to test for because you need to catch people using it when they’re not aware that you were judging their speech.

Exactly.

And that’s very difficult to do.

Very difficult to do.

Yeah.

Well, when words collide, A Way with Words results.

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