Unless of course it is patently hilarious in which case I make an exception.
Thanks to the open plan office, I am able to regularly experience the aural delights of a colleague I call "keybort woman".
She has attained this moniker on account of her stubborn inability to properly pronouce the 'd' sound.
From her lips, a 'd' is inexplicably hardened into a vile and incongruent 't' sound.
Hence, 'keyboard' becomes 'keybort'.
And this woman has become keybort woman.
In the comfort of our own home, the LovelyWife and I have expanded on this trend and have identified the following kinds of bort scattered amongst the everday of modern life:
Cheese bort
Dart bort
Sidebort
Bort of directors
Dash bort
Score bort
Diving bort
Surf bort
Snow bort (thankyou Winter Olympics)
Black bort
Smorgasbort
Australian Wheat Bort
Today, I discoverd that it is not just when 'd' appears at the end of a word that it is mutilated by this woman. You can, apparently, harden your 'd' sounds whenever you like!
Forthwith:
"That's what my frients dit. They bought a house in Turner ant then when they solt it, they solt it for over a million tollars.
"Ant, then they borrowed another tree-hunret and tirty thousant tollars... which is a lot now they have three kits.
Ant I sait 'you're kitting'! Don't forget that chilt care is really expensive."
Sometimes I just wanna sneak up behind her and whack her over the head with my keybort.
8 comments:
Thank you, I have heard this story a number of times but managed to piss myself nonetheless. Not literally of course...
There's a whole Minette Walters (I think) novel whose plot turns on one of the characters having this speech defect, or something quite like it (the 'd' gets swallowed rather than hardened, and so comes out as more of a 'm' or closed-lips sound), which leads to a mis-hearing of a crucial phone conversation, which leads ... etc etc etc; you know how those psychological thriller murder plot thingies work.
To your list, I would add a few items from my own line(s) of work: the chalk bort, the white bort, the editorial bort, the Literature Bort, and the nasty condition one develops while listening to academic conference papers or watching bad amateur theatre: 'Bort Out of Your Skull'.
My boss promounces 'v' as 'r', as well as the occassional muddled up word (as can happen when English is a third or fourth language), leaving me wondering why she was talking about the 'pirate sector' in a serious meeting. It was 'private sector'. D'uh.
Well, that IS the pirate sector!
Sounds like Jennifer Coolidge in Best in Show... bet she doesn't look as good.
Excellent post. Every public service department is a gold mine of eccentrics. We need more stories told in the interests of public awareness.
Pavlov - 'bort out of my skull' should have been the title of the post.
And I am seriously loving 'pirate sector'....arrrr, matey.
Duckmeister - public service department? Don't know what you're talking about... that would mean I was wasting tax payers' money diddling about on this blog.
I would only waste tax payers' money once it had been paid to me as a fair wage. Then I could go feed it into the pokies or something.
Ahem. Heh. There's a lot of public money wasted in worse ways. I don't mind my taxes being blown on blogs. ;)
To quote Iggy Pop...
I'm bort.
I'm the Chairman of the Bort.
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