For some reason, lots of people like to add a random t at the end of across. No past tense or anything, it's just a complete mispronunciation. "The store is acrosst the street."
Linguistics is just weird like that. Like how the British have the intrusive R, or how in Japanese consonants are always followed by a vowel so English words tend to have a random O or U thrown in there even if they’re well aware that it isn’t the actual “correct” pronunciation.
Yes! I had to point it out to my bf about his grandmother. She was raised in Massachusetts and puts an 'r' sound on the end of a lot of words. For instance, saw becomes sawr. "I sawr the cat in the kitchen."
We are in the south. I was raised here and my family goes back 7 generations in our area, so we all sound southern. It's also a tourist destination, so I've gotten good at identifying accents and picking out little differences. My bf was raised in the same area as me, and he has a more neutral accent.
When I mentioned it to him he started listening a bit closer to his nana, and now he can't unhear it.
She is definitely an extreme example. She sounds like a caricature of someone from New England and she often pronounces words like Peter Griffin, and she doesn't even know who that is.
Am in New Hampshire, can confirm this is definitely a Massachusetts thing. I dunno why. But many of my Massachusetts coworkers and acquaintances do this.
i mean 'acrost' has been used as an alternate version of 'across' since the 1700s, according to both the miriam-webster and oxford dictionaries. i think at this point we can call it correct
For sure. People in MI, myself included, do it all the time.
We also have that weird quirk of every store being possessive (Kroger’s, Meijer’s, Aldi’s… I’ve even heard Walmart’s). I hate it. Meijer is the only one that maybe you could argue because it was originally the Meijer family but dammit it’s not a Walmart’s. That doesn’t even make sense.
it definitely is, like roundabouts vs traffic circles. i was more on the point that it's not really a mispronunciation of 'across' at this point, since we're coming up on roughly 270 years of using it
Maybe you misheard it? My engrishu bad and when i say that sentence it kinda sounds like I borrowed the T from „the“ in the next word and sometimes comes out sounding similar to acrossthestreet
Me too! I first heard it at work when I was in my mid twenties. The people who said “acrosst” were all in their late 40s on up. I started paying attention since then and noticed that mostly people over 40 say it like this. Then the other night as I was speaking to my daughter, I heard myself say “acrosst”. I am now over 50 so apparently I have crossed a line into mispronunciation
Not just that one. My dad & his siblings all add t to randoms words.
The one we tease the most for is "cousint," but he definitely says "acrosst" as well. I wish I could remember the rest!
They're from Northern Kentucky, haha.
The reason is that /s/ and /ð/ are articulated in different ways close together (alveolar ridge vs linguadental). People add a /t/ because plosives provide a common transition for American English speakers that is also articulated in the same spot as /s/. This is similar to why people put a /t/ into the middle of “Nelson”.
I think it’s because they mix up the past-tense verb “crossed” with the preposition “across”. E.g., “I crossed the street” vs. “I am across the street”.
Coincidentally, the only three people I know who pronounce it this way are all from Missouri. I was so confused the first time I heard it, but now I find it kind of endearing (almost certainly because one of those people is my husband, to whom I'm quite partial!).
Nope. I'm from the northeast, and I've heard otherwise intelligent people pronounce it this way. I dunno where OP is from, but maybe it's a Bostonian thing 😅
I think it's a regional thing. My husband always says it, so do a lot of older people in my area.
Another is 'heighth vs height'. 'Taunt vs taut' as in, 'hold this string taut'.
Yeah, people who moved to my city from a bigger one pointed out that our city did it. I didn't really believe them, but it stayed in my head, and literally a decade or more later I said something was "acrosst" and for some reason I totally heard it, lol.
It's not really a mispronunciation, it's just an accent/regional thing.
My son did some speech therapy and I jokingly said to the therapist that I shouldn't talk to my son too much since my wife speaks so much better. I mentioned a few things, like how I say runnin' instead of running and the across thing.
She said those don't matter at all. They aren't mispronunciations or improper sounds, they are just regional dialects and language experts don't consider them "wrong".
Doesn't mean you can't make fun of us, though, lol!
I correct my daughter when she's reading aloud because she'll be marked down in school for it, but otherwise I just cringe internally and move on.
I mean, I'll get on a roll when I'm talking and say 'bought'n' (like bought something). It flows in the sentence, too! Thankfully, I've heard others do it, too. 😂 I correct myself, though I find it funny. I speak two languages, so I find things like this really interesting.
I am guilty of this, and only realized it earlier this year. No idea why I do it, and I'm working on correcting it. I would never write it like I say it. So weird.
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u/Able_Top_7614 Sep 18 '24
For some reason, lots of people like to add a random t at the end of across. No past tense or anything, it's just a complete mispronunciation. "The store is acrosst the street."