[ncmncm]

No, there is nothing there at all. If you look on a sonograph, "debt" and "det" sound exactly identical.

Anybody who imagines English pronunciation should match spelling can't possibly know much of anything about English.

Let's not get started on how many British pronounce "drawing".

[robbedpeter]

Drawring lol. That r just magically appears after ahh or ohh, and almost everyone is shocked when you point it out.

[Threeve303]

Drawring is how it is pronounced in Warshington and Chicargo as well.

[denton-scratch]

"Droring" seems to me to be regional in British English. I hear it more in the North and in London.

As a child, I had elocution lessons from a scouser in Liverpool. She insisted on pronouncing the word "with" as "hwith", with the "th" hardened as in "thought", rather than softened as in "the". As a consequence I misspelled "with" for many years. Try to avoid taking elocution lessons from someone with a non-standard accent!

I enjoy regional pronunciations. I don't want them ruled to be somehow incorrect. But I deplore incorrect usage, such as "literally" to mean figuratively. M-W says that figuratively is a correct usage of literally, even though it means the exact opposite.

[tsimionescu]

Figuratively, literally can mean figuratively, even though literally it means literally.

But joke aside, literally is basically a figure of speech used for emphasis - it seems strange to me to say it means figuratively. If I hear someone say "I was so embarrassed I literally died", to me that transmits emphasis, which is different from both the proper sense of "literally" and the proper sense of "figuratively". If someone said "I was so embarrassed I died", this is still a figurative use, just less emphassised. The addition of "literally" is not there to clarify that they don't mean real death, as it would imply if "literally means figuratively" was what was happening.

[ncmncm]

Linguists call this usage a "generic intensifier", where whole meaning is stripped away and just means "more".

They circulate in and out of fashion as they grow tired. Recently we had "exponentially", correctly meaningful only to describe a series of numbers growing at rate out of all proportion, or sometimes decaying. Lately we have "incredibly", correctly meaning "unbelievably", which has somehow attained greater and longer currency than usual, used even in constructions like "incredibly honest". "Unbelievably" had its day. We have had "deeply", "madly", many others. Ancient ones include "very", which has almost entirely lost its original meaning of "truly", which has itself been a generic intensifier, and been weakened.

Any adjective or adverb may completely flip meaning by ironic use, and sometimes back again, such as "terrific", which once meant close to "horrific". "Plausible", literally "believable", meant in the early 20th century more frequently "unbelievable" or "unlikely". In living memory, "likely" meant "unlikely", as in "a likely story".

The extremum of ironic usage is "yeah, right".

[boondaburrah]

Ah yeah the boston 'r' will do the same thing - appearing as needed to separate two vowels.

[Koshkin]

Well, Bostonian accent is an extreme case - they would say “today’s agender: the question of genda.”

[kwhitefoot]

It varies. My pronunciation of drawing definitely does not include an r.

Perhaps it has changed over the last 65 years of my life. Or it is a regional pronunciation.

I suspect that more young people include the r.

[CRConrad]

> My pronunciation of drawing definitely does not include an r.

Oh, I'm quite sure it does. :-)

[saalweachter]

I grew up near the Wabash ("wal-bash") river in Indiana.

[srcreigh]

English. Emphasis on the ish.