Heads up: this is impor’unt.

Welcome back to Doofus Dad. We haven’t seen each other for some time now. Actually, by my count, it’s been six years. I’ll tell you about my “time off” in a future post.

Buckle in, though. Six years ago, I was already a Grumpy Old Man. Now, I’m either a Grumpier Old Man or a Grumpy Older Man, whichever way you’d like to look at it. Plus, I’ve built up a backlog of snark that might find its way out into these posts, so be forewarned.

A lot of cultural things have happened over the past six years to incur my wrath, much like Khan. Usually, my wife, Holly, God bless her, gets the brunt of my disapproval because she’s the only other person in the room as we watch the news while having our morning coffee. Sometimes she supports my rants, sometimes she doesn’t. This keeps me honest.

So, among the cultural shifts that have given me pause is the apparent fact that the letter “T” is being phased out of the English language, most obviously among people in Hollywood and in the news media, both local and national. If you’re an English-speaking person who owns a television or smartphone, I’m sure you’ve noticed this. How could you not?

At some point since 2019, TV folks — mostly in their 20s — must’ve convened and decided that the pronunciation of Ts appearing in the middle of words is now optional and usually frowned upon. How and why these people arrived at that decision is a great mystery but arrive at it they did.

Snooty linguists often refer to this discrimination against the letter T as “T-glottalization,” “glottal replacement,” or, in some cases, “T-deletion.” Writers like me, on the other hand, refer to this as “stupid” or “idiotic” or, in some cases, “brain-deletion.”

Usually, this phenomenon happens in words where the internal T is followed somewhere down the line by an N. Examples are button, forgotten, cotton, written, certain, and so on. Even proper names are falling victim to the glottal replacement. I’m sure that Peyton Manning winces every time he is introduced by a young person for a speaking engagement, fully expecting to be called “Pey-un Manning.” Same for Quentin Tarantino. Or Michael Keaton. (Go ahead and try it in your head. You’ll get it.)

The most obvious and conspicuously bastardized word, though — especially among news reporters — is “important.” It is the King Daddy of glottal replacement words.

The first problem is that “important” is an overused adjective. Reporters seem to have an unnatural love of describing one thing or another as “important” while perfectly good synonyms like “crucial,” “consequential,” “valuable,” and “significant” are riding the bench, twiddling their thumbs.

But the young reporters — almost always attractive women wearing enough facial makeup to impress Gene Simmons — insist on using the word “important.”

But they don’t say “imPOR-tant.”

They say “imPOR-unt.”

Over and over again.

Worse yet, they say this while also employing that typical, news-reportery, overly emphatic inflection in their speaking, a trope that’s been parodied for years by everyone from Ted Knight to Will Ferrel.

Because of this, it feels as if we’re receiving our news from valley girls or surfer dudes who are “playing” a news reporter for a high-school skit. So whatever conclusion they’re arriving at must be taken with a grain of salt, unless you’re a valley girl or a surfer dude.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

And yes, I fully own the fact that I’m saying this from the perspective of the “Get Off My Lawn!” generation. But more impor-untly, I’m saying this as a writer, communications pro, public speaker, and English major.

I don’t begrudge the younger generations of their verbal quirks. Every generation has them. We also have a variety of dialects, accents, and regional expressions. These things aren’t incorrect — they’re a part of language.

If you know me personally, you know that I tend to speak with a Southern accent — which famously drops the Gs at the end of words — and I love to use the “country-isms” I grew up with. But country-isms are not necessarily grammatically incorrect, and I’m not employed as a news broadcaster.

I’ve also wondered if this is somehow an Americanized version of the British glottal replacement, which is most famously associated with the Cockney accent.

“Give me a bottle of water” becomes “Give me a bo-ewl of wa’ah.”

Sure, we all love British accents, but Cockney shouldn’t be finding its way into American English, if that’s what’s happening. (Honestly, I don’t think it is.)

When the incorrect use of the spoken English language becomes normalized to the point at which it’s acceptable within [what used to be] one of our most respected institutions — the national network news media — it becomes a problem, in my view. Network news anchors and reporters (see Walter Cronkite) were once held in high regard.

Now? Not so much.

Here is a direct quote from a CNN field report about the recent flash flood in Nepal. The reporter was identified as CNN Senior China Reporter Simone McCarthy. (For the record, Simone is clearly American and looks to be in her 30s.)

“This location was once a five-story building that was FLA-enned by floodwaters…” (The actual word was “flattened.”)

First off, the location wasn’t a five-story building. A five-story building once stood at that location. More impor-unt, though, is the fact that as soon as she uttered “FLA-enned,” I turned the channel. Why? Because:

1. I couldn’t take anything else she said seriously,
2. I was so distracted by “FLA-enned” that I was primed for the next glottal replacement, as if anticipating a jump scare in a horror movie, or
3. Some combination of the two.

Now, I’m sure Simone is a wonderful person and is probably a very capable reporter, so nothing against her personally. But there are good reasons why, up until recently, newspeople were required to be linguistically faultless, or nearly so. First and foremost was a matter of trust. We needed to trust that we didn’t have knuckleheads giving us the news.

This also reflects poorly on the news channel itself, and it’s not only CNN. I’m noticing this across all legacy media. These reporters are being hired and using the glottal replacement as a matter of course without being corrected, because the people in charge apparently don’t find this to be a problem.

And that’s a bit frightening.

Sure, in the grand scheme of things, I guess the slow, painful death of the internal T may not seem like a big deal. To me, though, it’s another example of the chipping away at American excellence in favor of uber-relaxed culture, as if the entire country is collectively lying around its communal basement living room, smoking doobies and listening to Steely Dan. The glottal replacement, after all, is simply lazy speaking, as if the speaker can’t be bothered to pronounce the T sound.

My real favorite is when the glottal replacement teams up with its equally lazy sister: vocal fry. This happens when the speaker (sorry, but exclusively either a young woman or a young gay man) can’t seem to rally enough energy to fully vocalize the last word of their phrases, resulting in a sound not unlike the one car tires rolling slowly across a gravel driveway make.

What could possibly be attractive about sounding so disinterested with the world that you are unable to pronounce your Ts or finish a phrase without lapsing into a coma? I’m so confused by this.

I’m not sure what to suggest to fix this, and I’m afraid we may already be too far gone. A hundred years from now, spoken language might have vanished altogether in favor of some form of holographic or psychic texting. And that begs the question:

Will the letter T survive at all?

Only ime will ell.