To Mr A.M.

[Mark A. Mandel]

An exchange with my sister, who works as a medical transcriptionist and
occasionally sends questions or gems to her linguist bro':

#Dear Mr Answer Man,
#I just had this odd, but understandable (I suppose) mouth-glitch:
#
#"...and was found to be a good candidate for endographic repair of this
#lesion."
#
#This doc is trying to describe the use of an "endograft" for doing a
#vein grafting procedure.  Interesting.  Wrong, but interesting!

Hmm. In some dialects, including for many Afro-American speakers, final
clusters simplify, so that "-graft" and "-graph" sound identical. I
can't guess if that was happening here.

I still remember my bafflement when someone in an office I was
volunteering in said something about "desses".  After a fair bit of
discussion, it turned out that this was her plural of "desk":

        /dEsk/  standard
        /dEs/   final cluster simplification
        /dEs at z/ pluralization

The plural was normal, assuming that for this speaker the underlying
form of the word was pronounced "dess": just like "mess, messes".

        mEs : mEs at z :: dEs : dEs at z


-- Mark A. Mandel, aka
   Dr. Whom, Consulting Linguist, Grammarian, Orthoepist, & Philological
        Busybody