Last week we talked about dropping R’s in our Southern way of speaking.  This week we are heading to the opposite pole – the propensity of some Southerners to add R’s where they do not belong. This is much more prevalent in some parts of the South than in others; your commentator finds that it sounds discordant and substandard to his Middle Georgia ear, but in other areas, it is a fairly common speaking pattern.

      A friend named Brad who spent his career in the building trade came to Georgia from the Midwest sometime around 1980.  Brad told your commentator twenty years or more ago that he had never heard of “winders” till he got to Georgia, more or less implying that is how all Georgians pronounce those glazed and often decorative portals of natural light which grace our homes and offices.

     Your commentator begged to differ, telling Brad that in his own world, at least, the accepted and correct pronunciation was, “WIN-duh.” (Please do not write the editor and say it is, “WIN-doe” – it is difficult to imagine anyone  native to Georgia who has not striven to disavow his or her raising ever pronouncing the last syllable with a long O.  For the record, we also do not say, “tor-NAY-doe” – it is more like “tor-NAY-duh” – since we generally get more of those destructive storms than nearly anyone else in the country, we ought to be able to pronounce it however we please!)

    But back to R-adding:  it is hard to say with any real authority.  Called “the intrusive R” in formal speech descriptions, it can be found throughout the English-speaking world.  U.S. President John F. Kennedy (1917-1963), who came from the country’s elite in terms of wealth, background, and education, added it on occasion when talking about the island of “Cuber.”   And long-time British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013) was sometimes called “Laura Norder” because of the way she pronounced, “law and order.”  So on those examples, it is hard to call the intrusive R substandard.

    Closer to home, Northeast Alabama author Rick Bragg writes of aunts named Edna and Nita who were routinely called “Edner” and “Niter,” and of someone once falling so far and landing so hard that it knocked him out — he was in a “comer.”  That may sound spot-on in Northeast Alabama, but it does not in Middle Georgia, at least to your commentator, who has never strayed far from here on a permanent basis and has long been a student of how the native dialect sounds.

    If we were to cross Georgia on something of a northeasterly path from Bragg’s bailiwick in Piedmont, Alabama, we might land in the Upstate South Carolina town of Walhalla, which was the hometown of your commentator’s late father-in-law.   Locals, in your commentator’s many years of observation there, tended to pronounce that Germanic placename of honor and bliss in one of two ways: “Wa(l) -HOL-luh” or “Wa(l)-HOL-ler.”  The first L, in both pronunciations, was nearly always silent, so that the first syllable sounded mostly like, “Wah” – although occasionally a hint of that first L would be heard.   But the terminal syllable – and here is where your commentator might really step in it – seemed only to have the R added by those most careless in speech and intonation, presumably due to a lack of stress on such matters in their upbringing and/or education.

    So what does the reader think?  Is the intrusive R in speech a matter of local custom, or is it automatically and irrevocably substandard?  Is it a Southern thing, mostly, or is it much more widespread, as our first two examples might indicate?  Your commentator will be sure to let the folks in Wah-HOL-ler know!