By DAN LANGFORD

Wouldn, couldn, and shouldn are common Southern pronunciations for the contractions wouldn’t, couldn’t, and shouldn’t.  “Wouldn” rhymes with “wooden,” as do “couldn” and “shouldn.”  Most of us, when relaxing in the language, feel no need to pronounce the terminal “t’s.”  Naturally, we’d write them correctly, but why go to the effort of saying it so precisely?

We probably shouldn drop letters like that, and wouldn if it made a bit of difference.  It dudn (there’s another one - for “doesn’t”), so what’s the harm?  I couldn care less, could you?

This entry was posted on Monday, November 17th, 2008 at 10:41 am and is filed under Dialect, Pronunciation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.