There are two things I know this morning:
1 – At this stage of my life, I’m unlikely to ever hit a run of consistent pronunciations of ‘urinal’. To this day, I veer between the American and British enunciation. Normally I abhor American pronunciations spilling forth from a British moue but, given my dozen years co-starring (I was the only cast member to appear in all 362 episodes) in US police procedural ‘Kid Cop’, which existed entirely in my own imagination from 1980 – ’92, I think I can be excused.
Last Saturday I joined two old friends for coffee in Brixton. I’m pretty confident we were the only three people in that café that knew the old ‘proper dangerous’ Brixton. One of my friends, guilty over the last three decades of resorting to Americanisms, so much so he was at one point known as ‘The American’, pronounced ‘route’ in the American way, possibly the most grating of American pronunciations there is. The moment killed me, but I let it slide.