Brandi and linguistics

All right, so I've been convinced that in a few live versions, Brandi sings "I'm so sad since she went away," but then I started thinking about how the girl isn't the clearest enunciater, and I realized that there's a linguistic explanation for why I hear "she." First, she pronounces "you" more like "yew," so you get a long 'e' sound in there. But there's this thing that happens in people's pronunciation sometimes when the 's' sound is immediately preceded by the 'y' sound--the 's' and the 'y' kind of blend to get the 'sh' sound, as in the word 'tissue.' So you take "since you," and it comes out of her marbly mouth as "sinshew," which you could easily miss hear as "since she," since you'd give the 'w'-ish sound to the next word, "went." I forget the linguistics term for that mashing up of sounds--I learned it in my study of the development of the English language. I learned a lot of things in that class--and then promptly forgot them.

Oh, college. Only useful in my nerdy blog posts.