What Ben Yagoda refers to as "that sort of London glottal stop" is not what Americans have been producing for generations. Just sayin'.

On 27 Sep 2012, at 16:14, David Bowie <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> On Thu, 27 Sep 2012 04:44:21 -0800, Damien Hall <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
> <snip>
> 
>> ·         Also, at least one of the ‘British’ features cited as new imports into American English – replacement of the first /t/ in words like _important_ with a glottal stop – is something I heard in the States up to eight years ago.  I lived in Philadelphia, and it was common to hear:
> 
>> -          ‘Clinton’ as [klɪnʔn̩]
>> -          ‘Scranton’ (a town near there) as [skɹænʔn̩]
> 
>> -          and even with deletion of the first /n/ and compensatory nasalisation of the preceding vowel, so [skɹæ̃ʔn̩], [klɪ̃ʔn̩].
> 
> As others have noted, this isn't any sort of Britishism at all, except insofar as English in the Americas itself is a Britishism.
> 
> As another point of interest, glottalization is slightly stigmatized as a very local regional feature along the Wasatch Front of Utah, and people from that area generally appear to be very aware that they do it, and very unaware that anyone else anywhere else in the entire English-speaking world does it (folded in with the belief, in fact, that people everywhere else in the world look down on Utahns for using it).
> 
> (David Eddington has some evidence that what's *actually* stigmatized along the Wasatch Front is a glottal stop followed by a schwa-then-nasal rather than a glottal stop followed by a syllabic nasal, but that's not the way Utahns self-report it.)
> 
> An answer to this next bit would probably require a change of subject line, but: Is anyone aware of any other perfectly standard features that are perceived by members of a speech community as stigmatized?
> 
> <snip>
> 
> David Bowie
> 
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