Wordstalks 7: 'Intrusive Liquids'

I remember when I was at Stanford, Ivan Sag told us about a dialect of American English that had an 'intrusive 'l' and cited a couplet from a country-and-western song that had 'rilver' rhyming with 'silver.' I was a little incredulous about this - egregiously wacky poetic license not worthy of the name, I thought - couldn't be part of someone's dialect?! 

Then, a year or two later I started going to raw food potlucks and seeing 'alvocado' on people's ingredients lists. Not once, but often. Like 'definitely,' it seems that 'avocado' is a word that many people have trouble spelling - aside from the oft-noticed 'alvocado,' I saw 'alvacodo,' 'avocado,' 'avacada,' 'alvocadoe,' etc…

When I got to thinking about it, that whole 'rilver' thing shouldn't have surprised me at all: I noticed 'intrusive 'l's' when I was a kid listening to East London dialects. I remember hearing a woman saying she was 'divoulced' and spelling it out to myself in my head, imagining how you'd need to spell it to have that pronunciation, when I was about 6 or 7. And when I went for horseback riding lessons, aged around 12 or 13, there was a girl who would always talk about 'riding an oulse.' I found this one very funny indeed, because by then I knew enough French to know that 'bear' was 'ours' and enough about language in general to know the lability of 'r's and 'l's, and I would amuse myself by picturing her horse as a bear!

But another 'intrusive liquid' phenomenon that keeps me giggling (and that does not seem to include any 'r'/'l'transgression is the pronunciation, apparently common in rural dialects all over the US, of 'wash' as 'warsh,' 'Warshington,' squarsh,' etc. Considering how much British English speakers get teased for ''r' insertion' intervocalically (e.g. they would say 'Elarand I,') (and considering how much that phenomenon sticks out to me when I hear British accents nowadays, as much as the conspicuous absence of the 'r' on the end of words like 'car,' 'number,' 'center,') there's something especially amusing about this kind of 'r' insertion, where there's no vowel to be orphaned by the lack of it and no etymological motivation for it either!