KMart Ad Ship my Pants Shit my Pants American English Pronunciation
In this American English pronunciation video,
we’re going to go over a controversial new
Kmart commercial that bases its joke on American
English pronunciation.
First, if you want to check out the commercial,
click here, or follow the link in the description.
In the commercial, Kmart takes advantage of
our use of Stop consonants in American English.
They use the word ‘ship’ to sound like the
word ‘shit’ in the idiom ‘to shit your pants’.
Let’s take a look at why these two words sound
the same.
The only difference in pronunciation is the
final sound. Both of these sounds are stop
consonants. Stop consonants have two parts.
A stop of air, and a release of air. We often
leave out the release of air, especially when
the next word begins with a consonant. So,
instead of saying ‘ship my’, where the lips
open and release the air before the next sound,
we’ll say ‘ship my’, without releasing the
air before the M. Ship my, ship my. The same
is true of the word ‘shit’, we don’t usually
say ‘shit my’, releasing the air of the T
before the next consonant sound. We usually
say ‘shit my’, where we hold the air and go
right into the next sound, in this case, the
M, without the release. Shit my, shit my.
When the release is left out, these two phrases
sound almost exactly the same. Ship my pants,
shit my pants. Kmart wants you to know you
can ship any item they don’t have in the store
for free, and to make sure you remember, they’re
making it sound a lot like the idiom to ‘shit
your pants’.
What does this idiom mean? First I want to
point out that ‘shit’ is a cuss word, a dirty
word, as you probably already know. You want
to use this idiom only among friends, in a
casual setting, when you feel confident they
won’t be offended. It’s a colorful way to
express that you’re worried about something.
For example: I’m shitting my pants over the
test on Friday. Or, I’m scared to fly. Don’t
shit your pants, you’ll be fine.
‘Shit’ begins with the SH sound, sh, where
the teeth are together, the lips flare, and
the front part of the tongue is very close
to the roof of the mouth. Then we have the
IH as in SIT vowel, with a little jaw drop,
then the stop T, where we cut off the airflow,
shit, shit, mm, the M consonant, lips come
together for that, shit mm-mmy. The AI as
in BUY diphthong. You do need some jaw drop
for the first half of that diphthong. Shit
my. Let’s take a moment here to talk about
stress in this phrase: SHIT and PANTS are
the two content words, and MY is a function
word. So it will be unstressed. The stress pattern
is DA-da-DA. Long-short-long. DA-da-DA. Shit
my pants. So ‘my’ needs to be quick, and lower
in pitch than the other two words: my, my,
my, shit my. Then we have ‘pants’: lips come
together for the P. Then the AA vowel is followed
by the N consonant. When the AA vowel is followed
by a nasal consonant, we have an ‘uh’ sound
between. Paa-uh-nts. Check out the video I
made that explains that concept if you haven’t
already. Then we have the N consonant, TS
sound. Normally the front part of the tongue
will go to the roof of the mouth for the N
and T sounds, like this. But since they are
followed by the S here, you can take a short
cut, and use not the tip but the top part
of the tongue just behind the tip, here. That
way your tip can be free to make the SS sound,
where it presses behind the bottom front teeth
with the lips closed. To make the S, pull
the tongue away from the roof of the mouth.
NTS, NTS. Pants. pants. Shit my pants.
I hope you’ve enjoyed learning this expressive
idiom.
Practice your English — try it out yourself.
Make a video using this idiom and post it
as a video response to this video on YouTube.
I’m very interested to see what you come up with.
That’s it, and thanks so much
for using Rachel’s English.