Ad Watch: the rotten kitten

Before I quit this blog and devote myself full-time to the study of flapping (and the denunciation of flap refuseniks), let's look at this commercial that demonstrates a high degree of flaplack.

Here's the script:

I was getting into my car one morning when I heard…
<meow>
It sounded like a kitten was trapped in my car, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. Neither could my husband. And neither could the fire department.
<meow>
We couldn’t lure it out. So we decided to drive very slowly to Les Schwab.
The team took my car apart—“Oh! Here he is”—and rescued the kitten. Today’s he’s alive and well and spoiled rotten.

When you watch this thing, the word kitten practically attacks you through the screen. (That is, kiTTen, with that t aspirated, resulting in a pronunciation that is thoroughly at odds with the woman's American English. She also pronounces rotten as roTTen.)

As always with the things I dredge up here, there is plenty of ordinary flapping—I was geDing into my car one morning, I couldn’t find iD anywhere, so we deciDed to drive very slowly—along with the weirdness.

Now, to be fair (and obsessively specific), this is a matter of too-much-aspiration instead of not-enough-flapping. Kitten and rotten don't have flaps; they have unreleased t's and syllabic n's. But I think the impulse that leads to roTTen and kiTTen is the same as the impulse that causes people to run screaming from flaps.

But when the film crew was recording the story, what did they think of that nonstandard kitten and rotten? Was it intentional? Did they ask her to say those words that way? (Why would they do that?) I tried to find other audio of the woman whose testimony the commercial was built around, but I couldn't. I dug up stories on local TV about the story, but I couldn't find her flapping or not flapping. I am assuming she doesn't typically avoid flaps. But who knows? And more to the point, who cares?