"There's no T in Scranton"

According to Jennifer Bendery, "At 81, Joe Biden Is Still The Last Guy To Leave The Party", Huffington Post 3/8/2024:

After his State of the Union speech, the president was so eager to keep talking to people he didn't care that the lights went down or that hot mics picked him up.

[…]

“Thank you, man,” said Biden, before shaking someone else’s hand and pointing at him. “You know there’s no T in ‘Scranton.’ It’s Scran-un!”

Fact-checking that claim, I did a quick scan of Shuang Li's INTERVIEW: NPR Media Dialog Transcripts dataset, which contains 3,199,859 transcribed turns from 105,817 NPR podcasts, comprising more than 10,648 hours. That dataset is just the transcripts, but some years ago, Jiahong Yuan and I downloaded the audio and aligned it with the texts. And I wrote a simple search script, so that checking stuff like this is easy.

In that corpus, Biden's assertion does check out. Here's the first instance I found:

Scott Horsley (from "In Kansas, Obama Invites Roosevelt Comparisons", Morning Edition 2011-12-06):

Your browser does not support the audio element.

Zeroing in on the audio for "Scranton": Your browser does not support the audio element.

In fairness to the person Biden was (apparently) correcting, the /t/ is normally performed as bit of glottalization, which was lenited to (near?) extinction in the previous example. Here's a version where more of it survives, from Don Gonyea, "Biden A Vital Surrogate For Obama On Campaign Trail", All Things Considered 12/06/2012:

Your browser does not support the audio element.

Zeroing in again on the audio for "Scranton":

Your browser does not support the audio element.

Locals (like Biden) are typically prone to greater lenition of the weaker aspects of their home town's phonetic implementation, wherefore the correction…