Nanohedron wrote:
david_h wrote:
I suspect that in the movies and the media "doody" is mainly said in a serious, gruff male voice which makes it stand out more.
Actually, no. If some bruiser said "doody" it would only stand out for being hilariously dissonant - and a gruff voice would make it even more so - because the word is quite childish and frankly risible; not at all the speech of Manly Men. As a member of that club

, my self-respect forbids I ever utter it out loud; if I must anyway, I would probably keep the word at a safe remove, dangled from the end of such tongs as a wince and a smirk, and afterward get myself checked for a possible testosterone deficit.
I try to imagine the likes of John Cena or Robert De Niro saying "doody", and it cracks me up. In that context it would work only as comic effect. Come to think of it, I don't recall ever hearing it in the media; but then, I don't watch comedies much, and that is where I would expect to hear the word regardless of who said it.
Is that any clearer?
I'm not ready to devote my time to a action film festival to research this, but I seem to remember quite a few respected action heroes pronouncing duty with that second d. Whether it be Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne, Tom Hanks, Mark Whalberg or Matt Damon, I can't quite remember. Softening the T is so common it goes un-noticed. And again, if you asked the speaker to repeat the syllables they had just uttered individually, the fellow that just said doo-tee would come out with due-T. So much of how we say what say is habitual. We are often not speaking as precisely as we think we are.

There was a period in the 30s when Talkies took over in movies, the powers that be in the film industry developed the Mid-Atlantic accent. This blend of British English, East Coast English and Midwestern English mostly ignored the south. It was immortalized by George and Ira Gershwin's "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off." "You say tomato and I say tomato," et al.
Interestingly enough, as I was composing this this morning, i realized I was thinking phonetically and actually typed the Adlantic Ocean. I realized, at least in most of the part of the US I'm familiar with, I have seldom heard that first T