From the start of "What Can Doctors Learn by Admitting Their Mistakes?", Part 1 of the TED Radio Hour episode Making Mistakes:
Guy Raz:
That's Brian
Brian Goldman:
I'm uh staff emergency physician
at Mt. Sinai Hospital in Toronto, Canada
Guy Raz:
That's [təˈɹɐn.toʊ]
Brian Goldman:
You know
about thirty years ago
it was- it was [ˈtɹɜ.ɾ̃ə]
because I used to say [təˈɹɐn.toʊ]
and Canadians would correct me
Guy Raz:
and say [ˈtɹɐ.ɾ̃ə]
Brian Goldman:
((yeah))
[ˈtɹɐɾ̃.oʊ]
There's no 't' in it
Guy Raz:
Anyway, Brian
went to medical school in
that city …
This seems to be meant as a metaphor for how Dr. Goldman (who describes his high school self as someone who would study for a blood test) learned to relax about the possibility of not being precisely correct about everything. At least, here's the abstract for the associated TED talk:
Every doctor makes mistakes. But, says physician Brian Goldman, medicine's culture of denial keeps doctors from talking about and learning from those mistakes. Goldman calls on doctors to start talking about being wrong.
But I'm puzzled by the implication that the pronunciation of Toronto has changed since "about thirty years ago". Turning intervocalic post-stress /-nt-/ into a nasal tap remains a normal process in North American English. An urbantoronto.ca forum discussion from 2007 notes that
Wikipedia devotes an entire section to the pronunciation of Toronto saying, "Locals sometimes pronounce the city's name as 'Toronno', 'Trono', 'Toranna', 'Taranna', 'Chrono', 'Chranna' or even 'Terawhnna' ?in each case, the speaker merely pronounces 'Toronto' in the way that is most natural in his or her dialect." - Jack Chambers, a professor of linguistics at University of Toronto for more than 30 years, agrees with this logic, explaining that people born and bred in Toronto pronounce their hometown differently than outsiders because Torontonians say the name of their city repeatedly, over time becoming lazier about the pronunciation, eventually shortening it. "For people who live here their solution is to get rid of the 't' at the end."
And similar testimony can be found in a 2009 Yelp forum and a 2010 Yahoo! answers discussion.
The local pronunciation of my own city, Philadelphia, is conventionally spelled "Fluffya". That's the most opaque-to-outsiders local-pronunciation spelling that I know — but no doubt commenters will have some other candidates to suggest.
[Note: Because the cited passage is clearly edited from fragments rather than being the result of a single take, and because Raz and Goldman have similar voices, I'm not sure that I have the back-and-forth correctly assigned to participants. One of the many curious things about human speech perception is that I was not at all aware of this ambiguity until I tried to transcribe the passage with speaker IDs.]
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