Unlike my usual questions picked up from newspaper sources, this question regards literature.
I was asked by one of my friends who is an English enthusiast about the meaning of “speak through one’s nose full of b's and d's.”
The phrase appears in the following sentence in the section of ‘Love and the Ridiculous’ of Agatha Christie’s Autobiography.
I checked the definition of the phrase in Merriam Webster Dictionary and Cambridge Online Dictionary in vain.
Can somebody explain the meaning of ‘Speak through one’s nose full of b's and d's’, specifically what does ‘b and d’ represent?
Anyone can admire somebody for being handsome or amusing or charming, but that bubble is soon pricked when a trace of ridicule comes in. I should give as my advice to any girl about to get married: "Well now, just imagine he had a terrible cold in his head, speaking through his nose all full of b's and d's, sneezing, eyes watering. What would you feel about him?" It's a good test, really.
Best Answer
When one has a cold, with a stopped-up nose, the letters m and n (and v and others) are not nasalized and so come out as b or d or other sounds. Nasalized, non-stopped phonemes can get dropped entirely, like the l in the following sentence.
In the following sentence, the n becomes a d and the m sounds turn into b sounds:
And so on.