I'd like to make a motion

I just came across this again reading one of the local weekly rags earlier today, and it has long bugged me, now enough to move me to action. It is a sign of linguistic laziness, of writers relying on convention without thinking things through for their own damn selves.

It is the literary dialect spelling of talk as "tawk" to indicate Long Island/New Jersey coffee klatch pronunciation.

You know the pronunciation of which I speak. Go ahead, say it out loud right now.

It doesn't sound like tawk. I mean, really, just read tawk aloud. Tawk rhymes with hawk, and moves my mouth to drawl. Have a conversation with a Texan, and you're tawking.

But, I'm not one to merely bitch and offer no solution, or at least not this time.

Gotta get or give the downlow on the cheating ways of a neighbor's spouse over cups of Folgers? Here it is. Lean in close and say "Can we toowk?" Try it, say that one out loud. Just do it. There, you sounded all Joan Rivers, all Mike Myers on SNL.

Toowk. Learn it, use it, love it.

Do I hear a second?