You have to emphasize the positive
Eliminate the negative
Stick to the affirmative
But don’t mess with Mr. In Between…
Forget the venerable saying that manners make the man. It’s our accents that make us—or give us away. In the early ’60s, when I first came to town as the novel editor of Pine Bluff Commercial, my American accent, learned over the radio, aroused suspicion. “What part of the North are you from?” I was asked. At that point, it became obligatory to emphasize my Southern roots. “Well, my grandfather and namesake made cornmeal,” I explained, which was true. But not entirely.
A partial truth can be as dishonest as a lie, and not nearly as forthright. There was no need to go into detail and add that Pesach Gritzer made these groats in his shtetl in the venerable country, following his horse “in circles” around the millstone. And when the destitute animal had no more food, my grandfather would take its place. But enough said. Prudence may be the better part of valor in certain circumstances.
I am indebted to the invaluable Kevin Williamson of National Review for today’s column. His article (“Voice of America”) discusses in detail the impact of our accents on how others perceive us, and he in turn is indebted to William Labov’s meticulously scholarly article “The Social Stratification of (r) in New York City Department Stores,” a work of sociolinguistics that is as authoritative as John James Audubon’s guide to the birds of North America. One of the many points Mr. Williamson makes is that most Americans equate the average Southern accent with yahoo, no matter how cultured the Southerner may be in real life.
Whether a speaker pronounces his R in any context, except at the beginning of a word, for example, can be a mark of class. No lesser artists than Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Lowe, of “Guys and Dolls” fame, can be relied upon as guides to the linguistic preferences and prejudices of Americans. (“At Wanamaker’s, Saks, and Klein/The lesson I was taught:/You can’t get alterations/On a dress you didn’t buy. . . . ”) Where you shopped determined who you were in the eyes of others. The salespeople at Klein’s, for example, would probably speak working-class English, those at Macy’s would prefer a vague middle-class American style, and those at Saks would come closest to being considered to speaking “proper English.” I remember a saleswoman in one New York department store turning up her nose at a Southern girl who didn’t show her credit card within a New York minute. To which the Southern girl replied, “Well, I’m already there!” Which only increased the salesman’s contempt.
You wouldn’t expect to find a nicer breed of American than the Midwesterner in his native Chicago, Illinois, and the surrounding area, where Hillary Clinton hails from, born and raised in the suburbs of that urban center. Even today, she lacks the verbal agility that characterized her husband’s shape-shifting rise in American politics. Bill Clinton could be anything you wanted him to be, and say anything you wanted to hear in the right tone. And he undoubtedly still can, God bless his much-repaired heart.
In the words of Kevin Williamson, our boy Bill “could be a fake redneck, a fake intellectual, a fake Baptist preacher—but Mrs. Clinton mostly sounded like a real vice principal, but a horrible kind of vice principal who sometimes swallows her existential rage for a minute and tries to be calm and talk to the kids in their own language.” The guy has to wonder if he has any authenticity left in him.
Whatever our distinguished men have to say about our novel president, Donald Trump, he always sounds like Donald Trump, prompting Kevin Williamson to opine: “Trump may sound like a sleazy conman from Queens who’s about to ask, ‘What do I have to do to get you in this Buick?’ but he has the advantage of sounding like that all the time, which gives him a perverse veneer of authenticity.
“One of the lessons of Trump’s 2016 victory may be that, despite Rick Perry’s excellence, Republicans shouldn’t nominate another presidential candidate from Texas — or even the South — for a long time. Michigan, South Florida, California, Maine — anywhere where the locals don’t seem willing to offer to pray for you if you send them money. That’s part of the value of Trump’s language: They can call Trump Hitler, but they can’t call him a redneck, and if we’ve reached the point where all presidential politics is Kulturkampf, that matters and will matter even more in the future. I think Alec Baldwin’s imitation of Trump is pretty funny, but I don’t think it’s likely to sound as funny in the union halls of Ohio or the rundown parts of Pennsylvania.”
Kevin Williamson adds this good advice for political nerds: “If you want to understand the voice of American populism, consider paying attention to the voices of populists.”
