That guy and their red face

Today I was walking with my son, and we passed two men going the other way. I said to him, “Did you see how one of those guys was really red in the face?”

“No, what’s so special about them being red in the face?”

“I think he was drunk. Sometimes when people get really drunk, their faces get red that way. Not every red face means the person is drunk; sometimes it could be windburn-”

“So they might just have windburn?”

“Well, no, it’s a different pattern of redness…”

The conversation went on like that, with me using he pronouns to refer to the man, and my son using they pronouns. And no, he wasn’t talking about both of the men, he was talking about the one with the red face. I know this because he’s used they pronouns to refer to classmates in his all-boys gym class, and to his teachers who take the “Ms.” honorific and wear makeup and high heels.

I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while, but I figured tonight is a good night to post it, since the lexicographers are talking to the copy editors about singular “they.”

I grew up using “singular they” for generic referents: “If anyone needs help with this reading, they should talk to me.” I was familiar with the “the pronoun game,” as it was called in Chasing Amy, where the lesbian and bisexual characters obscured their sexuality by using “they” to refer to their (specific) partners. Being transgender and a linguist, I’m familiar with a relatively new use of “they” pronouns: for specific genderqueer or agender people who don’t want to be identified with any gender.

My son’s use of “they” doesn’t fit any of these established uses. He is using it for specific individuals whose gender is either male or female, and already known to us. I asked, and none of these people asked to be referred to with gender-neutral pronouns. I don’t have the impression that this is a conscious effort on my son’s part, either. It just seems to be the third person pronoun that he uses for everyone.

I don’t know if my son’s classmates use it this way, or if it’s just one of those quirks that comes from growing up as the child of two linguists. I haven’t yet heard him use “they” to refer to any immediate family members, or to people who are present. I’ll post an update if I hear anything like that. In the meantime, have you heard this use of “they”?

Photo: rob_rob2001 / Flickr

Tea and prototypes

I once surprised a friend by ordering tea in a pizza parlor. She did not expect anyone to drink hot tea with pizza. Someone ordering that in Germany where she grew up, or Philadelphia where she lived, would be surprising. But it would be just as surprising in my hometown of New York. I asked for “tea” as an experiment.

As I predicted, the waitress was not surprised by my order, and brought a large glass of iced tea. I then conducted the second part of my experiment by tasting the tea. It was unsweetened. This was because we were not in New York or Philadelphia, but in Oxford, Mississippi.

When I ordered “tea” in Greenville, North Carolina, where I lived at the time, I always got “sweet tea”: tea that was supersaturated with sugar and then chilled and served over ice, but I had heard that in some parts of the South you got unsweetened iced tea. Here in Queens if you order “tea” at a restaurant that caters to the Indian or Nepalese populations, it will probably come with milk.

This is a difference in the sense of the word “tea,” but unlike previous semantic differences I’ve discussed, it is not a difference in the extent of the word. If you served me or any other Northerner a glass of iced tea or sweet tea and asked, “Is this tea?” most of us would say yes. If you served a Southerner a cup of hot tea, they would agree that it’s tea.

Of course, as Lynne Murphy has observed (PDF), some people argue about edge cases like rooibos or peppermint tea, but I think most of them would agree that iced tea, sweet tea and hot tea (with or without milk) are all definitely tea. The difference is not at the edges of the category, but in the center.

This is what George Lakoff refers to as a prototype effect. Iced tea is consumed much more frequently than hot tea in the South, so it has become the default “tea.” Sweet tea is consumed more frequently in North Carolina, so it’s the default there.

I’ll get into the differences between defaults, prototypes, stereotypes, radial categories, gradient effects and salient exemplars in future posts, but the main points I wanted to make here are that not all subcategories within a category are perceived equally, and that different people can have different expectations for a category. And to talk about this cool variation in the use of the word “tea.”

The positional neutralization of Marion Barry

In the wake of the death of Marion Barry, the former Mayor of Washington, DC, one of the most striking revelations was how many people had believed at one time that he was actually a husband-and-wife couple named “Mary and Barry.” Aaron Naparstek, founder of Streetsblog, tweeted about this misconception and then discovered that lots of other people had also mentioned it.

The sociolinguist David Bowie mentioned that as a child he thought marionberry yogurt was named after the Mayor. I also thought until tonight that the Mayor was named “Marion Berry.” I had never heard of the berry or the yogurt, but apparently it’s a kind of blackberry that was first cultivated in Marion County, Oregon, when the Mayor was a child in Tennessee. It would have been the perfect Ben and Jerry’s ice cream naming opportunity, but given the Mayor’s controversial past, I understand why they didn’t bite. This may have been the seed for Barry’s fierce opposition to a “yogurt tax,” which could be a whole other blog post.

This widespread confusion between “Mary and” and “Marion,” and Bowie’s and my confusion between “Barry” and “berry,” comes from the positional neutralization of the /æ/, /ɛ/ and /e/ sounds in some dialects of English. As far as I know, no English speaker has trouble telling these two sounds apart before a /t/, so if there were a politician named “Mettion Batty,” no one would think that he was a couple named “Matty and Betty.” But in many parts of the United States, the sounds are pronounced the same before an /r/, so that “marry,” “merry” and “Mary” are pronounced the same.

Why do some people neutralize these vowels before an /r/? To make the American bunched /r/, we put our tongues in a place that’s very close to the place for /e/. That means to say “Mary” /meri/ we don’t have to move our tongues before the /i/, which is pretty convenient. For “merry,” those of us who say /mɛri/ have to raise it a bit, and for “marry” /mæri/ we have to raise it more. My guess is that for some of the ancestors of the marry-merry-Mary neutralizers would have occasionally raised their tongues a little early, or not lowered them so far in the first place, for those words. This kind of timing variability is quite commonplace in speech. They then discovered that confusions like “Mary and Barry” were infrequent and usually pretty easy to correct, and it was more efficient if they didn’t have to lower their tongues so much, so they kept doing it, and their kids picked it up from them.

I personally don’t have this neutralization (possibly due to the influence of a dialect that syllabifies /r/s into onsets), so I can pronounce all three sounds – and hear them, provided that the people speaking are pronouncing them differently. My first memory of this neutralization is hearing Mary Gross ranting about Christmas on Saturday Night Live: “People tell me I should be merry because my first name is Mary. Well, my last name is Gross, so have a gross Christmas!” And since I heard “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” today in the supermarket, it’s not too early to extend that gross Christmas wish to you all.

America’s Loveliest Accents: Baltimore

I’ve never been to Baltimore, but I would like to visit one day. I’ve never watched “The Wire,” but I’ve seen a couple of John Waters movies.

I also went on a date once with a woman from Baltimore. She herself mentioned her accent, in particular that she pronounced her hometown’s name as [bɒɫdəmɚ], like “Bald o’ mer” (this is different from the stereotype I later heard with “Bowlmer”). It didn’t work out, but I’ll just say that I found her very attractive, including her accent and not despite it.

And yes, this is kind of a lame post. That’s the point: that I can say something nice about this accent and a lot of others without doing any research whatsoever. You can too.

I’ve avoided following the original Gawker series “America’s Ugliest Accent,” that inspired Josef Fruehwald’s blog post that inspired this series, but Ben Trawick-Smith (no relation that I know of) has a summary of other people’s reactions to the Gawker series, and adds his own.

There are other accents that weren’t part of the Gawker sixteen, and that I may discuss at some point. I’ve lived in New Mexico and North Carolina, which both have very interesting accents (North Carolina actually has several; just ask Walt Wolfram and his colleagues). And my native Hudson Valley accent doesn’t get much attention at all, living as we do in the shadow of the New York accent.

In conclusion, you’re entitled to your own feelings about any accent. But to reinforce what Fruehwald and Trawick-Smith said, usually the opinions that people hold about an accent are just the opinions they have about the speakers of that accent, thinly disguised. Accent prejudice is ethnic and class prejudice.

If you wouldn’t put up with someone saying that black people look ugly, then don’t put up with someone saying that black people sound ugly. If you wouldn’t put up with someone saying that New Yorkers are uneducated, then don’t put up with them saying that New Yorkers sound uneducated.

Question your own prejudices. If you find yourself judging people for the way they pronounce certain words, or correcting them, ask yourself what it is that really bothers you.

Set an example. If you hear someone speaking with an accent that could invite rejection or ridicule, do your best to treat them with the same respect that you would anyone else. And if you notice that you’re criticizing your own speech, take a minute and give yourself the space to love yourself for who you are.

This is part sixteen of a series where I say nice things about all sixteen of the accents that Gawker’s Dayna Evans nominated for “America’s Ugliest Accent.” Previously: New Orleans.

America’s Loveliest Accents: New Orleans

There’s a stereotypical “Southern” accent you’ll hear in mid-twentieth century movies and television, that owes more to Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh’s artificial accents than to anything that ever came out of the mouth of any real-life Southerner. It may bear a passing resemblance to the accents of real Coastal Southern gentry like Fritz Hollings, but it’s been used to portray people from all regions and social classes of the South. In the last fifty or so years we’ve heard a new stereotype that’s at least based on real Southerners like Dolly Parton and Elvis Presley, but it’s been applied to rich and poor white characters from Dallas to Knoxville to New Orleans.

YouTube user Mehrvigne, from Chalmette, Louisiana, wants us to know that some people from the New Orleans area don’t talk anything like that. Katie Carmichael, who just finished her dissertation on Chalmette accents after Hurricane Katrina, pointed me to Mehvigne’s “accent tag” video on Twitter.

Mehrvigne has a “Yat” accent, which bears an uncanny resemblance to working-class New York and Boston accents, and is said to have evolved from similar patterns of European immigrants acquiring an /r/-dropping dialect.

The “Yat” dialect is just one of several New Orleans accents, and it’s one that I actually didn’t hear when I visited the city back in 2010. It exists alongside other accents spoken by white, black and Asian (NSFW) people in New Orleans. To get an idea of the diversity of the area, listen to these two teenage girls doing an accent tag together:

This is part fifteen of a series where I say nice things about all sixteen of the accents that Gawker’s Dayna Evans nominated for “America’s Ugliest Accent.” Previously: Charleston. Next, and last but not least: Baltimore.

America’s Loveliest Accents: Charleston

In my post about the Memphis accent, I discussed how the Mountain and Coastal (white) Southern dialects have very distinct origins. So why do they sound “the same” to many people? In part it’s because they’ve become more similar over the years.

At first it was the Mountain South imitating the Coast. Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia all controlled large mountain areas from their coastal port capitols in Williamsburg, New Bern, Charleston and Savannah, and later from their Piedmont capitals in Richmond, Raleigh, Columbia and Atlanta. It was fashionable among certain people to imitate the elites, and those elites spoke mostly with Coastal accents.

In the late twentieth century with the rise of the “New South” centered around Appalachian and Piedmont centers of cheaper labor, cultural and political power shifted to cities like Nashville, Charlotte and Louisville. With wider access to radio and television, and better roads connecting them to regional capitals, Southerners have had more exposure to regional accent role models.

African Americans in the South have also tended to shift from local accents to a regional or national model of “sounding Black.” Walt Wolfram and his colleagues have documented this divergence between black and white accents in Hyde County, in coastal North Carolina, in a fascinating series of studies.

Charleston

Charleston used to be known for its conservative, genteel coastal Southern accent, which you can hear in the speech of former Senator Fritz Hollings.

I’ll admit I had to look this one up. Darius Rucker, lead singer of Hootie and the Blowfish, is from Charleston. I’ve heard Hootie dismissed by some music snobs, but is there anyone who thinks Rucker doesn’t have a lovely voice?

What I find most interesting is that to my ear he sounds almost nothing like Hollings. Is that because he’s black, or because he’s younger, or both?

This is part fourteen of a series where I say nice things about all sixteen of the accents that Gawker’s Dayna Evans nominated for “America’s Ugliest Accent.” Previously: Atlanta. Nextly: New Orleans, and finally Baltimore.

America’s Loveliest Accents: Memphis

What does it take to have an accent – or not to have one? I thought I had a great example of a Memphis accent when I discovered that Aretha Franklin was born there. But then I found out she moved away when she was two. I knew Elvis Presley was born in Tupelo, Mississippi, a hundred miles away, but he lived most of his life in Memphis. Do either of them have a Memphis accent?

In my experience, the bulk of a person’s accent is formed in their teenage years. That doesn’t mean that it’s always a copy of the people around them: many people rebel and try to sound as different as possible from their neighbors. If they’re especially attached to a childhood or family identity that clashes with their teenage situation, they may try to hang on to as much of it as they can.

From a cursory search, nobody seems to think Aretha Franklin has an accent of any kind other than “black,” but they definitely don’t associate her amazing voice with Memphis. Elvis, on the other hand, was occasionally described as having a “melodic Memphis accent,” and described himself as “just a poor-boy from Memphis, Memphis.”

Memphis

When I started this series I decided that I wouldn’t go looking for speakers of any of these accents. I want to say nice things about the speech of these cities without having to look it up. I do some research to find good examples, or pictures to go with the posts, but I haven’t been pulling up the Wikipedia list of “Famous people from Memphis.”

Another name that came to my mind was Bobby Whitlock, who played and sang with Eric Clapton in Derek and the Dominos, on “Layla” and other assorted love songs. Here’s a recent reunion of the two men performing “Bell Bottom Blues,” where you can hear Whitlock’s accent:

In looking up details about Aretha Franklin, Elvis Presley and Bobby Whitlock today, I did sneak a peek at the Wikipedia lists, and they reminded me of another famous Memphis voice, Alex Chilton. I knew Chilton as the high-voiced lead singer of Big Star on songs like “September Gurls” and “In the Street.” Until today I didn’t know that he had already had a career as the lead singer of the Box Tops, delivering the gravelly lead on “The Letter” in 1967, when he was sixteen years old, and boy do you hear that Memphis accent! Here he is in 1985 (when there was music still on MTV) with an impromptu solo performance of “The Letter” at the end.

This is part twelve of a series where I say nice things about all sixteen of the accents that Gawker’s Dayna Evans nominated for “America’s Ugliest Accent.” Previously: Louisville. Nextly: Atlanta.

America’s Loveliest Accents: Louisville

We talk about “Southern” accents, but dialectologists distinguish at least two major dialect groups: South and South Midland, sometimes known as “Upper South” and “Lower South.” The different histories of the Coastal and Mountain South are presented in Albion’s Seed, David Hackett Fischer’s accessible history of early British migration to North America.

Fischer shows us that there were two distinct migrations: the Anglican and Catholic planters and their indentured servants crossed from the south of England to Virginia ports like Arlington and Jamestown between 1642 and 1675, spreading out down the coast and importing slaves from Africa. It wasn’t until 1717 to 1775 that Presbyterians from the Scottish Lowlands, Northern Ireland and the English-Scottish borderlands arrived in Philadelphia and after a few years in Pennsylvania began migrating down the Shenendoah Valley and throughout the Appalachian and Ozark mountains.

My grandmother’s family history follows this stream: in the birth, death and marriage records collected by my cousins we see each generation moving down the mountains: Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Oklahoma and finally Texas, where my father was born. In Texas the Coastal and Mountain dialects merged to form something different from both.

Louisville

The Appalachian dialect covers all of Kentucky and the Ohio Valley, including Louisville. I’ve known several people from Louisville, including my first college roommate, and my friend and neighbor Elaine.

Dennis Preston studies American dialects and our attitudes to them. He also has a lovely Louisville accent, having grown up in New Albany, Indiana (“N’Albany”), just across the river. His dialect still maintains different pronunciations for “witch” and “which,” and “horse” and “hoarse,” as he demonstrated to me at a recent meeting of the American Dialect Society. Here’s a great video of him and Robert MacNeil riding a train across the mountains and talking to people about accents:

This is part eleven of a series where I say nice things about all sixteen of the accents that Gawker’s Dayna Evans nominated for “America’s Ugliest Accent.” Previously: Tallahassee. Nextly: Memphis.

America’s Loveliest Accents: Tallahassee

Shortly after I posted the first of America’s Loveliest Accents, Matthew Harrison tweeted, “This really is lovely. I hope you do some Southern accents!” As I told him at the time, the last seven of these sixteen cities are in the South, if you define the South broadly enough to include Baltimore (#16).

It’s hard to tell whether New York accents get more hate than Southern ones, but it’s close. I don’t think there are any accent groups whose speakers try as hard to cover them up. Being half-New Yorker and half-Southern, I’m happy to say that they’re both misjudged. My father was a master of the Texan strategy of deploying arch gentility and folksy wit in proportions finely calibrated to the situation at hand.

Tallahassee

Tallahassee is another of those cities I’ve never been to (the closest I’ve gotten is New Orleans or Orlando), but my neighbor, Teresa Ward, went to college there, and sent me this guest post:

Well, Tallahassee is a beautiful north Florida town. It should actually be part of Georgia, as it has a distinct Southern bent to it. It’s near the border with Georgia. It is also close to the Gulf of Mexico, so it is slightly “coastal” in feeling.

Their are roads in Tallahassee that are extremely romantic, canopied and dripping with moss. On a sunny day, the road can be cool and shaded by the canopy.

The nearby beaches have sand as soft and white as sugar and the oysters and shrimp are the best.

And the accents are warm and friendly. When I think of Tallahassee accents, I think of my friend Carol and how she says “Hey” over the phone when I call her. It is slow and cozy, and takes her about three or four syllables to finish it. And there is always a slight smile and generosity to her conversation.

I also think of another old friend from there, who had a much quicker way of talking than Carol. In fact, as Debbie herself might say, she could talk “ninety to nothing.” The voice would go a little high in the head and louder than Carol’s, but it too would drip with kindness and laughter. That’s how I remember it.

My brother, who is in sales, has a wonderful Tallahassee drawl now too. And I think it helps him continue to be one of the leading salesmen!

When I started school at FSU, in the theatre department, I do remember my voice teacher tearing out his hair to get me to hear and say the difference between “pin” and “pen” (and, of course, “tin” and “ten”), and as an actress I mastered it. But really, in daily life, does it matter? Down there, we know what y’all are talking about, it’s all in the context.

Speaking of FSU, students often come from out of state, or city, to go to school there, and end up staying. The town has grown quite a bit since I made it my home in 1978. And, I would say a number of the residents are former students who were swayed by the friendliness of the city. (You go into a grocery store, and they actually look at you and thank you and talk about all kinds of things before you can leave. . .)

I’m guessing that the Tallahassee accent is pretty close to the accent of nearby Gainesville, which you can hear in Tom Petty’s song “American Girl.”

This is part 10 of a series where I say nice things about all sixteen of the accents that Gawker’s Dayna Evans nominated for “America’s Ugliest Accent.” Previously: Los Angeles. Nextly: Louisville.