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Home » Open thread 6/16/22

Open thread 6/16/22

The New Neo Posted on by

I looked at quite a few videos on this same subject: the “Mid-Atlantic” or “Transatlantic” American accent. But they all had the same odd flaw: they all used Cary Grant as an example of one of the Americans sporting this accent. Odd. Cary Grant – aka Archibald Leach – was British. He came here with a troupe from England at 16 and stayed, becoming a US citizen when he was 28.

Comments

Open thread 6/16/22 — 35 Comments

  1. Judy! Judy! Judy?

    I’ll grant you that he never said it. According to the interwebs.

  3. The authors don’t really know a lot. Bet they think Bob Hope was born in Des Moines too.

  4. Maybe Walter Pidgeon (born in Canada), Clifton Webb, Grace Kelly, Eva Marie Saint, Gloria Swanson?

  5. Long ago, a friend of mine , then a student at Columbia University in NY , invited me to visit him there. So I did. We hung out in one of their cafeterias and it was easy to overhear the conversations of the other students.
    Everybody I overheard seemed to speak with some sort of pseudo-English accent, and my friend, a rather cynical sort, mentioned to me how he found it irritating to listen to those speaking with their “phony affected” accents.
    My friend had a Queens, NY accent; totally non-English.

    When I was in college (at a city university in NY ), the professor who taught the writing/composition class I was required to take, was a graduate of Harvard U.
    He too spoke with some sort of pseudo-English accent.

    Not sure if, back then, the psuedo-English accent was normal for Ivy League types.

    Check out this English accent:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CyRXg_DZkFM

    If not for the subtitles, I would not understand 90% of what was said.

  7. Here is how the ruling leftist elites, all promoters of going “green” will handle brownouts or blackouts (which will be inevitable once enough conventional power plants are shuttered).

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CyRXg_DZkFM

    Apparently what’s good for the goose is not good for the gander.
    Or put more precisely, some pigs are more equal than other pigs.

  9. Note to Richard Aubrey from a few days ago:
    “There is a metaphor I wish I could recall. It’s funny, exasperated and clever and it refers to people who step over dollars to pick up pennies. It’s probably rude to the OCD community. If I think of it, I won’t post it.”

    As a member of the OCD community, I resemble that remark.

    I don’t know that particular metaphor, but there is an old proverb about being “penny-wise, pound-foolish.”

    It’s British of course, so there’s the Cary Grant connection.

  10. Grace Kelly was an Irish girl from the Philly area who spent a huge amount of time mastering that accent and speech style. There are some moments in her films where it doesn’t quite come across as her natural speech, for me anyway.

    The video claims that the aristocratic style of speech went away with the burgeoning American middle class.

    Both my mother and mother-in-law said that films of that era were escapist fare for them. With the depression and the war and rationing being the familiar, they got to escape to an alternate reality where everything was elegant and lovely. I don’t think there was a lack of a middle class back then.

    The video also says that it was fake, and I think that is a correct assessment. I’ve watched a number of films in the last year or two that were made in the mid ’50’s through to the ’70’s and somewhere in the late ’50’s there really was this strong movement towards socially relevant topics sometimes mixed with gritty realism. I don’t fully understand why that happened when it did.

    Even though the point of that shift is realism (maybe), to my modern eye much of it also seems fake. Which can be amusing. I think some of the even older Italian neorealism films really do have an honest realism to them.

  11. Is Cary Grant the one who said that his LSD sessions enabled him to get beyond his gay orientation and find women sexually attractive?

  13. Michael Kinsley contended that Alastair Cooke had perfected ‘the perfect mid-Atlantic accent, which sounds British to the audiences of NPR and American to the audiences of the BBC’. Not sure if that’s actually true.

    The actor John Hillerman referred to his default accent as ‘New York stage voice’. He’d worked with a vocal coach for about a year ca. 1957 to learn it and commit it to habit. His reason for signing up with a coach was that he was having trouble landing parts because of his Texas accent (“not many parts for cowboys on the New York stage”). Even with that, he could barely make a living on the New York stage and decamped to Hollywood in 1969; it took him years to establish a reputation with bit parts and short stints in series before he landed the role that made him wealthy. It took 23 years of living alone on a meagre income for him to get that break. To the mid-Atlantic accent he’d acquired he could add some tweaks to make a credible accent for the British Army vet Jonathan Higgins on Magnum PI.

    Interesting biographical tidbit. When Hillerman arrived in old age, he quit acting returned to Texas after an absence of 42 years, spending his last 18 years there.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuFYkKspu54

    You can hear Hillerman’s acquired accent here.

  14. People of a certain vintage who attended boarding schools or finishing schools often had a mid-Atlantic accent. My mother had two friends, born in 1931 and 1932 respectively, who spoke this way.

  15. Grace Kelly was an Irish girl from the Philly area who spent a huge amount of time mastering that accent and speech style.

    Her father was an Irish-born building contractor affluent enough to afford live-in servants ‘ere the Depression. Her mother’s parents were German-born. Her maternal grandfather managed to make a living as a self-employed designer of some sort.

  17. My grandfather, born in Bar Harbor, Maine, in 1881, raised in Boston, and a Harvard graduate, had a Hahvahd accent all his life. I don’t think it was fake.

  19. Kate,
    I was referring to cinema, which often fakes a great many things. The question for filmmakers is will the audience buy it?

    I met a number of “preppies” in college, but I never socialized with them and never got a chance to become familiar with their world. I do recall an accent difference, but I don’t remember much beyond that.

  20. There used to be regional accent differences which were quite noticeable. I think what happened to them is television.

  21. @Art Deco –

    I wonder if Hillerman simply relaxed and reverted to type for his role in Blazing Saddles.

    He was very good in Chinatown.

  22. Do people hear their own accents?

    I have been told that anyone can tell that I am from NYC, but I simply don’t hear it that way.

    Once, at a meeting in Birmingham, AL, another attendee, a local, said “Mike, ah lahk yore ak-sent.”

    I responded, “MY accent?!?!”

  23. So is the male “ gay” accent acquired ? I know all do not use that accent, but there is certainly a sub group among gay males that does. Like it is some kind of identifier or something.

  24. Jon Baker @ 1:52;

    I think your presumption is correct.
    A friend of my daughter is gay.
    Before he moved to NYC he spoke, let us say, “normal.”
    After he moved to NYC he spoke markedly different; in a manner you refer to as an acquired NYC gay accent

  25. When my Wife and I first started traveling to Europe in the late 1970’s we were mistaken for Canadians. Wife born in CO and other than a short stint in Portsmouth, VA lived in CO whole life, me only since 1957. Dad was Navy so we moved around so I guess my “accent” is MidWest.

  27. I think that Katherine Hepburn’s accent was authentic. She grew up in ultra-high Wasp Connecticut and had what I think was called Park Avenue lockjaw.

  28. Paul in Boston:

    Yes.

    The Wiki article I linked to in the post is more informative than the video.

  30. Tommy SHah. My father, born 1920, said the same thing about escapism in films.
    It’s difficult to differentiate Mid Atlantic from Received American Theater (I think that’s the term) pronunciation.
    Buckley had the former and was accused of putting on a phony British accent.
    I got well into Mencken’ s mammoth work on American English. Word origins were interesting, but the rest had been made obsolete by homogenization.

  31. Buckley had the former and was accused of putting on a phony British accent.

    His brother talked the same way. Even his son has some boarding school vowels. (The son’s an amiable $hit).

  32. I wonder if Hillerman simply relaxed and reverted to type

    What you hear in that 1984 interview is Hillerman relaxed. In character, he used different voices.

  35. Too good not to add – picked this up from comments in the Post Neo linked from 2010.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UgpfSp2t6k
    Amy Walker does 21 accents – ending with the Transatlantic.

    Personal side note: I was arranging a medical examination by telephone with a central operator for our insurance service. His basic accent was Continental Indian, overlaid with either a Scots or Canadian pronunciation for words like about => “aboot” .
    Very pleasant to listen to, although not a mix I had ever heard before!

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