The Atlantic - Latest Comments in Watching The Sotomayor Hearings

Re: Watching The Sotomayor Hearings

BreakerBaker — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 08:07:50 -0000

But while I happily accept the grammatical acceptibility of y'all in some contexts,'both of y'all' is just simply poor grammar. 'Both of you all'? Why do you need the all?

I'm no fourth generation Texan. My parents are from Tennessee. My father grew up a farm boy on land my family had owned since the middle of the 19th century. I grew up in North Carolina and Georgia, so I think my Southern bonafides are pretty firm.

I don't know why I've never been big on y'all. I don't think I used it before I realized people mocked Sotherners for it. Maybe I'm blocking it out.

In the north, they have the ugly habit of saying 'yous guys.' Given the choice between those two options, I think y'all is far superior. Still, I've just never been big on it.

Re: Watching The Sotomayor Hearings

dave in texas — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 12:32:12 -0000

Actually, y'all works perfectly fine when talking to only two people; the preferred usage in that case seems to be "both of y'all." I've even heard it used when the speaker is talking to only one person, but I suppose that's a hazard of any colloquialism--that, strictly grammatically speaking, it will often be used incorrectly.

I suppose I have to freely admit to a certain prejudice regarding y'all. I am, after all, a fourth-generation Texan, and the phrase "you guys" isn't one I often heard growing up. It's certainly perfectly fine, for all the reasons you mention. And the grammar can get confusing. For example, in addition to the singular/plural usage, is the plural possessive all y'all's, all's y'all's, or what? ;)

Re: Watching The Sotomayor Hearings

BreakerBaker — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 10:23:34 -0000

I've never been big on y'all. I do say 'you guys.' Maybe it's because I'm a man, I don't have a problem using guys in a way that is gender nonspecific. Besides, seeing as y'all is a contraction of 'you all' it actually seems grammatically inappropriate in any number of instances of use. I mean, you can't say 'do you all want to come with me?' when you're speaking to just two people. But people use y'all in this instance without any hesitation. To me, the 'all' is important. Whereas with you guys, if you can get past the gender aspect of it (the way they do in Romance languages), you're in good shape whether you're speaking to two or twenty people. Whether a whole group or a small faction of a group.

Re: Watching The Sotomayor Hearings

dave in texas — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 09:41:08 -0000

@DaBomb, I maintain that y'all is one of the most useful constructions in the English language. It's non-gender specific, which eliminates the need for saying "Ladies" (sometimes considered condescending or sexist) when talking to a group of women. It's also good for talking to a group of men and women together, and besides, what do you replace it with? You guys? Embrace the y'all. It's an extremely useful construct.

Re: Watching The Sotomayor Hearings

Anna S. — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 09:36:44 -0000

Nobody gets to have the default identity. There isn't one

I have to disagree here: there are linguistically correct ways to pronounce words, and there are 'accents' -- variations from the dictionary norm. English happens to have no lingual governing body, but in France the Academie francaise regulates standard pronunciation and accents are identified as variants thereon. Likewise Spanish, Danish, Arabic, Italian, Thai, Russian, Swedish, Chinese, and a large number of other languages have linguistic regulators that set the norms; English is something of an odd duck in this regard for not having one. Linguists do recognize standard English forms, though -- for North America linguists call it General American, for Britain it's Received Pronunciation. Granted, no one (or very few people) actually speaks the theoretical linguistic norms, but the default is there, and generally when people say 'I don't have an accent' they mean that they pronounce more closely to the theoretical norm than people around them.

Of course, all this is a little esoteric and I agree that there generally shouldn't be value judgments attached to how much or little or what type of accent one has. Regional accents aren't 'flawed' in any way, they're an interesting and inevitable part of any living language (and a select few dead ones). But to say that there isn't a 'how things are supposed to be' baseline for pronunciations (especially for non-English languages like French in which there is an officially set out Way Things Are Supposed To Be) is a little misleading.

Re: Watching The Sotomayor Hearings

BreakerBaker — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 08:05:21 -0000

Oh, I've seen it. For Mitchum fair, I have to say I am more of a Night of the Hunter type of guy.

Re: Watching The Sotomayor Hearings

BreakerBaker — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 08:01:55 -0000

Actually, I take some of that about me being wrong back.

http://www.teara.govt.nz/NewZealanders/NewZealandPeoples/Dutch/4/en

http://www.mfat.govt.nz/Countries/Europe/Netherlands.php

The influence is not from the origin I thought, but it's there.

Re: Watching The Sotomayor Hearings

BreakerBaker — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 07:56:28 -0000

I guess you're right. I thought it was originally (in Western terms) a Dutch colony eventually taken over by the Brits, but it appears it was just orginally (again, from the European perspective) found by the Dutch. "Old" Zealand (or Zeeland) is, afterall, in the Netherlands. Oh well. That'll teach me.

Re: Watching The Sotomayor Hearings

Ta-Nehisi Coates — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 07:15:01 -0000

Well, you have to consider my path. For my first eight years in journalism I worked for mostly alty publications. There wasn't much pressure to change. It really never even crossed my mind. By the time I worked at more mainstream places, I was 30, and the people who hired me knew what they were getting.

As for the "what voice should I use," it comes up more than you think. The voice I use in my memoir is not "standard" English, but it certainly isn't how I talk now, nor is it the voice I blog with. And the voice I blog with isn't the voice I use in long-form. So I guess I do have a number of voices. My blogging voice is certainly much less formal than my long-form voice.

Re: Watching The Sotomayor Hearings

Marcos El Malo — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 06:32:35 -0000

Forgive my presumptuousness, but isn't the reason you haven't changed your accent because you are a writer (and the sort of writer that you are)? It's not so much that you "don't have to change" your voice due to a lack of external pressures, but that you feel an internal pressure to Be true to yourself and SPEAK truly thru your writing. (And that's what I mean by the sort of writer your are.) Your stock in trade is your mind and your thoughts.

Maybe I'm over glorifying you and what you do, but let me ask you this: When you sit down to write, how often do you ask yourself, "What voice should I use?" Please understand, I'm not saying that writers who have "second voices" are dishonest; I am saying that it can complicate ones writing when one is aiming for clarity as you do.

Re: Watching The Sotomayor Hearings

sanjuroku — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 02:44:49 -0000

BreakerBaker, that is utterly false. The New Zealand accent is not Dutch influenced in any way whatsoever. There has never been a ditch presence in NZ.

http://www.ualberta.ca/~johnnewm/NZEnglish/origins.html

If I would categorise the Kiwi accent, I'd call it an Australian accent with Scottish vowels.

Re: Watching The Sotomayor Hearings

DaveinHackensack — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 02:28:17 -0000

I think there's another explanation for Sotomayor's diction: she had been coached (as all nominees are) and was trying to adhere to prepared answers.

Re: Watching The Sotomayor Hearings

xaphoo — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 00:16:49 -0000

I'm with tomtom above. There's some overanalysis here; she's just being careful, using the tone I recognize academics using when they talk to laymen, especially laymen with hostile or anti-intellectual aims.

And I just have to add: that though I am usually of one mind with TNC's comments, something irked me about saying that Sotomayor sounds like "the hood". I grew up in Miami, a large mainly Hispanic city whose suburban geography conceals the fact that it is as complex and radically mixed-income as the Bronx; and there, there were as many styles of Hispanic accent as there were individuals. None of them were as simple as "hood", and those who tried to speak like the rest of America did so in a number of complex ways - none of which I can describe as "scrubbing away the hood accent." They were speaking according to their own style, reflecting the unions of their upbringings and self-images, with no style of speech being either natural or unnatural.

TNC, one of your great virtues is your unwillingness to be reductive, and your eagerness to see complexity; but something about the phrase "scrubbing away the hood accent" seemed to be the opposite of that.

Re: Watching The Sotomayor Hearings

bread & roses — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 23:46:40 -0000

JD and others, I gotta call you on this. Everyone has an accent, all the time. There is not "accented" and "non-accented" version of English. You may have a neutral, California-meets-Kansas accent, that you can change to a Tenessee southern-belle accent when you feel like it, but you always have an accent. Try going to Australia and telling them you don't have an accent.

The whole accent/no accent thing is a "normalizing" thing that I'm surprised how many people don't get. It's like when people talk about "people" and "women". Or "blacks" and "Americans". Nobody gets to have the default identity. There isn't one. There's a dominant identity- a majority identity- in a lot of places, but it always has strong culture attached to it. It's not just how things are supposed to be.

And I would also pick an argument with "flawed diction as a cultural signifier". It is certainly true that people use language as a declaration of who they are, but I think if you actually tried to pin down what diction was "flawed" and what was "perfect", you'd get in a muddle in a hurry. You say tomayto, I say tomahto, y'know. One of them isn't "right".

When you say "I choose not to have an accent", it sounds to me like you want to sound like a white, middle-class, professional American. Bully for you. Those who choose to speak in a way that comes naturally to them who don't belong to those categories aren't necessarily flawed.

Re: Watching The Sotomayor Hearings

Juba — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 21:26:25 -0000

Essentially it is being multi-lingual, if you define it loosely.

Thanks Anna!

Re: Watching The Sotomayor Hearings

tomtom — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 21:15:14 -0000

Deleted and banned. Take the snark to another site. You won't have trouble finding one.

Re: Watching The Sotomayor Hearings

anna perez — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 19:41:13 -0000

I wouldn't call it flexible, but inevitable. Its almost like being multi-lingual and that's a good thing.

Re: Watching The Sotomayor Hearings

Juba — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 18:52:40 -0000

Ive met a lot of people from a lot of places, and I would say the top place for throwing me for a loop accentwise, Black folkwise is Savannah, GA. I have met more Black folk from Savannah that spoke perfectly neutral English with no trace of accent than I have from any other place.

Completely anecdotal I know, but I wonder still...

Re: Watching The Sotomayor Hearings

Doctor Cleveland — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 18:29:32 -0000

It's true that she sounds different in the sound bites that have been used against her.

I think a fair amount of what's happening is just straight-up vocal tension, which makes the "scrubbed" effect TNC mentions sound much more audible. In those audio clips, she's generally relaxed, talking to a friendly audience, and while her accent is still her accent, she speaks more quickly and less in her head voice. During the hearings, she's slowed down and tensed up, and choosing all of her words painfully. Scrubbed and slow sounds more painstaking, because it is.

Of course, some of the tension could be because some of the senators questioning her are trying to railroad her with a few "careless" (or just not-insanely-cautious) words that she spoke while she was relaxed.

Re: Watching The Sotomayor Hearings

Byrk — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 18:02:52 -0000

I am now a hoity-toity goil, and all the betta for rit.

I took creative writing in high school and I would always write speech with a dialect. My writing was generally heavy on dialogue for one reason. I could explain any spelling/grammatical error as the dialect of the person speaking. The teacher bought this argument, so I went with it for the whole class.

Re: Watching The Sotomayor Hearings

lovelynina — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 17:35:17 -0000

This is a great topic for discussion, because it highlights the efforts people go to to be accepted in polite society and to be understood. Words mean a lot, but so do accent, affectation, and delivery. Ta-Nehisi makes the good point that he is protected to some extent from this as a writer.

No doubt some accents communicate, rightly or wrongly, an underlying disposition. Southern accents to some signal slowness of thought; to others it signals wealth or privilege. A New York or Boston accent has always tipped the listener off to a rough-and-tumble, or perhaps unpolished, person. A Midwestern accent has meant honesty, sincerity, or in the extreme, gullibility.

These are prejudgments, and to the extent that they are demeaning or prejudicial, and remediable, people have struggled to rid themselves of them by polishing their speech. I am now a hoity-toity goil, and all the betta for rit.

Re: Watching The Sotomayor Hearings

LarryGeater — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 17:33:10 -0000

I moved arround growing up and had that same flexability going on when I was younger. I did it without noticing untill it was pointed out to me in basic training. Now I have a neutral accent that I keep for all ocasions. I do change my gramar and profanity usage based on the setting though.

Re: Watching The Sotomayor Hearings

PBomb — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 17:24:57 -0000

I live in Texas. I use to work for a bank call center and I dealt with New Yorkers quite a bit. They could never figure out where I was. I would informed them that I am from Texas and they were always shocked. I didn't have that traditional or stereotypical Texan accent. The only thing that gives me away at times is when I say "y'all". But I am working on that.

Re: Watching The Sotomayor Hearings

lovelynina — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 17:18:54 -0000

Ha ha, no, Ta-Nehisi, you don't mean that your life is more insular (if I may comment on the meaning of the words of a professional writer!) You mean that you are fortunate insofar as your work allows you to be judged purely on the meaning of the words you choose. This is in contradistinction to the situations of many, such as myself, who have the dubious privilege of having their words judged not only on the basis of their intrinsic meaning, but by their delivery ("what an arrogant bitchy lady!") or by the appearance of the deliverer ("I didn't catch a word she said, but she has lovely breasts!"). Your national and internet presence keeps you from being insular, but we also don't get to see what lovely eyes you have, my dear!

Re: Watching The Sotomayor Hearings

LarryGeater — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 17:15:38 -0000

The same thing happens in white communities. I had an aunt who spoke with perfect diction. I learned as an adult that her family was from the poorest of the poor in rural TN. They were rail spliters.

My own father spoke unaccented english at work but kept his southern accent at home. In speaking as with writing one should adjust ones voice to ones audience.