I always associate Tennessee with the accent my grandmother had, which doesn't much resemble the ones in the video. Hers was more "country" than Southern, I guess. But she was from the far southeastern corner of the state: "ED-uh-waww, TEEIN-uh-see," or something like that.
I do not, in fact, really want to feel pissed off and depressed about racial injustice. So I'm going to just completely put in a random request for the next Belle music journalism post over at CT*: Lil Debbie, do you like her or do you love her or do you totally love her**?
* Incidentally, and I've wondered this before, why is a philosophy blog such a magnet for pseudo-educated morons who think they're philosophers because they've read a few pages of Nietzsche or Ayn Rand? Or does that question answer itself?
** Or, I suppose, maybe there are certain ways in which her work is problematic. I guess that's possible.
... aaaaand I clicked that second link anyway.
And my first intuition was in fact correct.
1: that's actually how my step-dad's family in sewannee talked too. his mom was a big daughters of the confederacy person and she had this accent that I don't even know anybody has anymore. like what you say, but old-fashioned and (consciously?) upper-class. like an extra in 'gone with the wind.' sort of like how my oldest relatives in NY talk like people in movies from the 40s. (you always wonder, did anyone talk like that? verdict: they did.) these newspeople have more of a generic southern accent; if I had my eyes closed and you told me it was the news from murfreesboro, GA I wouldn't have been surprised. but ordinary people I know in statesboro have a different accent that's quite pronounced. we didn't really get to hear much from the locals besides yelling; I bet they have a distinct accent, but like I say, it was the suppression of the accent that got me.
somewhat relatedly, this (terrifying) video of a guy getting rescued from a fire in houston was highlighted on gawker, and people were arguing in the comments section about whether the woman saying OMG was black. and everybody from the south or texas was like, the fuck? how can you not obviously in one second tell she's black? the asshole cracking jokes in the background while someone near him faced death was white, and he should be stabbed in the ear with a pencil. gawker commenters were basically saying, 'if she was black she wouldn't have said 'fricken' or 'oh em gee.'' like black people only say "bad motherfucker" all the time, even at their white-collar job at an insurance agency? but more even: any 'southern accent' ovverode their normal ability to discern someone's race based only on their voice (which otherwise is quite accurate. IIRC there was a study of this in the late 90s.) funny.
I know belle waring reads this blog, so we'll have to hope she lets us know. I remember someone asking at LGM why she even leaves the comments open to her posts since they are always such a total clusterfuck of sexist assholes, but the next person pointed out you can't troll an empty comments section, which was an ICECOLD SICKBURN but completely accurate. ogged is the peerless master of trolling your own blog, but clearly he has disciples. (though, I have to say I feel I'm not seeing enough genuine anger, hatred, 600-comment long threads, and flouncing off the blog forever generated by your sin of onan trolling posts since you've returned, ogged. have you become lazy? has parenting melted your icy-mechanical, dick cheney-like heart and weakened your troll-fu?)
"Incidentally, and I've wondered this before, why is a philosophy blog such a magnet for pseudo-educated morons who think they're philosophers because they've read a few pages of Nietzsche or Ayn Rand? Or does that question answer itself?"
jesus crooked timber is a pain in the ass sometimes. I guess the question answers itself? I don't see why it should be so, so bad on the gender ration of commenters, though. it's as bad as real academic philosophy. worse even. fewer than 1 in 10 comments in many threads by openly female commenters. often completely zero, and 45 comments long. it's like we feel unwelcome or something. cala should go over and calabat people; it would be so salutary.
5: it's like we feel unwelcome or something.
I can't imagine why. The Clueless Dudebro readings on a typical CT thread are so far off the charts that they can only be measured using the Official Gaming Industry Dudebro Factor scale.
Regarding CT comments, I asked dsquared about this once and all he said was that I hadn't seen the stuff that didn't make it through moderation.
Regarding boro, the US Bureau of Geographical Names decided to regularise spellings used by the postal service some time in the 1920s (IIRC) and decided to spell "-borough" the illiretate way.
I completely stopped commenting at CT, years back, due to the sheer metric weight of arsewipes who were commenting. Although I notice that at least one of the people who used to drive me to the edge of posting hundreds of comments consisting of nothing but swearing has apparently left.
7: you say "illiterate," I say "thrifty"
It seems like CT's comments section has become much more active in the last few years, but also much worse (even though it certainly had it's problems earlier). I think the nut of the problem is that many of the main posters are determined to attempt a civil dialog with libertarians, always a mistake.
Unlike filmdrunk, CT never got added to my "don't ever read the comments anywhere, except Unfogged" rule.
weakened your troll-fu?
My wife's accent is more lost than submerged, but it comes back whenever she's talking to her mom or sister. I barely hear it on any of them anymore, but her mom did get a friendly "you're not from around here, are you?" comment from a stranger last she was here.
On the other topic of the post, the decision to stop considering Nashville as a place to live, specifically on "it's still the South" grounds, is looking better all the time.
has parenting melted your icy-mechanical, dick cheney-like heart and weakened your troll-fu?
Parenting does have a way of humbling you. Or maybe just wearing you down. It is harder to find the energy.
7.2: It was a compromise position between -"borough" and -"burro".
I'm surprised by the negative comments about CT threads, not because the comments are that good, but just because almost every other comment section is so much worse. Are there a bunch of great comment sections out there I don't know about?
16: They might point you to LGM or Coate or Making Light.
I read all the m-fing comment threads, and I do not find the above, however comforting and cozy to their communities, in anyway freaking useful.
CT used to be not this horrendous. It has become unreadable. Like being drowned in unmediated 19 year old middling smarts white US male pure id, group dynamic version.
||
That's an interesting approach to the copyright theft problem.
Like being drowned in unmediated 19 year old middling smarts white US male pure id
This. It's hard to read CT threads these days without thinking of Otto from A Fish Called Wanda.
19: I guess it's not any stupider than video art which is sold to collectors as a one-of-a-kind artwork.
I don't know why y'all believe "Bianca Steele" and "Katherine" over at CT are such horrible losers. You should go over and tell them so.
Anytime you see a community making a claim about another community in the form "All X are Y" you can count on the purpose being self-aggrandizement and internal solidarity.
Mostly the problem with the CT commenters is that they are so goddamn pompous and ponderous. They all want to tell you about their personal philosophies. And yet, none have personal philosophies AND clear, simple societal action plans, like I do with Halfordismo.
Fortunately, they've released the secret female force of Ingrid Roebyns (spelling?) aka the world's most spectacularly boring blogger. Detailed Belgian government formation blogging anyone? 85 part series on some incomprehensibly pointless political theory issue?
On boro/borough: We have an Edinboro up here, so it wasn't just -boroughs that changed (although that may be a special case based on pronunciation). And of course Pittsburgh lost its 'h' for a decade or two due to wanting to standardize on the German spelling instead of the Scottish one.
My wife has a hiring philosophy at her work, which I find profound.
'Don't hire or work with any twats.'
@23: It's not that every commenter over there is a wanker. It's that the wanker factor seems to drown out everything else too often.
23: They're consistently good commenters, but they're just two voices among many.
24: Yes. I often find myself in situations there where I think I would be offended if I knew what the hell was being said.
CT threads have become almost unreadable and filled with wankers* (one of whom ,and among the very worst of the lot, has popped up in one of the other threads).
*Bianca Steele, Katharine, and a few others excepted, it's just that the signal to noise ration has gotten much worse.
7.2: The work of a leftover supporter of the Roosevelt spelling reform?
Detailed Belgian government formation blogging anyone?
I really like those posts. Belgian politics is pretty fascinating to begin with because of the great ethno-linguistic divide, and then of course you have the political crisis of the last few years on top.
Speaking of sites going downhill, when did TPM decide that Daily Show segments were worthy of front page posts on a near daily basis?
Belgian politics is fascinating. When I was in Belgium I was really shocked by the following fact. If you take a local train starting in Flanders and ending in Brussels the announcements will be only in Flemish until you hit the Brussels border and then will be bilingual! That's crazy.
29: Why has that awful man St. Claire come here to Unfogged? Can he be banned based on his comments on CT? His comments were massively sexist and racist--he calls himself a "race realist".
Please consider everything I have previously said about not wanting to ban people unless they're really becoming intolerable (as opposed to disagreeable) incorporated by reference.
Southern accents make me extremely nostalgic despite what I always end up giving in and calling a complicated relationship with the region. (Kentucky: so pretty! So nothing else! Texas: My favorite but also a nightmare!) It's gotten to the point that I say to people with a detectable southern accent sometimes "oh, you must be from around where I'm from" even though it's a fairly large region. I'm actually somewhat bad about distinguishing where in the south someone is from unless they sound like Mrs. Hoffmann, my sixth grade teacher, or my uncle or something.
I have no suppressed southern accent except according to some people. I do have a generalized southern sentence intonation I turn on if I need to not sound like such a snoot, like if I'm dealing with a client. I don't know why southern does this but it's what I've got.
And I could never seem to get into Crooked Timber because it always seemed to be a conversation about a conversation about a conversation [turtles turtles turtles] finally landing on a blog post someone made in 2005. I usually had literally no idea what anybody was talking about.
I'll just sort of sit here on this comment thread. So also vaguely re: southern, y'all was a native part of my speech, but after about two years in New York I thought I'd best kill it off, so I did, and fully replaced it with "you guys." Now I'm reviving it. I don't know why.
You don't have much southern -- like, in any given sentence I wouldn't have any idea where you were from -- but you come out with something southern-sounding not all that infrequently.
I do something strange to my accent when I'm trying not to sound snooty -- I think it may be an attempt to channel my mother's working-class Queens. Think a mild Penny Marshall from Laverne and Shirley. I don't know if it works or if I just sound insane.
The first president of my alma mater was an advocate of reformed spelling, so a lot of the school's early documents (from the teens) abide by it. I wonder how many people got so they could read it without it looking peculiar.
I haven't really thought about it much, but I haven't noticed anything about either LB or MS's accent. I just think of them as generic American.
The Penny Marshall thing is only for when I'm trying to sound unthreatening. Which doesn't apply to meetups, what with the knife fights and all.
I used the word "rad" recently in a settlement negotiation, and immediately wondered what the hell I was doing.
As in "that would be rad." What the fuck?
I've spent most of my life in parts of the South that have a lot of people who are not from the South. I didn't have a southern accent as a child, and I still don't for the most part. But it's a familiar enough sound to me that I could slip into it at will, if I wanted to. And as I get older I feel like my inner southern accent is starting to creep out from under all the other junk at the back of my brain and trying to weasel its way into my regular speech patterns. Maybe one day it'll take over. Who knows.
As in "that would be rad." What the fuck?
Were you negotiating with pedantic mathematicians?
I still say "y'all". I should probably stop, but I think it's too late.
39/42: The weird thing is, you sound so much like my friend who grew up in rural Wisconsin. Scary.
CT comment threads often give the impression of being written by two dueling balding 43 year olds in between campaigns in Call of Duty. They don't have a Moby, or Halfordismo, or Heebie posts or nosflownian pedantry or any of the cool stuff we have here. It's shocking to think that I made my internet poetry debut there.
There is no justice, just T. D. us
"Y'all" and "no worries" are two phrases I wish I could comfortably use.
I do kinda miss having correspondents in TAAAHler TEX'sss.
Well, they're setting a less frivolous tone in the posts, generally. Their comments were much more entertaining in the past, but so were everyone's -- back ten years ago, you could get an actual fairly interesting discussion going all over the place.
I blame FaceBook. Everyone sane has retreated to talking to their own circle of acquaintances, and the only people left out in the public internet are irritating lunatics. (Present company excepted.)
'Don't hire or work with any twats.'
I recently asked the person who chaired the committee that hired me to explain the decision.* She replied, "My guiding principle was, "Don't hire a dick.'" This begged the particular question of how I got hired, but it impressed me as a sensible philosophy more broadly.
* I asked this, nicely, because, given the position, hiring me didn't make a ton of sense, and I wanted to understand the committee's reasoning in hopes that I could then gain some insight into the trajectory being envisioned for the department.
"Y'all" and "no worries" are two phrases I wish I could comfortably use.
Hakuna matata, y'all.
"no worries"
I say this all the time, too. But I know many, many people who think it's rude -- "say 'you're welcome' or 'my pleasure' if that's what you mean," they say -- or annoying, so I'm trying to quit.
She meant "no more child rapists" which is pretty admirable when you think about it.
I thought saying "no worries" was an Australian thing.
51: You spelled "accepted" wrong.
As in "that would be rad." What the fuck?
"Rad" has made a comeback in my house due to this.
But I know many, many people who think it's rude -- "say 'you're welcome' or 'my pleasure' if that's what you mean," they say -- or annoying
I've never heard that kind of response around various work and social settings so maybe the PhD humanities crowd needs to get over itself.
Y'all sounds perfectly normal on anybody as long as you don't drawl out the vowel or stick a w in it. Or use it to refer to a single person.
she had this accent that I don't even know anybody has anymore. like what you say, but old-fashioned and (consciously?) upper-class. like an extra in 'gone with the wind.'
I think you are describing what the "way too much information on one 1990s-looking web site, lingusitics is my hobby" guy's site calls "Classical Southern" which is a subset of "Lowland South" and which has a very convoluted border with "Inland South" (really requires a look at his map to see the extents--in my experience Inland South is much twangier*).
The r-dropping areas in the Lowland South (marked with a dark green line) could be described as "Classical Southern". This is the accent that Scarlett O'Hara is attempting to imitate in this clip from Gone with the Wind. This area represents the heart of the old plantation system, as can be seen on the map mentioned above. However, this feature seems to only occur in older settled areas, and does not occur in western areas on the Mississippi River or farther west that were settled after about 1825. 7-Dec.-2009
Within this area older speakers seem to be consistent in maintaining this pattern. However, many younger ones in this area seem to be pronouncing all of their r's, and I will include some of these with a comment. Outside of this area (but always within the Lowland Southern area) there will occasionally be much older speakers who do speak Classical Southern.I have a friend from near Mobile who has a much "softer" southern accent that I think is close.
*He attempts to link a lot of examples by location, but there is a lot of link rot (especially the YouTube links).
Ever since I posted JP's thing on unexpected regionalisms, I've been self-conscious of how I say "no problem" all the fucking time, instead of "you're welcome". Just like he claimed people from my micro-region did.
I think my response to "thanks" tends to be "no problem" or "sure" or something like that. Last time I was visiting my parents my mom went on an extended rant about how some of her coworkers never say "you're welcome". I was trying to figure out if I'd said one of those things to her to provoke the rant.
I say you're welcome, my pleasure, no problem, and no worries nearly interchangeably and frequently. Often all in one conversation, because working in service means that you often are thanked about 10 times in one interchange and it gets really boring just saying, 'you're welcome.'
61: "No problem" is a regionalism? I say that all the time and am unaware of any region that you and I share more specific than "East of the Rockies."
60: The father of one of my childhood friends had that Classical Southern accent. Outside of movies, I haven't heard an accent like that in years.
This dialect mapping tool would be fun if it had a better UI. Select a bunch of features in the lower left (if the drop down populates; if it doesn't, try refreshing) and see which regions have that combination of features.
34: A "race realist" came traipsing onto Unfogged and I missed it?!
?!
?!?!?!?!
I am very, very disappointed in Me right now. I'm going to give Me a stern talking-to about priorities.
If you hadn't been aimlessly lounging somewhere...
67: At least when I was watching, he wasn't talking about race stuff here. He just trolled the pro-death people.
Let's be depressed about something non race based like CA drought pics.
36 I have no suppressed southern accent except according to some people.
Although I've only met you once, I don't remember hearing the slightest trace of a southern accent.
I think the degree of southernness in my own accent fluctuates a lot and I notice it coming out particularly when I'm really tired. But it's always mild and from various conversations over the years I don't think many other people notice it.
I've also noticed that either a larger fraction of Americans abroad have southern accents than do people in, say, Boston, or for some reason when I'm traveling I'm hyper-attuned to it, because I keep having the experience of being in some foreign country and noticing lots of southern accents and always having some kind of "wow! my people are here!" reaction until I eavesdrop for a minute and discover they're saying something horribly racist or ignorant or something.
I ran into my third-grade teacher a couple of years ago and after I had spoken about half a sentence she said something like "oh my goodness, where did that accent of yours come from?" and I was confused and she said I sounded very northern now. Which confused me, because her accent sounded pretty neutral to me and her husband is Canadian, so I can't figure out how I was standing out as peculiarly not-southern.
70: A lot of pre-existing poverty in the Central Valley is only photogenic during droughts, apparently.
73: and strangely, the only way to help those deprived communities involves eviscerating habitat / species protections. Apparently.
A guy a few cubes down put picture 3 together for his own interest, and then it got forwarded to the drought team and then it got posted and went everywhere.
Is anyone else looking at all the crap sitting on the bottom of those reservoirs thinking no wonder the water in those towns tastes so shitty?
73: Touche.
My interest is in the Sierra snowpack because my family still has that cabin just outside of Chester. I'd like to take it over from my aunt soon and would prefer that area to not be a godamn tinderbox. The other barrier is the fucking forest service is jacking up the fees to 4k a year on those things. Hey fuckers, some of those things are still in the hands of people who work for a living.
Is he a liberal global warming hoaxer?
70: I look at those pictures and think, "I wonder if Halfordismo really offers the durable ideology/governing structure/political economy we need." And then I think, "Oh, this is all somebody else's problem."
78: Would we hire any other?
Dude. Chester is far north. How do you get there (I mean, besides telling me which highways)? This wouldn't be a weekend get-away cabin, I wouldn't think.
"rad"
Millennial lefties currently use this as a slang abbreviation for "politically radical". It's confusing because it's also usually simultaneously a kind of endorsement.
80: For me it's about a 9 hour drive and what we'd likely do after we took it over is spend a bunch of June up there every year. My wife usually gets out of school for the summer the first week of June. The cops here have the option to work holidays and bank them like vacation. We're on the 4 day workweek so those 11 or 12 holidays equate to another three weeks off a year and I'm already at three weeks of vacation time a year on top of that with several vacation accrual bumps yet to come with increasing seniority. It would be pretty easy for us to be up there for three weeks or more every summer and still have time for our other road trips. Hell, because of comp time and going to Yellowstone last year while on med leave I already have over 6 weeks of time off banked with most of the year yet to go.
That makes more sense. My Dad is prepping his cabin (southern Sierras) for his kids, but we've all moved to northern California. It is just out of range for us for a weekend trip. We'd have to have more vacation than we do right now to enjoy it.
My son just made a weekend trip to Portland. From Bozeman. It's too bad you bureaucrats are such weenies.
43/44: I complained, in front of the 2 early 20-something staff members at my store, about some missing feature on a newly shipped piece of furniture (which it had had in the past...but it escapes me. label holders on the drawers or something) "but the label holders were totally cruce!" (as in crucial.) they actually busted out laughing. I was right, though. so cruce. totes cruce.
84: I'm getting too old for that shit. The SLC to Chester drive is actually pretty easy and quick because the bulk of it is just shooting across northern NV on I-80 but man the scenery is boring as hell.
God I hope climate change doesn't decimate that area. My grandfather built that cabin himself right after WWII. Me, along with my dad, his siblings, and my cousin's fiance (you know you dig police issued sweatshirts) a couple summers ago. The cabin is near the Feather River (the swimming hole about fifty yards away from the cabin) and right on Domingo Creek. The creek and my girls back on one of our trips when they were little and cute and I didn't have cop hair.
I love that area, gswift. A good friend of mine has family around there and got married up there, so I used to get to visit semi-frequently. The cabin looks amazing.
