Katharine Hepburn and William F. Buckley had accents that sounded like old money. Buckley was annoying to listen to, slouching in his chair and drawling, with many of his sentences trailing off into inaudibility, a rhetorical device I've learned is called aposiopesis. "Aposiopesis" is the sort of word Buckley would insert into a conversation as if anyone worth talking to should be familiar with it.
Unlikely anyone under 50 at the Post has read Borges, but if they had, they could use him as someone who loved the endless varieties of English, and he wasn't even a pesky Englishman so they can cite him relatively guilt-free.
Borges’s grandmother Frances Haslam wasn’t just an Englishwoman, but a very specific regional type of Englishwoman: the daughter of a Protestant minister from Stoke-on-Trent (eg, Darwin’s grandfather Josiah Wedgwood). It strikes me now that her social background was somewhat similar to Mrs Thatcher’s.
I had a Saskatchewan grandmother and she had an accent similar to the American upper-MidWest. My Nova Scotia grandfather had more of a brogue somewhat similar to Tip O'Neill's. I think the Boston brogue may be dying out due to television.
As far as I can tell -- as a Brit-born Yank -- nobody who is anybody speaks RP any more. Everybody speaks "estuary English" which is a sort of half-cockney accent that shows you are not a snob.
But my cousin, who went to public school and Cambridge, reinvented himself with a fake LIverpool accent! Mind you, I can speak a fake Welsh, fake Scots, and fake Irish with the best of them.
I interviewed Renee Zellweger's accent coach on the "Bridget Jones" movie. Bridget is quite posh, but she had to speak Estuary English instead of RP because that is what one does in Cool Britannia. The accent coach, though, had a superb RP accent.
Well spotted. Anyone alleged to speak Estuary English is middle-going-on-upper-middle class, never garden gnome, flashing Christmas lights working class. The reason is that adoption of sound change is a class indicator.
English worldwide is undergoing a sound change affecting vowels: for instance, "man" and "men" are coming to be pronounced "men" and "min". On top of this, British English increasingly drops certain final consonants, so that "football" is pronounced "foopbaw" with the l a semivowel and the t a glottal stop in places nowhere near London.
Class comes into it because sound change trickles up from below. Old newsreaders ("Oh the humanity") now sound actorish and, to my ears, falsely aristocratic. Similarly, upper middle class Tony Blair acted falsely demotic. His type adopted the new "Estuary" pronunciation early to appear at the same time ahead of the curve and at ease with their social inferiors.
Untrue. There is a kind of BBC English that marks you as having gone to Oxbridge and/or a boarding school. There may be only a million speakers or so but it is very much there.
The great advantage for the upper classes in speaking estuary English is that poor people can't imitate them, because if they tried they would sound too convincing.
That also brings to mind that double acts like Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse, Cook and More, Morecambe and Wise, the Two Ronnies, Reeves and Mortimer, etc., often trade on the minute class distinctions between the passive-aggressive pairings. I find Harry and Paul’s take on Dragons Den/Shark Tank hilarious because of the very specific aspirational Estuary English accent:
Between the two publications, I know exactly one reporter personally and he has been at the WaPo for at least 10 years. Intelligent and hardworking, lefty politics, knows a lot of sports and US political history but not literary.
The US definitely has less class awareness than in the UK based on the brief time I lived there. Not only the general lack of class based accents, but people across the income spectrum in a lot of regions basically enjoy the same pursuits and cross paths do8ng them. Trucks, boats, fishing, hunting, football, camping, etc. are all pretty popular with a wide range of people.
Not quite. The wide and growing gap between the middle and upper-middle classes is mostly about intangible (or at least not obviously material) things, as Steve has written about many times. Even which affluent suburb you live in is a social class marker.
"Trucks, boats, fishing, hunting, football, camping, etc. are all pretty popular with a wide range of people."
But relatively few upper-middle class Americans, unless you mean sailboats (which is more upper class, actually). Genuinely upper-middle-class people who enjoy these classically blue-collar pursuits are novelties. Granted sports are a partial exception, but even there, love of soccer is very upper-middle class.
It's true that remote ancestry doesn't matter in the US, but coming from upper-middle class parentage gives one a huge leg up on the status ladder, and not just for financial reasons. Our class system is less rigid and more subtle than the British system, but it exists, and most Americans are instinctively aware of it without acknowledging its existence even to themselves.
There are levels to the newspaper industry, just like any other. I would put the Wall Street Journal above the New York Times and then there are the others like the Washington Post and the regional papers.
This makes me recall the final season of The Wire (season five?) which touched on the newspaper industry. A corrupt reporter at the Baltimore Sun dreamt of getting a job at the Washington Post. The folks at the Post rejected him. The lesson? Ny Times>Washington Post>Baltimore Sun.
Eleanor Roosevelt was a preachy, tiresome liberal who was physically repugnant, had a shrill voice and was a kiss-ass to the blacks. She never worked a day in her life.
In the British Isles, a pair of secondary schools (US "high schools") within a few city blocks of each other, one fee-paying (US "private") and one state-funded (US "public") will have children with entirely different local accents. Not true I think in the USA?
In a middle-class suburb, the children at neither school - public or private - are likely to have noticeable accents. Regional accents are rapidly fading away among educated people around the country, and in some areas (the Northeast, for example) have become a class marker.
Class signifiers are everywhere, they just revolve around different axes. In the UK it is very much accent.
For the US my idle theory is that vocabulary is the prestige marker, a lot rides on whether you use the term “sex worker” or “prostitute”. Likewise reverential capitalisation of “black” but not “white”. I have a good ear and on my last trip to the US I was surprised at how regional accents are disappearing: no one under 30 spoke with a New York or Boston accent.
In France there is not as much focus on class markers in spoken language but being able to write it well is prestiged.
Interesting point. My fifty-something brother-in-law has a thick Boston accent while his children do not. This despite living in the same place my BIL grew up.
There are several reasons why The New York Times has fared much better than The Washington Post in the Internet age. First, The Times is still the national newspaper of record while the Post's leadership and reporting has receded drastically in comparison. Second, New York is a much larger metropolis than Washington. Third, The Times makes a better effort to be more balanced than The Post. For instance, The Times has the youngish Ross Douthat as one of their token conservatives while The Post has geriatric George Will. The Post seems not to care that conservatives like my 84-year old father dropped his subscription fifteen years ago because The Post was so ideologically extreme. Fourth, in comparison with The Times, The Post is more woke and more preachy than The Times.
As for accents, I find the Scottish accent difficult. Further, all the British speak faster than your average American. I think that comes from living on a crowded island. In America, I still find the urban black accent very difficult and I grew up in a fairly black county in suburban Washington DC so I am used to black accents.
"If TR V is representative, the American upper class may have the best of both worlds at present: they speak well, but not so distinctively that the moment they talk they make some other American despise them. "
It isn't the accent that distinguishes them and makes them hated, but rather the woke vocabulary.
I think the class distinctions become clearer If you slightly broaden the question to include vocabulary, diction, etc. as well as accent. Even before you get to things like "LatinX," a big sign of higher education in the U.S. is that the colorful regional vocabulary starts to disappear. The NYT still has their informative U.S. Dialect Quiz online* which covers a lot of the "tells" for regional English. In e.g. New England "townie English" vs "college English" is rather different.
On the other hand, a lot of this distinguishes working-class from middle-class and up. Perhaps it doesn't do much to distinguish the middle class from the upper-middle class or upper class at all.
My experience with that quiz was that it was astonishingly accurate, one of the two best things I've ever seen in that paper. Having moved around too much to get a coherent result for my current, adult self, I decided to answer it as I would have at age 13, the last year I lived in the town I'd grown up in until then. The map placed me basically halfway between Chicago and Aurora, IL, which was amazing: my hometown of Hinsdale, IL is centered on the Burlington Northern railroad line that runs between those two places.
Agreed on both counts. When I answered as I was brought up to speak, the quiz pinpointed Baltimore and Washington; I grew up in the MD suburbs of DC. When I made a few changes to reflect the way I speak now, It added Philadelphia (where I've lived for nearly 30 years) to the mix.
Also, though, haven't some things changed as much over time as geographically? I grew up in Maryland calling a certain type of shoe "tennis shoes." Today, I'm pretty sure people in the DC area call them "sneakers," as I do now. I thought everybody called them "sneakers" these days, thanks to the universality of the word on TV.
Katharine Hepburn and William F. Buckley had accents that sounded like old money. Buckley was annoying to listen to, slouching in his chair and drawling, with many of his sentences trailing off into inaudibility, a rhetorical device I've learned is called aposiopesis. "Aposiopesis" is the sort of word Buckley would insert into a conversation as if anyone worth talking to should be familiar with it.
Did Buckley go to the top Catholic boarding school in England? I think his father wanted him to have that Mid-Atlantic accent.
I'm pretty sure he went to Millbrook, in the Hudson Valley.
I knew his father worked in Mexico, but his childhood was even more unusual: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_F._Buckley_Jr.
Not much time in England, which they claim was his second language. Surely his parents spoke English to each other, but maybe the nanny didn't.
Unlikely anyone under 50 at the Post has read Borges, but if they had, they could use him as someone who loved the endless varieties of English, and he wasn't even a pesky Englishman so they can cite him relatively guilt-free.
Borges’s grandmother Frances Haslam wasn’t just an Englishwoman, but a very specific regional type of Englishwoman: the daughter of a Protestant minister from Stoke-on-Trent (eg, Darwin’s grandfather Josiah Wedgwood). It strikes me now that her social background was somewhat similar to Mrs Thatcher’s.
I didn't know this, thank you
The WaPo article notes that Liverpool accents ranked low. My ex-husband is from Liverpool. Just sayin’…
Brought to Canada as child. We have no regional accents except Newfoundland and the Francophones.
You’re probably right about WaPo being rather low budget.
Several WaPo commenters quoted Shaw.
I had a Saskatchewan grandmother and she had an accent similar to the American upper-MidWest. My Nova Scotia grandfather had more of a brogue somewhat similar to Tip O'Neill's. I think the Boston brogue may be dying out due to television.
As far as I can tell -- as a Brit-born Yank -- nobody who is anybody speaks RP any more. Everybody speaks "estuary English" which is a sort of half-cockney accent that shows you are not a snob.
But my cousin, who went to public school and Cambridge, reinvented himself with a fake LIverpool accent! Mind you, I can speak a fake Welsh, fake Scots, and fake Irish with the best of them.
I interviewed Renee Zellweger's accent coach on the "Bridget Jones" movie. Bridget is quite posh, but she had to speak Estuary English instead of RP because that is what one does in Cool Britannia. The accent coach, though, had a superb RP accent.
Well spotted. Anyone alleged to speak Estuary English is middle-going-on-upper-middle class, never garden gnome, flashing Christmas lights working class. The reason is that adoption of sound change is a class indicator.
English worldwide is undergoing a sound change affecting vowels: for instance, "man" and "men" are coming to be pronounced "men" and "min". On top of this, British English increasingly drops certain final consonants, so that "football" is pronounced "foopbaw" with the l a semivowel and the t a glottal stop in places nowhere near London.
Class comes into it because sound change trickles up from below. Old newsreaders ("Oh the humanity") now sound actorish and, to my ears, falsely aristocratic. Similarly, upper middle class Tony Blair acted falsely demotic. His type adopted the new "Estuary" pronunciation early to appear at the same time ahead of the curve and at ease with their social inferiors.
Untrue. There is a kind of BBC English that marks you as having gone to Oxbridge and/or a boarding school. There may be only a million speakers or so but it is very much there.
The great advantage for the upper classes in speaking estuary English is that poor people can't imitate them, because if they tried they would sound too convincing.
“Accent comic” is a paying job in the UK.
Harry and Paul as the Scousers:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EIhFwLjsQug&pp=ygUXaGFycnkgYW5kIHBhdWwgc2NvdXNlcnM%3D
That also brings to mind that double acts like Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse, Cook and More, Morecambe and Wise, the Two Ronnies, Reeves and Mortimer, etc., often trade on the minute class distinctions between the passive-aggressive pairings. I find Harry and Paul’s take on Dragons Den/Shark Tank hilarious because of the very specific aspirational Estuary English accent:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=j-Jhi5ttuSs&pp=ygUMQnJpYW4gZmFybmV0
Between the two publications, I know exactly one reporter personally and he has been at the WaPo for at least 10 years. Intelligent and hardworking, lefty politics, knows a lot of sports and US political history but not literary.
The US definitely has less class awareness than in the UK based on the brief time I lived there. Not only the general lack of class based accents, but people across the income spectrum in a lot of regions basically enjoy the same pursuits and cross paths do8ng them. Trucks, boats, fishing, hunting, football, camping, etc. are all pretty popular with a wide range of people.
Class politics in the US is more about how much money you have today and less about whether your grandfather was a Church of England vicar.
Not quite. The wide and growing gap between the middle and upper-middle classes is mostly about intangible (or at least not obviously material) things, as Steve has written about many times. Even which affluent suburb you live in is a social class marker.
"Trucks, boats, fishing, hunting, football, camping, etc. are all pretty popular with a wide range of people."
But relatively few upper-middle class Americans, unless you mean sailboats (which is more upper class, actually). Genuinely upper-middle-class people who enjoy these classically blue-collar pursuits are novelties. Granted sports are a partial exception, but even there, love of soccer is very upper-middle class.
It's true that remote ancestry doesn't matter in the US, but coming from upper-middle class parentage gives one a huge leg up on the status ladder, and not just for financial reasons. Our class system is less rigid and more subtle than the British system, but it exists, and most Americans are instinctively aware of it without acknowledging its existence even to themselves.
I think we agree, it’s just a question of degree.
There are levels to the newspaper industry, just like any other. I would put the Wall Street Journal above the New York Times and then there are the others like the Washington Post and the regional papers.
This makes me recall the final season of The Wire (season five?) which touched on the newspaper industry. A corrupt reporter at the Baltimore Sun dreamt of getting a job at the Washington Post. The folks at the Post rejected him. The lesson? Ny Times>Washington Post>Baltimore Sun.
Trollope always ragged on Americans as "talking through their noses." I'm not sure whom he was exposed to--Bostonians?
Eleanor Roosevelt was widely hated--was it her bizarre accent or her advocacy of blacks?
Anthony Trollope, or his mother?
I don't think his mother used "he/him."
Eleanor Roosevelt was a preachy, tiresome liberal who was physically repugnant, had a shrill voice and was a kiss-ass to the blacks. She never worked a day in her life.
I remember reading about the simplified spelling movement of the early 20th century. https://childrenofthecode.org/code-history/spellingreform.htm#:~:text=America's%20spelling%20reformers%20wanted%20to,paper%2C%20claimed%20the%20champions%20of%20%E2%80%9C. The hilarious parts were words like SPILLED should be spelled SPILT, same with SPELLED should be changed to SPELT. It seems that it would have helped our African American brethren on the verbal portion of the SAT.
In the British Isles, a pair of secondary schools (US "high schools") within a few city blocks of each other, one fee-paying (US "private") and one state-funded (US "public") will have children with entirely different local accents. Not true I think in the USA?
In a middle-class suburb, the children at neither school - public or private - are likely to have noticeable accents. Regional accents are rapidly fading away among educated people around the country, and in some areas (the Northeast, for example) have become a class marker.
Class signifiers are everywhere, they just revolve around different axes. In the UK it is very much accent.
For the US my idle theory is that vocabulary is the prestige marker, a lot rides on whether you use the term “sex worker” or “prostitute”. Likewise reverential capitalisation of “black” but not “white”. I have a good ear and on my last trip to the US I was surprised at how regional accents are disappearing: no one under 30 spoke with a New York or Boston accent.
In France there is not as much focus on class markers in spoken language but being able to write it well is prestiged.
Interesting point. My fifty-something brother-in-law has a thick Boston accent while his children do not. This despite living in the same place my BIL grew up.
There are several reasons why The New York Times has fared much better than The Washington Post in the Internet age. First, The Times is still the national newspaper of record while the Post's leadership and reporting has receded drastically in comparison. Second, New York is a much larger metropolis than Washington. Third, The Times makes a better effort to be more balanced than The Post. For instance, The Times has the youngish Ross Douthat as one of their token conservatives while The Post has geriatric George Will. The Post seems not to care that conservatives like my 84-year old father dropped his subscription fifteen years ago because The Post was so ideologically extreme. Fourth, in comparison with The Times, The Post is more woke and more preachy than The Times.
As for accents, I find the Scottish accent difficult. Further, all the British speak faster than your average American. I think that comes from living on a crowded island. In America, I still find the urban black accent very difficult and I grew up in a fairly black county in suburban Washington DC so I am used to black accents.
Completely anecdotal, but I was struck how English the characters sound in Citizen Kane. English with an American twang.
"If TR V is representative, the American upper class may have the best of both worlds at present: they speak well, but not so distinctively that the moment they talk they make some other American despise them. "
It isn't the accent that distinguishes them and makes them hated, but rather the woke vocabulary.
I think the class distinctions become clearer If you slightly broaden the question to include vocabulary, diction, etc. as well as accent. Even before you get to things like "LatinX," a big sign of higher education in the U.S. is that the colorful regional vocabulary starts to disappear. The NYT still has their informative U.S. Dialect Quiz online* which covers a lot of the "tells" for regional English. In e.g. New England "townie English" vs "college English" is rather different.
On the other hand, a lot of this distinguishes working-class from middle-class and up. Perhaps it doesn't do much to distinguish the middle class from the upper-middle class or upper class at all.
* https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/dialect-quiz-map.html?unlocked_article_code=1.qE4.LzUn.JWywMjiGTVQF&smid=url-share
My experience with that quiz was that it was astonishingly accurate, one of the two best things I've ever seen in that paper. Having moved around too much to get a coherent result for my current, adult self, I decided to answer it as I would have at age 13, the last year I lived in the town I'd grown up in until then. The map placed me basically halfway between Chicago and Aurora, IL, which was amazing: my hometown of Hinsdale, IL is centered on the Burlington Northern railroad line that runs between those two places.
Agreed on both counts. When I answered as I was brought up to speak, the quiz pinpointed Baltimore and Washington; I grew up in the MD suburbs of DC. When I made a few changes to reflect the way I speak now, It added Philadelphia (where I've lived for nearly 30 years) to the mix.
Also, though, haven't some things changed as much over time as geographically? I grew up in Maryland calling a certain type of shoe "tennis shoes." Today, I'm pretty sure people in the DC area call them "sneakers," as I do now. I thought everybody called them "sneakers" these days, thanks to the universality of the word on TV.