I Must Say

Again, I picked up Edwin Newman's I Must Say. By now it's obvious that I read at random and have a slew of books on every subject imaginable. Something piques my interest and I'm off.

Now that I live in East Texas, the chapter on "The Gubment and the Fanger," which Newman penned in 1984, jest got t' me, y'all.  There are areas of Texas in which the accent is very pronounced. Lindale, the small town in which we live, is only a few miles from Tyler, a mid-sized city of almost 100,000. Lindale is very rural, and countrified. The difference in pronunciation between the two towns is really evident.  Here's Edwin Newman's take.

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Some people think that one thing wrong with the American system is that the feddle gubment is forever putting its fanger where it doesn't belong. Where may those people be found? In the American south, of course. There are also people in other parts of the country who believe that Washington is excessively obtrusive, but they don't put it in quite the same way. "Feddle gubment" and "fanger" - there are five fangers on each hand; even the gubment can't change that - are srictly southern. They are also, when genuine and not affected, delightful.

     It is, for this reason, faintly distressing to hear of the activities of Bevery Inman-Ebel. Ms. Inman-Ebel, an Ohioan who has lived in Tennessee for some years, has been teaching a course, at a college in Chattanooga, called Southern Success Without a Southern Accent. Obviously there is a demand for the course, or it would not be offered. It is equally obvious that southerners may be held back by their accents, when those accents are extreme, because they have, over the years, been made into a comic turn. The blathering southern senator has been a figure of fun. (I insert here: Senator Foghorn Claghorn, I say, Senator Claghorn, in the Looney Toons Cartoons). It is also true that Ms. Inman-Ebel does not want her students to lose their accents permanently. She is only trying to help them get along in the world. Their viewpoint, and hers, is understandable.

     Still, anything that even unintentionally jeopardizes feddle gubment and fanger does risk bleaching some of the color out of American English. Take an example; ast, which is ask. And the past tense of ask, which is also ast, as in "he ast for it and he got it." He may well, by the way - as we learn from a little book called The Southern Legislative Dictionary, by Allin and Fisher - have done the asting while sitting at his dest, maybe during a debate on proprashuns, before he became tarred.

     Tarred, which stands in for tired, also brings to mind bard, as in "He bard a dollar." And har and far - "She has the authroity to har and far" - which are necessary in any bidness. There is quite a trade in books abouth southern speech. "Bidness," which may be recognized as "business," was cited in How to Speak Southern, by Mitchell and Rawls.

     In any southern lexicon, "cheer" will be found. It may mean that somebody is shouting "Hurray." It will more often be used to designate a piece of furniture, with one seat, as in easy cheer. Where is that piece of furniture? Rat cheer, that is, right here.

     It goes almost without saying that not all southerners speak this way. Far from it. The higher up the social ladder one goes, the less is this kind of thing likely to be heard. And scholars no doubt can explain how these pronunciations came to be, why "freezing" comes out "phrasin" and "Heinous" comes out "hanius," and "rench" replaces "rinse." (she renched her hair is much less disturbing than it sounds.) The explanation I prefer is that these pronunciations - and this is mountain speech - not southern - crope up on us.

     Speaking for myself, or sef, I'd hate to see regional accents in the United States disappear. They add to the variety of our lives; they do it with no strangs attached; and they do it, in that happy phrase, rat cheer.

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I maht could add sum EG-zamples of East Texas speech. F'rinstnce: a fella we harred t' burn  wood n sech, told us there used t be a cannon factry b'hind ar place on th other sahd of the woods. We larnt later that he was talkin' about a "canning factory," cannin' bein' the word we misunderstood. It is also true, in most of Texas, that the people here do not want the feddle gubment putting its fanger where it doesn't belong.

These are good, God-fearin' folks down here, polite, helpful and a pleasure to be around. I'm with Edwin Newman. Let them never lose their southern accents. They add to the richness and diversity of language.

11/9/11