07.05.08
Stuck a wild hair in his cap and called it word baloney
Once again in the spirit of the 4th of July weekend, I shall now reenact the least-famous battle of the American Revolution: The Battle of Bumpkin Hill. The Bumpkins—that’s us.
In a recent David Crystal blog, Crystal noted that a blog correspondent had written “to say she is ‘fascinated by the American habit (inability?) to say mirror, terror, etc as we do in two discrete syllables. mir-r, ter-r, is what we hear.’ Why do they do it?, she asks. She offers four explanations:” And then the four explanations—which I tend to believe were not intended to be insulting—followed:
1. A desire to be stylish or a reluctance to be too correct/too English?
2. Their frequent desire to speed speech up, as in giving a year as Two thousand eight instead of Two thousand and eight?
3. A form of shyness, like saying duiper instead of nappy?
4. Or maybe a Deep South accent becoming unable to embrace it?
Well, at least the correspondent didn’t include possible explanations involving “cowboy,” “Jed Clampett,” or “bloody ingrate colonists.” Obviously, I’m a mite irked by the theories, not because of the correspondent’s refusal to allow that regional differences are a natural part of language change, but by the implication that all Americans are self-absorbed idiots consciously disdaining correctness. Most of us are self-absorbed idiots consciously disdaining correctness, but by no means all of us.
Crystal, bless him, was purely educational in his response, and when a commenter challenged some of the thoughts, he kindly explained, “I’m allowing the post to appear without editing, but I would like to flag up that I don’t welcome intemperate expression on my blog. Some of the views that come in to me are often, from a linguistic point of view, wildly misconceived, but there is nothing to be gained by reacting to them with hostility.” I respect that. But because I’m one of those Americans afflicted with his own form of shyness, and one of those afflicting you with his own blog, allow me to examine the correspondent’s possible explanations one by one from this side of the pond:
1. A desire to be stylish or a reluctance to be too correct/too English? Yes, every syllable that comes out of Americans’ mouths goes through a “How correct/English is it?” mental filter before being uttered. As far as “stylish”—I had a paisley shirt in 1965. Does that count?
2. Their frequent desire to speed speech up, as in giving a year as Two thousand eight instead of Two thousand and eight?
BadConcision!BadConcision! We use such shortenings to catch up on time lost running everyday words and phrases like “t’rbl mr’r” through our “How correct/English is it?” mental filter. (I mean, filt’r.)
3. A form of shyness, like saying duiper instead of nappy? Americans? Shy? That perhaps is the first time I’ve heard that accusation. But specific to the example, we say diaper because it’s the word we use. It’s not like we say elevator instead of lift or truck instead of lorry out of squeamishness. Oh, don’t say lorry! It makes me blush! Besides, ninety-nine percent of Americans don’t know what the hell a nappy is. (It’s a diminutive of [oh, I'm blushing now!] napkin, a word with several uses, among them “sanitary napkin,” a phrase we do use.)
4. Or maybe a Deep South accent becoming unable to embrace it? Yes. All Americans speak in a Deep South accent. With Shallow South dialects near the Canadian border. Particularly in Wisconsin, Idaho, and parts of North by Northwest, starring Cary Grant (who was English). Perhaps Cary was from the Deep South Wales.
How many people consciously shape their pronunciations out of “desire,” “reluctance,” conscious rejection of correctness, deliberate wallflowerism or “shyness,” and/or whatever the hell #4 meant? Crystal—again,bless him—responded with a dispassionate discussion of regional pronunciation. One quote in particular: “Where did the American /r/ come from in the first place? Think of the people on the Mayflower, and where many of them came from,” in essence holding a mir-r back on portions of . . . well, need I say more?
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