Speaker 1: If you watch any movie from Hollywood's Golden Age today,
Speaker 1: you'll notice something distinctive about the way many actors speak.
Speaker 2: Oh, we're going to talk about me.
Speaker 1: Good Catherine Hepburn in Philadelphia Story, Orson Wells in Citizen Kane.
Speaker 3: You're right, mister Thatcher. I did lose a million dollars
Speaker 3: last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year.
Speaker 3: I expect to lose a million dollars next year. You know,
Speaker 3: mister Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year,
Speaker 3: and I have to close this place in sixty years.
Speaker 1: Or Betty Davis as Margot Channing in All About Eve.
Speaker 4: Nice speeches, But I wouldn't worry too much about your heart.
Speaker 4: You can always put that award where your heart.
Speaker 1: On t V, I've always been fascinated by this old
Speaker 1: timey accent, whether in black and white movies or in
Speaker 1: the TV commercials of my youth.
Speaker 5: You see, high Point has a special way of capturing flavor,
Speaker 5: deep brood flavor.
Speaker 6: You see, high Point has a special way of capturing flavor.
Speaker 4: Better. Yes, deep brood flavor.
Speaker 1: Deep brood flavor.
Speaker 4: Nice.
Speaker 1: Who knew Lauren Bacall was such a coffee connoisseur. But
Speaker 1: just where did this peculiar accent come from?
Speaker 4: It was a real accent. It was a really dominant
Speaker 4: sound in the northeastern part of America.
Speaker 1: And one that commanded authority.
Speaker 7: Let me upsit, my family. That's the only thing we
Speaker 7: have to fild.
Speaker 8: Bird the idea that that's the way you wanted to
Speaker 8: hear your leaders speaking is a different kind of America
Speaker 8: than today.
Speaker 1: So why does almost nobody talk like this anymore? With
Speaker 1: the exception of Kelsey Grammar.
Speaker 7: Rather than truckle to the forces of commercialism, I've decided
Speaker 7: to take a stat and on principle it's.
Speaker 1: A mystery I'm determined to solve. From CBS Sunday Morning
Speaker 1: and iHeart I'm Morocca and this is mobituaries, this moment
Speaker 1: the death of an accent. Now, this is where it
Speaker 1: gets a little bit controversial. There's a lot of disagreement
Speaker 1: around what to call this because it's been commonly called
Speaker 1: the mid Atlantic accent.
Speaker 8: I call it the old Rless dialect, or that way
Speaker 8: they talked in old movies. It's Betty Davis roughly.
Speaker 1: That's linguist and New York Times columnist John mcwarter. You
Speaker 1: may remember John from our episode on the death of
Speaker 1: once popular names. He's helping me today with some of
Speaker 1: this dialect detective work. Let's listen to Betty Davis herself.
Speaker 1: Pay attention to the way she says Parker's written.
Speaker 9: By that outstanding leading lady of.
Speaker 2: Literature, Dorothy Parker. Dorothy Parker is the one who said
Speaker 2: men seldom make passes at girls who wear.
Speaker 8: Glasses Paka instead of Parker. Yeah, that excellent, And is.
Speaker 1: That the primary characteristic when we're discussing this way of
Speaker 1: talking burlessness?
Speaker 8: Yeah, what sticks out today is that ours at the
Speaker 8: end of syllables have a way of softening or even
Speaker 8: not being present. And there's a certain archness that we detect.
Speaker 8: We imagine that the women had fluty voices, etc. But
Speaker 8: then again, Betty Davis did not have a fluty voice.
Speaker 8: She didn't talk like this. She had a rather low,
Speaker 8: cigarette stained voice. And yet what we hear in her
Speaker 8: is paka instead of Parker, corner instead of corner. And
Speaker 8: that's where you get this accent that sounding ever more
Speaker 8: exotic as the decades go.
Speaker 1: By, sounds almost alien and it makes people, i think today,
Speaker 1: especially young people, kind of laugh.
Speaker 8: I think that's absolutely true. It makes a lot of
Speaker 8: older movies difficult for people. I would say, at this
Speaker 8: point under fifty to take because everybody seems to talk funny.
Speaker 8: It's been a long time since any real person spoke
Speaker 8: that way.
Speaker 1: Where does the R lists come from?
Speaker 8: There are some consonants that are less hardy than others,
Speaker 8: Like R is a very muddy kind of sound. It's
Speaker 8: almost like a vowel. There's a difference between going puoh
Speaker 8: or too and going it's muddy. When you hang a
Speaker 8: R on the end of a vowel, it's delicate. It's
Speaker 8: kind of like hair and split ends. You know that
Speaker 8: that R is ripe for getting soft. It's going to
Speaker 8: change the color of the vowel before it, and pretty
Speaker 8: soon the our is gonna probably disappear. It's gonna erode,
Speaker 8: as we put it. And so in any English, any
Speaker 8: rs that are at the end of syllables, such as
Speaker 8: in Parker, are in danger in a way, and it's
Speaker 8: almost a matter of not weather, but when stuff is
Speaker 8: going to start to happen.
Speaker 1: Would you find this all over the United States?
Speaker 8: Well, actually no, it's interesting. You have it most prominently
Speaker 8: in New York and thereabouts, and then also you have
Speaker 8: it in Boston, and then it also happened in the South.
Speaker 8: But that was also partly because African languages on the
Speaker 8: West Coast tend not to have ours at the end
Speaker 8: of syllables. Slaves were brought to the Southern United States
Speaker 8: often helped to bring up kids. That meant that the
Speaker 8: ours were certainly going to fall away in the South.
Speaker 8: So it's a different reason. So that's why you have
Speaker 8: the r less Southern accent, and so that means Black
Speaker 8: English is r less all over the country. But the
Speaker 8: main things that people tend to think about if we're
Speaker 8: talking about, say Betty Davis, is what was going on
Speaker 8: in the northeastern United States starting in the eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 1: And she was from Lowell, Massachusetts.
Speaker 8: She was from Lowell.
Speaker 1: Well, let's listen to her right now. In all about
Speaker 1: Eve Eve.
Speaker 5: This is an old friend. Mister DeWitt's mother, Missus Caswell, was.
Speaker 2: Having to miss kiswell, how do you do Edison. I've
Speaker 2: been wanting you to meet Eve for the longest time.
Speaker 8: It could only have been your natural timidative, but kept
Speaker 8: you from mentioning it.
Speaker 4: You've heard of her great interest in the theater.
Speaker 1: Clip and it's where she's meeting Marilyn Monroe, right, and
Speaker 1: Marilyn Monroe walks in.
Speaker 10: And.
Speaker 1: She's a luminous closed. She really does. You should close. Okay,
Speaker 1: now let's listen. Oh and I just have one other
Speaker 1: thing to say about All about Eve. My father once
Speaker 1: said to me. He said, the two most purely evil
Speaker 1: character is sort of in Western arts and culture, in
Speaker 1: the Western canon where Iago in Othello and Eve Harrington
Speaker 1: and all about.
Speaker 8: Eve, if not Addison to but Eve, Yes, she is
Speaker 8: more evil. That's definitely true. She has no feelings. That
Speaker 8: is absolutely the case.
Speaker 1: I want to be Addison, right, you're referring to Addison Dewett,
Speaker 1: the imperious drama critic.
Speaker 8: I wish Sondheim were still alive so that he would
Speaker 8: do a musical of All about Eve that actually is
Speaker 8: all about Eve, as opposed to Applause fifty years ago,
Speaker 8: which wasn't. And because I'm kind of the age and
Speaker 8: the temperament and we're now so interested in diversity in
Speaker 8: the theater, I want to play Addison, but I can
Speaker 8: tell nobody is going.
Speaker 11: To do it.
Speaker 3: You would be great that I should want you at
Speaker 3: all suddenly strikes me as the height of improbability, and
Speaker 3: that in itself is probably the reason.
Speaker 1: Did people speak like this in all cities on the
Speaker 1: Eastern Sea border?
Speaker 8: No, they didn't. This hourlessness developed by chance in some
Speaker 8: places and not others. New York and Boston have it,
Speaker 8: but Philadelphia and Baltimore don't. And particularly there are Philadelphia
Speaker 8: and Baltimore were our full rhodic cities, as we call it.
Speaker 1: It just skipped those cities. So it's ironic then that
Speaker 1: Katherine Hepprince, because come Back, Early, Comeback was playing Tracy
Speaker 1: Lord in the Philadelphia story.
Speaker 5: You seem quite contemptuous, and.
Speaker 8: They all of a sudden she wouldn't have sounded that way.
Speaker 1: In other words, Tracy Lord would not have ordered a
Speaker 1: cheese steak. She would have ordered one. Other aspects of
Speaker 1: this accent, it's posh, it's proper. What would you say,
Speaker 1: how would you describe it?
Speaker 8: That is an accent that sounds British to us, And
Speaker 8: I think there's an idea that everybody was trying to
Speaker 8: sound British. I question that. I think that the way
Speaker 8: American English happened to develop was something that would have happened,
Speaker 8: whether there was a great Britain, and whether we associated
Speaker 8: it with poshness or not.
Speaker 1: Here's a surprise. John mcwater says, early Americans didn't talk
Speaker 1: this way.
Speaker 8: We have a tendency to think that the Founding Fathers,
Speaker 8: for example, because they were such formal and educated people,
Speaker 8: we assume that they sound that like masterpiece theater, or
Speaker 8: if that's a dated reference, like many of the actors
Speaker 8: in Every Potter. And actually that's not true. That accent
Speaker 8: actually developed after America was already up and running.
Speaker 1: So Thomas Jefferson would have said went in the course
Speaker 1: of human events, definitely, And John says the Brits themselves
Speaker 1: only started dropping their rs in the late seventeen hundreds,
Speaker 1: so the early sixteen hundreds it was William Shakespeare, definitely.
Speaker 8: Yeah. And there was no horelessness among the people in
Speaker 8: the Globe.
Speaker 1: Theater, okay, all right. And it was the Virgin Queen.
Speaker 8: The Virgin Queen, not the Virgin Queen, right.
Speaker 1: Although Betty Davis dislay she was all the quing Queen.
Speaker 1: I'm suddenly imagining Betty Davis walking to the hunter Acre
Speaker 1: would and having to greet that donkey eawe. This accent,
Speaker 1: with its emphasis on enunciation was especially prevalent in the
Speaker 1: early American theater before the invention of the microphone. It
Speaker 1: tended to carry all the way to the back of
Speaker 1: the house.
Speaker 8: And then once amplification comes in, old habits die hard.
Speaker 8: And so you have these people, you know, on the
Speaker 8: soundtracks of these old movies, still talking in a way
Speaker 8: that maybe would have been thought of as a better
Speaker 8: way to sound if you're doing Our American Cousin in
Speaker 8: eighteen sixty five as opposed to what you need to
Speaker 8: do now.
Speaker 1: Thank you for the Our American Cousin reference, which, of
Speaker 1: course was the stage comedy that Lincoln was watching at
Speaker 1: Ford's Theater. Now, I've always wondered there was a star
Speaker 1: of it. But then there was a guy who was
Speaker 1: the second Banana, who played kind of the funny guy role.
Speaker 1: And there's an insult he lays on her, and that's
Speaker 1: the big laugh line. And that's when John Wilkes Booth
Speaker 1: fired the gun. He was waiting for a laugh line.
Speaker 1: You suckologizing old man trap, And that was the big
Speaker 1: That was sort of like the sit on It Potsey
Speaker 1: of its time.
Speaker 8: So few people are going to get them, all.
Speaker 1: Right, it's that's what she said of its time. Right, Wait,
Speaker 1: what are the people laughing to now? I don't know
Speaker 1: what they're laughing to now. Now, it wasn't only Hollywood
Speaker 1: royalty who spoke like this, but also the political elite.
Speaker 1: Here is Teddy Roosevelt campaigning to return to the White
Speaker 1: House in nineteen twelve.
Speaker 10: These prohibitions have been given by the gods from safeguards
Speaker 10: against political and social privilege, in the barriers against political
Speaker 10: and social justice and the bastie our papers. He is
Speaker 10: not to impume the gods, but to emancipate them from
Speaker 10: a position where they stand in the way of social justice.
Speaker 8: That was amazing. I've never heard him. There's a story
Speaker 8: of him going up to Albany when he is in
Speaker 8: the Assembly and he was made fun of for the
Speaker 8: way he talked, because that arl attack scent sounded silly
Speaker 8: to a lot of the people from other parts of
Speaker 8: the state. They imitated him as saying, mister speaker, miss
Speaker 8: the speak up when he wanted to talk. That's not
Speaker 8: the way people from further upstate spoke.
Speaker 1: Let's hear now his fifth cousin, Franklin Delanor Roosevelt, let.
Speaker 7: Me ussit my firmilie. Let's the only thing we have
Speaker 7: to fish fire, so nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terra with paralyses
Speaker 7: needed up, We'll convert with creek enter advance.
Speaker 8: It's perfect.
Speaker 1: Okay, this is twenty one years after that clip we
Speaker 1: heard from Teddy, but it's still there, that accent very
Speaker 1: much in the thirties, Like so many millions of others.
Speaker 1: My Italian grandmother, she to her dying day, was grateful
Speaker 1: to him for the new deal for the WPA. And
Speaker 1: you know, she didn't talk anything like that.
Speaker 8: The idea that that's the way you wanted to hear
Speaker 8: your leaders speaking is a different kind of America than today.
Speaker 1: You know, It's funny. My grandmother might have not only
Speaker 1: expected it, but demanded it. That's right, let her leaders
Speaker 1: speak like that. John mcwater says that in politics that
Speaker 1: accent is as much of a relic as the art
Speaker 1: of oratory itself.
Speaker 8: Your grandmother would not have tolerated the way a lot
Speaker 8: of our leaders today speak in public. And it's not
Speaker 8: to say that there isn't a such thing as being
Speaker 8: very eloquent within the bounds of being colloquial and casual.
Speaker 8: But for someone to get up and talk the way
Speaker 8: Trump does. And this is independently of the content, but
Speaker 8: just that kind of scattershot half sentences and you know,
Speaker 8: rarely completing a thought that would have been processed as amateurish,
Speaker 8: as offensive.
Speaker 1: But it's interesting the transition that happens, because you know,
Speaker 1: FDR's last vice president, and his successor, of course, is
Speaker 1: Harry Truman, who does not talk like that. He's not
Speaker 1: a habadasha.
Speaker 8: Oh, he's a Midwesterner. He has his urs.
Speaker 5: I can't tell you.
Speaker 12: How very much I appreciate the honor which you just
Speaker 12: confarred upon me. I shall continue to try to deserve it.
Speaker 8: And what's interesting is that his speaking is not something
Speaker 8: anybody was particularly interested in paying attention to. He wasn't
Speaker 8: considered an orator, he wasn't a performer. But yes, he's
Speaker 8: somebody who did not have that kind of hourlessness, and
Speaker 8: no one ever expected that he was going to become president. Anyway.
Speaker 1: Let's now hear from one of Teddy Roosevelt's six children.
Speaker 1: And no one had more fun children than tr had
Speaker 1: in the White House. Okay, so let's hear from Ethel
Speaker 1: Roosevelt Derby.
Speaker 2: The children especially will be interested in seeing that odd
Speaker 2: little animal under the table there. His name is Josiah.
Speaker 2: And my father, knowing how he liked to have things
Speaker 2: brought home to us whenever he could from his trips
Speaker 2: out west, used to bring us home treasure. One time
Speaker 2: he brought us a bear which lived in the woodshed.
Speaker 2: This time he brought home a little badger. I took
Speaker 2: a picture of my brother Archie in his ordinary girl
Speaker 2: barefoot is little ragged trousers holding Josiah. My father used
Speaker 2: to say.
Speaker 8: Hissing like it, boy, And you can see why people
Speaker 8: think this is about great Britain. Actually, the badger that
Speaker 8: was a wonderful cliff.
Speaker 1: It is so great. And I had to tell you
Speaker 1: the picture of Archie holding Josiah the badger is just adorable.
Speaker 8: Really, Yeah, you've got to look it up.
Speaker 1: You will, of course not remember that I wrote a
Speaker 1: book about presidential pets in two thousand and four, and
Speaker 1: so Cheddi Rosevelt was my favorite chapter. He didn't know, no,
Speaker 1: of course he didn't. I've seen the sales figures, and
Speaker 1: so he had thirty six pets, and he hated amazing pets.
Speaker 1: He had amazing pets.
Speaker 8: Did the Lincolns. How many pets they did.
Speaker 1: They had a horse samed Old Bob. They had a dog,
Speaker 1: which is the very first photographed presidential pet. The dog's
Speaker 1: name was Fido. It's actually really a very sweet picture
Speaker 1: of Fido. He was a mott which is perfect for it.
Speaker 8: But there's of Lincoln.
Speaker 13: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And then they had two goats named Nanny and Nanco.
Speaker 8: Did the dog sit still in the Lincoln picture? Is
Speaker 8: it all blurry?
Speaker 1: Because no, the dog is actually seated on what looks
Speaker 1: like a pedestal, like a plinth.
Speaker 13: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And after Lincoln died, a drunk with a knife stabbed
Speaker 1: the dog.
Speaker 8: You're kidding.
Speaker 1: I'm just bringing all of us really down. It's really,
Speaker 1: really terrible. But let me just make it better by
Speaker 1: saying the teddy Roosevelt. They had a bear, a little
Speaker 1: bear that they named Jonathan Edwards. So next time, listened
Speaker 1: to Ethel Roosevelt saying Jonathan Edwards, the bad and the Bad.
Speaker 1: And they had a hyena. Did they really have they
Speaker 1: did have a hyena?
Speaker 8: No?
Speaker 1: It was crazy. I mean, I hope those kids had
Speaker 1: all their shots. I want to give this guy some props.
Speaker 1: Cornelius Vanderwbilt the fourth because he was an outcast from
Speaker 1: the Vanderbilt family because he dared to get into newspapers.
Speaker 1: Can imagine that as if he'd gotten an OnlyFans account
Speaker 1: he was working for the newspaper My God. Okay. He
Speaker 1: produced what is arguably the very first anti Hitler documentary,
Speaker 1: Hitler's Reign of Terror, in nineteen three four. It was
Speaker 1: met with a cold shoulder as hysteria warned people about
Speaker 1: anti Semitism. So if just for that, let's listen to him.
Speaker 10: There was money enough in Hollywood to tempt me to
Speaker 10: go through it again. I'll tell you that last day
Speaker 10: on the frontier, I felt like Mickey Mouse.
Speaker 4: It was one tough.
Speaker 10: Squeak for me.
Speaker 2: I knew just what I would be up against if
Speaker 2: the Nazzies ever found my films.
Speaker 14: The last few weeks I've been carefully watched.
Speaker 8: He sounds like Betty Davis and Nazzy.
Speaker 12: Nazzy.
Speaker 8: Yeah, you hear that occasionally, especially that Nazzies. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 8: that's that's something that people It was a spelling pronunciation
Speaker 8: if you don't know German, and so it looks like
Speaker 8: Nazzy and some people would get away with saying it.
Speaker 8: That guy says is a piece of work.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he really is.
Speaker 8: Did he have a family?
Speaker 1: He was married seven or eight times, never had children.
Speaker 1: It seemed like a guy I look just for the
Speaker 1: documentary along. We've got to give the guy some props.
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't know what it was like to
Speaker 1: be married to him, but I like him. I like him. Okay,
Speaker 1: let's hear another voice often associated with this accent. This
Speaker 1: is a conservative intellectual, founder of the National Review and
Speaker 1: co host of the TV show firing Line, William F. Buckley.
Speaker 15: If the telephone company projected the number of people using
Speaker 15: telephones nineteen thirty eight, they figured that at the rate
Speaker 15: of which people were using the telephone by nineteen hundred
Speaker 15: and sixty, in order to service that many calls, they'd
Speaker 15: have to hire. Every woman in the United States is
Speaker 15: a telephon operator.
Speaker 1: Now, this is a much parodied accent. What is it
Speaker 1: that we're hearing there that we're reacting to.
Speaker 8: He's speaking rather quickly, not a whole lot of melodic change,
Speaker 8: almost as if he can't be bothered to enunciate too much.
Speaker 8: There's a privilege in it, and that he sounds like
Speaker 8: he can't quite be bothered to try to get himself across.
Speaker 8: He assumes that you're listening.
Speaker 1: Closely, there's a certain lack of effort or I'm not
Speaker 1: sure if it's a fatigue in there, a detachment, detachment.
Speaker 8: It might also be brilliant, because he he was brilliant,
Speaker 8: whatever you think of the content of the things that
Speaker 8: he wrote and said. And so he's so committed to
Speaker 8: the thinking that he can't be bothered with performance is
Speaker 8: one kind of quick psychology you might pull.
Speaker 1: Buckley indeed had a cosmopolitan upbringing. Born in New York,
Speaker 1: he grew up speaking Spanish and received his early formal
Speaker 1: education in France and England. But it wasn't just those
Speaker 1: to the manor born who spoke this way. Let's turn
Speaker 1: back to entertainment to listen to a commercial from the
Speaker 1: early nineteen eighties starring The Bronxes. Betty Joan Persky aka
Speaker 1: Lauren Bacall.
Speaker 5: My favorite time of day is night. I love curling
Speaker 5: up with a rich cup of coffee. You think coffee
Speaker 5: and sleep down mix.
Speaker 8: They do.
Speaker 5: If it's high Point, it's decaffeinated and the flavor is marvelous.
Speaker 5: You see, high Point has a special way of capturing flavor, flavor.
Speaker 5: It's a coffee lover's dream.
Speaker 1: Betty Joan Persky was born of the Bronx. Okay, okay,
Speaker 1: grew up pretty hard scrabble. Now we can only guess
Speaker 1: because she started in Hollywood when she was so young.
Speaker 1: But do we think that an adolescent Betty Joan Persky
Speaker 1: soon to be Lauren bacall, was arless.
Speaker 8: She definitely would have been ar less, because this hourlessness
Speaker 8: was not only people of a certain means, it was
Speaker 8: also people who were middle and even lower class. Lauren
Speaker 8: McCall had an air about her, especially as she got older,
Speaker 8: and so it ends up sounding rather high toned that
Speaker 8: she says flavor. But she learned to say flavor, probably
Speaker 8: in the Bronx, in a very hot third floor apartment,
Speaker 8: because that's the way everybody would have spoken there.
Speaker 1: She's playing a high status character in one of the
Speaker 1: high Point commercials. She's in a limousine drinking high Point coffee.
Speaker 1: She's actually pouring it, which is insane. That's because how
Speaker 1: you I mean? These are New York City streets, pop
Speaker 1: holes everywhere. That's a major LOSSU youit ready to happen.
Speaker 8: My pants are full of flavor, my dad.
Speaker 1: These pants are full of flavor. I'm the woman of
Speaker 1: the year with third degree burns. Okay, sorry, coming.
Speaker 6: Up after a break. How to speak with distinction when
Speaker 6: quoting from the classics.
Speaker 4: Don't say flavor and hold it, get off it quicker flavor.
Speaker 6: You see high Point has a special way of capturing
Speaker 6: flavor better. Yes, you see high Point. You see high Point.
Speaker 4: That's not bad. You see high Point has a special
Speaker 4: way of capturing flavor.
Speaker 1: You see high Point has a special way of capturing flavor.
Speaker 16: Cap cap Chuck like cha sharing capturing dialect coach Jessica
Speaker 16: Drake is teaching me to pitch decaf like Lauren Bacall.
Speaker 1: Since the late nineteen eighties, Jessica's been helping major Hollywood
Speaker 1: actors get into character for movies and TV. She helped
Speaker 1: Sean Penn play Harvey Milk and Anada Armis become Marilyn Monroe.
Speaker 1: I'm curious, what are you asked most about.
Speaker 4: It's Forrest Gump. It's always Forrest Gump. That's it.
Speaker 1: The Alabama accent.
Speaker 7: Yes.
Speaker 11: Now, because I've been a football starg and war hero
Speaker 11: and national celebrity and a Shrimp and Bolt captain and
Speaker 11: the college graduate this city follows at Greenbow, Alabama decided
Speaker 11: to get together and offered me a fine job.
Speaker 4: You know, for an actor, it's another piece, right, It's
Speaker 4: like a false nose or a limp. It's a thing
Speaker 4: that they add to the character, or it's a piece
Speaker 4: that brings them closer to that other person they're playing.
Speaker 1: The accent that we're talking about is commonly called the
Speaker 1: mid Atlantic accent, the Transatlantic accent. Is that a misnomer?
Speaker 4: Yes, it is, first of all mid Atlantic. I just
Speaker 4: want to say, would be Delaware, Maryland, something like that.
Speaker 4: The idea, the notion is it's halfway between English and
Speaker 4: American speech, and so it's this mythological place that doesn't
Speaker 4: exist in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh, I know exactly right. The closest you
Speaker 1: could get it's a southern tip of Greenland. And I
Speaker 1: don't think they talk like that there.
Speaker 4: No, definitely not well observed. It's got nothing to do
Speaker 4: with that. It was a real accent. Loads of people
Speaker 4: spoke that way.
Speaker 1: So what would you call this accent we're talking about.
Speaker 4: I would call it probably Northeastern elite, because it's a
Speaker 4: sod with those regions. I mean where you really would
Speaker 4: hear its, places like New York City, Newport, Rhode Island, Darien, Connecticut,
Speaker 4: Kenny Bunkport, Maine, and Boston.
Speaker 1: Now this way of speaking wasn't only about dropping ours.
Speaker 1: You'll also notice a softening and elongation of the vowels,
Speaker 1: especially the A sound. And can I say my father,
Speaker 1: who grew up in a factory town called Leminster, Massachusetts,
Speaker 1: I would hear every so often he would say bathroom
Speaker 1: instead of the bathroom. He'd say bathroom, bathroom, the bathroom,
Speaker 1: I need that or bathroom? Yeah yeah that a and
Speaker 1: I would go bathroom, but he'd go bathroom.
Speaker 4: Yes, yeah, it's pretty good, Moe, you have a pretty.
Speaker 1: Good middle a. Jessica Drake says that for most people,
Speaker 1: this accent wasn't learned formally in school.
Speaker 4: The influences on most people's speech are pretty basic. It's
Speaker 4: your parents and it's your friends when you're young, and
Speaker 4: that's pretty much where it gets formed. But where their classes,
Speaker 4: I think unless you were pursuing either a career in
Speaker 4: the arts or perhaps going to say some sort of
Speaker 4: a finishing school, which is a thing that existed, then yeah,
Speaker 4: but otherwise no.
Speaker 1: One piece of misinformation you'll find online about this accent
Speaker 1: is the notion that it was taught to Golden age
Speaker 1: Hollywood actors by a woman named Edith Skinner, a speech
Speaker 1: teacher best known for writing a book called Speak with Distinction.
Speaker 1: Jessica Drake was one of Skinner's students at New York's
Speaker 1: famed Juilliard School, and she wants to set the record
Speaker 1: straight about her late mentor.
Speaker 4: Edith Skinner was dedicated to the theater more than anything else.
Speaker 4: The theater. She is responsible definitely for training a whole
Speaker 4: generation of regional theater actors.
Speaker 1: But Jessica says Skinner couldn't have coached those old, tiny
Speaker 1: Hollywood stars because she never once worked in Hollywood. How
Speaker 1: did she become associated with this.
Speaker 4: Accent misinformation is the simplest answer. Unfortunately, there have been
Speaker 4: things put into print that have claimed that she was
Speaker 4: in Hollywood teaching in the thirties, or that actors were
Speaker 4: running around the studio lots carrying her book under their arms.
Speaker 4: This is all complete and total fabrication.
Speaker 1: In fact, her book wasn't published until nineteen forty two,
Speaker 1: and then it was only available in the bookstore at
Speaker 1: Pittsburgh's Carnegie Tech, where she taught at the time. Now,
Speaker 1: Skinner did teach a later generation of actors something that
Speaker 1: would come to be known as good American speech.
Speaker 4: So the sound that she came up with, the good
Speaker 4: American speech, is certainly based on what we've been talking about.
Speaker 4: That Northeastern accent. However, it had specifically something she called
Speaker 4: the seven points.
Speaker 1: One of those seven points Skinner prescribed was softening those rs,
Speaker 1: but not quite as much as old time Hollywood actors
Speaker 1: often did. Skinner's method also encourages performers to pronounce certain
Speaker 1: words with a middle a.
Speaker 4: What she called the ask list of words. Those are
Speaker 4: words that Southern English would pronounce with a long a.
Speaker 4: Ask pauls Claus and she had it at ask pass class,
Speaker 4: which is not ask past class, which would be more
Speaker 4: general American.
Speaker 1: One of Skinner's students, the actor Ellis rab Here, in
Speaker 1: a production of the comedy The Royal Family, he.
Speaker 8: Said, who's directing this picture? I said, you're directing the picture.
Speaker 8: You're not directing me. I'm through with it and you
Speaker 8: can take that to remember me.
Speaker 1: By Ellis rab taught by Edith Skinner, was the inspiration
Speaker 1: for Kelsey Grammar's voice for side show Bob on The Simpsons,
Speaker 1: which means that side show. Bob was trained by Edith Skinner.
Speaker 7: Lisa, you always wear the one rose petal floating atop
Speaker 7: the cesspool.
Speaker 8: That is the Simpsons.
Speaker 14: You see.
Speaker 4: You can tie Edith to these things that way. Kelsey
Speaker 4: was a student of hers at Julliard as well, and
Speaker 4: I would say the frasier sound is in no small
Speaker 4: part connected to that Edith training.
Speaker 8: It's hard to say what to hate.
Speaker 14: Most about Crane's show is Papa's sanctimonious style, his constant
Speaker 14: self congratulatory references to his own life, or his voice
Speaker 14: a mock sympathetic tone, so sickly sweet. One wonders if
Speaker 14: the man graduated from medical school or from some mind
Speaker 14: controlling cult.
Speaker 1: And how's this for influence? That's truly out of this world.
Speaker 4: Robin Williams. He took some of the speech exercises and
Speaker 4: turned them into that language that Mork spoke. She has
Speaker 4: an exercise mo may me my mo moo nona nine
Speaker 4: no new LAWI li lo lou, Oh my god, that's
Speaker 4: where nyeah come from.
Speaker 1: Belief out of that.
Speaker 13: Wow.
Speaker 1: I'll catch you on the rebound your magnitude until next week.
Speaker 12: I know.
Speaker 1: No Coming up more with linguist John mcwater. Is this
Speaker 1: a white accent?
Speaker 8: This is of course largely associated with white people. But
Speaker 8: an interesting thing about the olden times is that there
Speaker 8: was a sense in the United States that if you
Speaker 8: were going to be a person of influence, you had
Speaker 8: to learn to talk in a certain way.
Speaker 1: I'm back with linguist John mcwarter to finish talking about
Speaker 1: the way some of us used to talk.
Speaker 8: And one of the most counterintuitive things I think these days,
Speaker 8: because of all sorts of layers of assumptions that we make,
Speaker 8: is that black public figures did the same thing. So
Speaker 8: Booker T. Washington was born a slave, he learned to
Speaker 8: sound like William Jennings Bryan because that is just what
Speaker 8: one had to do, included for black audiences as well.
Speaker 8: And so you listen to people, especially in the first
Speaker 8: half of the twentieth century, when you can have recordings
Speaker 8: of them black leaders, and it can be jarring. How frankly,
Speaker 8: what to our ears is white? They sound today, But
Speaker 8: really what it was was public oratory American style.
Speaker 1: Let's hear the voice of educator and orator and founder
Speaker 1: of the National Negro Business League, Booker T. Washington. It
Speaker 1: may be a little hard to make out since it
Speaker 1: was recorded in nineteen oh eight.
Speaker 17: Through the frays who depends on suttering back and begins
Speaker 17: a foreign land, or wonder that fat eatavating friend relations
Speaker 17: for southern white men? Who is the next door neighbor?
Speaker 17: I would say, cast down your bucket where you are
Speaker 17: pass down making friends in every man the way.
Speaker 1: So Bucker T. Washington, we can only speculate he would
Speaker 1: not have said I'm trying to sound white. He would
Speaker 1: have said, I'm trying to sound like a public figure
Speaker 1: who's respected.
Speaker 8: He would almost certainly have said that. Yet the idea
Speaker 8: that we would listen to him and think he sounded white,
Speaker 8: he would have to wrap his head around that. He
Speaker 8: would think, how else was I supposed to sound? If
Speaker 8: I was standing up in front of a massive audience
Speaker 8: making a speech, and this would include a black audience.
Speaker 8: Booker T. Washington didn't try to sound white. He tried
Speaker 8: to sound formal.
Speaker 1: Let's listen to who is often used as sort of
Speaker 1: the counterpoint to Booker T. Washington. This is the activist,
Speaker 1: pioneering sociologist, and socialist W. E. B. Du Bois, reading
Speaker 1: from his autobiography, so presumably this is much later in
Speaker 1: his life.
Speaker 18: I went from my home in Massachusetts when I was
Speaker 18: seventeen don to Fisk University in Tennessee. There I stayed
Speaker 18: three years. Then I came from there to Harvard University
Speaker 18: in the fall of eighty five and stayed there four years.
Speaker 8: You know why that's perfect? That's so perfect? Do boys
Speaker 8: was rful? He has his ours. The reason he's ourful
Speaker 8: is because there is this otherwise utterly boring difference. It's
Speaker 8: a dialecticians thing between western and eastern New England. Boston
Speaker 8: accent is eastern. Western is say, Great Barrington, where he
Speaker 8: grew up. I actually went to college for two years
Speaker 8: in Great Barrings in the Berkshires, And that's why he
Speaker 8: says year instead of the year. And so he's on
Speaker 8: the other side of that line.
Speaker 1: Isn't that neat Well it's such an interesting clip to
Speaker 1: me because vers goes Massachusetts, but he keeps his ar
Speaker 1: on Harvard. And there are moments and I could be
Speaker 1: getting this wrong. He almost it almost sounds like a burr.
Speaker 1: He almost sounds Scottish.
Speaker 8: He also just sounds like he's very much from another time.
Speaker 8: His vowels are something that we wouldn't hear in anybody
Speaker 8: in the United States these days, because if you're listening
Speaker 8: to Dubois, you're listening to somebody who learned to talk
Speaker 8: at the end of the eighteen hundreds, and yet he
Speaker 8: lived long enough to be recorded in good sound in
Speaker 8: that way.
Speaker 1: And I think a whole heck of a lot of
Speaker 1: people who know who w eb Boys was and who
Speaker 1: have read him would be shocked to listen to that.
Speaker 8: Oh, you know, to tell you the truth. And this
Speaker 8: is getting into a less cuddly dimension of these things.
Speaker 8: But as a black person, I have often thought this,
Speaker 8: many people who are big fans of people like Duboys
Speaker 8: today might find themselves involuntarily put off by the way
Speaker 8: he spoke, because he had There's no hint of what
Speaker 8: we today think of as blackness in the voice of
Speaker 8: that man. And it isn't an affectation. That's there's all
Speaker 8: evidence that that's the way he and people like him
Speaker 8: always spoke. And I think many black people today, quite
Speaker 8: innocently would be waiting for him to kind of get
Speaker 8: down and use certain expressions and to you know, have
Speaker 8: some horlessness and to have some vowel colorations, and he
Speaker 8: would never do it. And I think it would make
Speaker 8: a lot of them rather uncomfortable. Whenever I've heard do boys,
Speaker 8: I think to myself, hmm. Socially, it'd be a little
Speaker 8: awkward now for many black leaders, even black intellectuals and
Speaker 8: black thinkers, we have a whole different sense of what
Speaker 8: makes a person approachable, and perhaps even our value of
Speaker 8: what approachability is very interesting.
Speaker 1: Well, so we talked about William F. Buckley earlier, his
Speaker 1: famous one of his famous debate partners James Baldwin. So
Speaker 1: let's listen to James Baldwin.
Speaker 9: The reason for the political hesitation and in spite to
Speaker 9: the Johnson landslide, is the one that's been betrayed by
Speaker 9: American politicians for so long. And I am, I'm a
Speaker 9: grown man, and perhaps I can be reasoned with.
Speaker 8: I certainly hope I can be.
Speaker 9: But I don't know, and neither does Martin Luther King.
Speaker 9: None of us know how to deal with those other
Speaker 9: people whom the white world is long ignored. We don't
Speaker 9: believe anything the white world says, and don't entirely believe
Speaker 9: anything I or Martin say. And one can't blame them.
Speaker 9: You watch what has happened to them in less than
Speaker 9: twenty years.
Speaker 1: I mean, James Baldwin's voice is beautiful, and it sounds
Speaker 1: pretty close to British to my untrained ears.
Speaker 8: He was a performer. I'm a huge admirer of Baldwin,
Speaker 8: but he also he was cultivating a persona. But to
Speaker 8: be honest, I just hear black and nineteen twenties New York.
Speaker 8: If anything to me, he sounds like Earth a Kit,
Speaker 8: and Earth a Kit was not trying to sound British.
Speaker 8: He was trying to sound like Earth the Kit.
Speaker 1: I want to be evil. That's my favorite. Earth the Kid,
Speaker 1: the kids, I want to be mean. One interesting point here,
Speaker 1: and tell me if you think this factored in. James
Speaker 1: Baldwin's stepfather was a preacher. I wonder if that had
Speaker 1: any bearing.
Speaker 8: You know, it probably did, because Baldwin had a very
Speaker 8: close relationship to the preaching and the church and the
Speaker 8: performance aspect of that. That definitely would have affected him.
Speaker 8: What you're not supposed to say, though, and I'm going
Speaker 8: to say it because I think many people are thinking it,
Speaker 8: is that another thing he was doing I think was
Speaker 8: imitating the way many gay men of that time spoke.
Speaker 8: I think that there's some amount of playing with that
Speaker 8: dynamic too, So if there's the preaching, there's the performing,
Speaker 8: There is his sexuality, there is his blackness. You could
Speaker 8: pour all of those things and mix them up and
Speaker 8: almost predict that what would come out is him saying
Speaker 8: matn in the way that he does.
Speaker 1: We spent so much time focusing on the eastern part
Speaker 1: of the United States. Let's hear a clip from a
Speaker 1: great playwright from Chicago, Lorraine Hansbury.
Speaker 13: In other words, what I was trying to say exactly
Speaker 13: the opposite of what you paid attention to. That is
Speaker 13: that we are not concerned, or perhaps to say, I
Speaker 13: am not concerned with doing away with the mere paraphernalia,
Speaker 13: traditional paraphernalia of the inexpressive, crude Negro character. That is
Speaker 13: not the point. I very arbitrarily, very deliberately of thought
Speaker 13: and intention, chose to write, for instance, and I come
Speaker 13: from the Negro middle class about the Negro working class deliberately.
Speaker 1: So I love the way she talks.
Speaker 8: There's something about the way she spoke. And what's interesting
Speaker 8: is that she has a few arms in there. She's
Speaker 8: almost certainly smoking chainsmoker, and so there's some false starts
Speaker 8: as she kind of composes her thoughts while taking puffs
Speaker 8: on the cigarette, and yet I must admit, as a
Speaker 8: modern linguist, I spend a lot of time arguing that
Speaker 8: there are no grounds for looking down on new speech habits,
Speaker 8: and I very much mean it, But I must admit
Speaker 8: I'm going to only say this once on this show,
Speaker 8: and I'm never going to say it again. I must
Speaker 8: admit I liked that she wasn't saying like and sort
Speaker 8: of every two seconds, because her equivalent today, including that
Speaker 8: she could be just as fierce, just as educated, just
Speaker 8: as talented, it would be sort of every four sentences
Speaker 8: or so. That's not as good as we just heard.
Speaker 8: And it's because she lived in a time when public
Speaker 8: eloquence was still valued in a way that it just
Speaker 8: isn't today. You don't grow up living under the strictures
Speaker 8: that she did in terms of how you were expected
Speaker 8: to speak in public. And she didn't sound like George
Speaker 8: Washington's inaugural address, but that was different from all of
Speaker 8: the humble hesitations that are part of the way most
Speaker 8: modern people express themselves. I must admit I'd rather hear that.
Speaker 1: Her father was a successful real estate broker, her mother
Speaker 1: was a ward committee woman in municipal politics, so they
Speaker 1: were rich, but there's something And she describes herself as
Speaker 1: a member of the Negro middle class.
Speaker 8: Middle class and not and she wrote about the Negro
Speaker 8: working class. But she went to school beside you know,
Speaker 8: many white people, and she lived in an environment where
Speaker 8: there was a sense that if you were going to
Speaker 8: present yourself in public, you had to speak in a
Speaker 8: certain way. And I am quite sure that she did
Speaker 8: not think of herself as speaking whitely. She thought of
Speaker 8: herself as speaking the way one was supposed to in
Speaker 8: order to go out into the world and try to
Speaker 8: make a difference.
Speaker 1: You know, I had to say, of all the clips
Speaker 1: we've heard, this is the one that if I heard today,
Speaker 1: I would say, I really like hearing this person talk.
Speaker 1: This is this doesn't seem like a put on, This
Speaker 1: doesn't seem alien to me. It's like she's speaking in
Speaker 1: a way that's almost a bridge between that accent we've
Speaker 1: been talking about and today.
Speaker 8: Because she is somebody who's in her late twenties in
Speaker 8: that clip, I think, and she's speaking in.
Speaker 1: That nineteen sixty is nineteen sixty one.
Speaker 8: Okay, yeah, And so she has learned to speak in
Speaker 8: the middle of the previous century. So she's not going
Speaker 8: to sound as arch as say black female activist Mary
Speaker 8: McLeod Bethune, where if you listen to her making speeches,
Speaker 8: she sounds like Eleanor Roosevelt. But she also Lorraine Hansbury
Speaker 8: is not a modern person yet, and so she speaks
Speaker 8: with a certain crisp directness. You sense that she knows
Speaker 8: there's a microphone in front of her, and she's therefore
Speaker 8: supposed to switch into a certain mode.
Speaker 1: And she treats her vowels right surely. But she's also
Speaker 1: from the Midwest, and we love the Midwest.
Speaker 8: And therefore there's none of the weird rlessness. She's got
Speaker 8: her proper urs. Yeah, that's let's make her the voice
Speaker 8: of the twentieth century. That's the best voice of the
Speaker 8: twentieth century.
Speaker 1: I really really loved that clip. So what happened to
Speaker 1: the accent? The last time I hear it in the
Speaker 1: movie was probably twenty oh four in The Aviator when
Speaker 1: Kate Blinchett played Katherine Hepburn.
Speaker 12: It's all been a grand adventure, but it couldn't possibly last.
Speaker 1: But to alike you and I, the truth is some
Speaker 1: Golden Age actors had never adopted it through the thirties
Speaker 1: and forties, manly man actors like Gary Cooper and Clark
Speaker 1: Gable brazenly brandished their rs.
Speaker 8: Frankly, might hear I don't give a damn.
Speaker 1: But then the accent started disappearing.
Speaker 8: There certainly seemed to come a time after World War Two,
Speaker 8: and no one knows exactly why when that accent was
Speaker 8: no longer fashionable.
Speaker 1: The war itself was probably a factor, with infantrymen from
Speaker 1: all over the country mixing accents in dialects blending together.
Speaker 1: And then, six years after the war ended, a film
Speaker 1: performance that dealt a blow to the accent. Here's Jessica
Speaker 1: Drake again.
Speaker 4: Marlon Brando and Streetcar Name Desire changed a lot of
Speaker 4: people's ideas about what had to happen, certainly in movies
Speaker 4: and entertainment and in the theater in terms of speech.
Speaker 6: You know what I say, ha ha, you hear me.
Speaker 4: But I also think that the culture began to shift
Speaker 4: because the television came about. Now we had sources from
Speaker 4: all over the country, but a lot coming from the West,
Speaker 4: which in many ways to this day I would say,
Speaker 4: has gone a long way to kind of leveling a
Speaker 4: lot of regionalisms too, not just the Northeastern elite sound
Speaker 4: but all accents.
Speaker 1: The year after Brando in Streetcar, the movie musical Singing
Speaker 1: in the Rain, with a hilarious scene between the ridiculously
Speaker 1: untalented actress played by the wonderful Genie Hagen being tutored
Speaker 1: by an equally ridiculous addiction coach played by Kathleen Freeman.
Speaker 5: Now, let me hear you read your line.
Speaker 7: And I can't stand him.
Speaker 5: And I can't stand him.
Speaker 7: And I can't stamn.
Speaker 8: Can't get can't.
Speaker 6: Kid.
Speaker 8: Yeah, you know that's a good that's a good timeline piece,
Speaker 8: because there that is it's nineteen fifty two and they're
Speaker 8: making fun of the idea that there's a certain plumby
Speaker 8: way that people need to learn how to talk. And
Speaker 8: that's that's a sign of the times. That character wouldn't
Speaker 8: have been as funny in nineteen forty two.
Speaker 1: And then thirty years later The knockout punch against the Accent,
Speaker 1: a nineteen eighty two performance by Hollywood heavyweight Meryl Streep.
Speaker 19: I don't care that I would die. I'm afraid that
Speaker 19: you would die.
Speaker 1: With a to me, what is the significance of Sophie's choice?
Speaker 4: I think it made a huge impact because Meryl Streep's
Speaker 4: Polish accent is flawless and real, and it does so
Speaker 4: much to amplify the emotional life of that character and
Speaker 4: the truth of that story.
Speaker 19: So I hid it maham under my skirt on the train.
Speaker 19: I'm pretending that I am pregnant, you know, Oh you're
Speaker 19: so afraid shaking.
Speaker 4: And I think after that, suddenly it became very important
Speaker 4: to get the accents right. And everyone's trying to be
Speaker 4: real now and not a fantasy or better than us
Speaker 4: in the old days of the Golden Age and Louis B.
Speaker 4: Mayer it's not that at all. It's now, let's really
Speaker 4: get down in it.
Speaker 1: And do you miss what I guess we'll just call
Speaker 1: this old timey accent.
Speaker 8: You know something, though, I don't miss it. And the
Speaker 8: reason is because one with home video and streaming such
Speaker 8: as it is, so much of it is at our
Speaker 8: fingertips that we can have it whenever we want it.
Speaker 8: And too, I enjoy listening to the variety of normal
Speaker 8: modern voices. To me, it's all just a menagerie of
Speaker 8: different vowels and consonants and melodies and slang and new
Speaker 8: ways of using words. So no, I don't miss it,
Speaker 8: but I think it's very charming.
Speaker 1: As for me, I kind of do miss it, and
Speaker 1: you never know, it could come back and I'll be ready.
Speaker 1: It's a coffee lover's dream.
Speaker 4: That's your best line. Excellent.
Speaker 1: I hope you enjoyed this Mobituary. May I ask you
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Speaker 1: at Moroka. Hear all new episodes of Mobituaries every Wednesday
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Speaker 1: available in paperback and audiobook. This episode of Mobituaries was
Speaker 1: produced by Aaron Shrank. Our team of producers also includes
Speaker 1: Hazel Brian and me Moroka, with engineering by Josh Han.
Speaker 1: Our theme music is written by Daniel Hart. Our archival
Speaker 1: producer is Jamie Benson. Mobituary's production company is Neon Hum Media.
Speaker 1: Indispensable support from Alan Pang, Annie Cronenberg and everyone at
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Speaker 1: Steve Razis, Rand Morrison, and Alberto Robina. Executive producers for
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