Terms Which Have Disappeared

[tonyb]

“There is no such thing as the Queen’s English,” Mark Twain observed late in the 19th century. “The property has gone into the hands of a joint stock company and we own the bulk of the shares.”

 

[LizzieMaine]

There are a lot of people who think the various dialects of Northeastern US English are honky (it's even the source for that particular racial insult), but we *need* to be honky and loud to rise over all the honking horns of clueless tourists driving the wrong way down a busy one-way street.

In all seriousness, I really enjoy a real, honest, old-fashioned New York accent -- the kind that started to go extinct after WWII. I have a bunch of aircheck recordings from little peanut-whistle radio stations in Brooklyn from the mid-thirties, and there's one in particular that has a local precinct cop doing a talk on traffic safety in the richest, purest Flatbush accent I've ever heard. Absolutely music to my ears.

 

[Ticklishchap]

“There is no such thing as the Queen’s English,” Mark Twain observed late in the 19th century. “The property has gone into the hands of a joint stock company and we own the bulk of the shares.”

It's a very nice quotation - I really like it.

However I would say that it was better (I'm speaking here of England - not Scotland, Wales or North America) when there was a Standard English taught in schools, which everyone of whatever class or station in life would aim to speak. This does not mean speaking that everyone had to speak 'the same' English. The good thing about Standard English was that it had a lot of regional inflections which were enriching: one of our best radio newsreaders, Wilfred Pickles, spoke with a Yorkshire accent that was just as much Standard English as an upper middle class South Eastern accent.

Misguided egalitarianism has meant that teaching Standard English has been abandoned in favour of the idea that 'all dialects are equal' with the result that many younger Britons speak a.) very rapidly; b.) with limited vocabulary; c.) incoherently and incomprehensibly. The result is that they speak 'worse' English than immigrants from Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa who have learned the language in the traditional way.

Another result of misguided egalitarianism is the lack of social skills among many English 'millennials' in comparison to their Eastern European, Asian and African counterparts living in the UK. Older friends of mine tell me (and I have also noticed this) that young people who give up their seats on the London Underground are almost invariably either visiting from overseas or are Londoners of Asian or African heritage.

This is a bit off-topic except that the term Standard English has itself almost vanished from use.

 

[Ticklishchap]

The Old Man, a child of the South, said it frequently. He also frequently called people of any familiarity at all “honey.”

There were lots of references to 'sugar' and 'honey' in the brilliant production of 'Ain't Misbehavin' I saw last night.

 

[Ticklishchap]

There are a lot of people who think the various dialects of Northeastern US English are honky (it's even the source for that particular racial insult), but we *need* to be honky and loud to rise over all the honking horns of clueless tourists driving the wrong way down a busy one-way street.

In all seriousness, I really enjoy a real, honest, old-fashioned New York accent -- the kind that started to go extinct after WWII. I have a bunch of aircheck recordings from little peanut-whistle radio stations in Brooklyn from the mid-thirties, and there's one in particular that has a local precinct cop doing a talk on traffic safety in the richest, purest Flatbush accent I've ever heard. Absolutely music to my ears.

Brooklyn is a marvellous accent.
I believe that Flatbush is a strongly Haitian district now: their language is great as well, as is their music.

 

[tonyb]

It's a very nice quotation - I really like it.

However I would say that it was better (I'm speaking here of England - not Scotland, Wales or North America) when there was a Standard English taught in schools, which everyone of whatever class or station in life would aim to speak. This does not mean speaking that everyone had to speak 'the same' English. The good thing about Standard English was that it had a lot of regional inflections which were enriching: one of our best radio newsreaders, Wilfred Pickles, spoke with a Yorkshire accent that was just as much Standard English as an upper middle class South Eastern accent.

Misguided egalitarianism has meant that teaching Standard English has been abandoned in favour of the idea that 'all dialects are equal' with the result that many younger Britons speak a.) very rapidly; b.) with limited vocabulary; c.) incoherently and incomprehensibly. The result is that they speak 'worse' English than immigrants from Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa who have learned the language in the traditional way.

Another result of misguided egalitarianism is the lack of social skills among many English 'millennials' in comparison to their Eastern European, Asian and African counterparts living in the UK. Older friends of mine tell me (and I have also noticed this) that young people who give up their seats on the London Underground are almost invariably either visiting from overseas or are Londoners of Asian or African heritage.

This is a bit off-topic except that the term Standard English has itself almost vanished from use.

My admittedly limited formal linguistics education has it that all grammars are equally rule-governed. Once that was demonstrated to me by a person who knew of what he spoke, I have yet to see or hear anything to contradict it. The grammar rules of, say, what’s called Black American English, may differ significantly from what’s spoken in elite boarding schools, but those rules are every bit as internally consistent.

Among the reasons English has such a large lexicon is because there is no official academy handing down rules from on high. We speakers of this gloriously bastardized tongue quickly adopt words and phrases wherever they pop up. “Teriyaki” is now an English word. So is “adios.” We don’t have to delve too deeply into other languages to deduce the etymology of “mofo” or “badass.”

 

[Ticklishchap]

My admittedly limited formal linguistics education has it that all grammars are equally rule-governed. Once that was demonstrated to me by a person who knew of what he spoke, I have yet to see or hear anything to contradict it. The grammar rules of, say, what’s called Black American English, may differ significantly from what’s spoken in elite boarding schools, but those rules are every bit as internally consistent.

Among the reasons English has such a large lexicon is because there is no official academy handing down rules from on high. We speakers of this gloriously bastardized tongue quickly adopt words and phrases wherever they pop up. “Teriyaki” is now an English word. So is “adios.” We don’t have to delve too deeply into other languages to deduce the etymology of “mofo” or “badass.”

Agree entirely. Yet without some point of reference we are left with a large number of mutually incomprehensible English accents. This is an increasing problem as it makes communication more difficult across social classes, regions, etc.

 

[The Jackal]

Agree entirely. Yet without some point of reference we are left with a large number of mutually incomprehensible English accents. This is an increasing problem as it makes communication more difficult across social classes, regions, etc.

This occurs more often that you would think in other languages as well. I've seen it go horribly, horribly wrong in Spanish. The same word can mean vastly different things depending on which Spanish speaking country you are from and what region in that specific country. I've seen a Dominican and an Ecuadorian that would rather speak to each other in English because their dialects were so different that neither could understand what the other was saying.

 

[tonyb]

Agree entirely. Yet without some point of reference we are left with a large number of mutually incomprehensible English accents. This is an increasing problem as it makes communication more difficult across social classes, regions, etc.

It’s not accents I’m addressing here so much as grammars and all that makes up those grammars — syntax, verb tenses, cases, etc. An identical grammar spoken in varying accents would likelier be incomprehensible than differing grammars spoken in the identical accent.

I have very rarely misunderstood native English speakers, no matter from where on the globe they hail, although certain lexical items carry different meanings in different places. Still, the accent would likelier throw me than the grammar.

We have numerous dialects (grammars) and accents here in God’s Country. I’ve yet to find any of them incomprehensible. And I got a lousy ear.

 

[LizzieMaine]

What's happening in America is that true dialects are rapidly disappearing -- the evolution of the New York accent as studied by William Labov over the last half of the 20th Century is an interesting microcosm of what's happening all over the country. Prior to WWII the "curl-coil" merger, as made popular by such radio/movie/TV types as Ed Gardner, Leo Gorcey, and Archie Bunker, among others, was nearly universal in adult New Yorkese speakers born before 1920, and it *was* universal in those born before 1900, even among educated types: listen to recordings of people like Al Smith, Milton Cross, or John Kieran, for example.

But every decade since the end of the war has seen a sharp drop in that characteristic until now, in the early 21st century, it's almost completely extinct, the main remaining vestige being a very slightly raised "er" sound in words like "nurse." Social demographic changes are a part of that -- dialects didn't always to carry the cultural stigma they do now -- as is the homogenization of speech due to broadcasting. Radio had far less of this homogenization in the 30s and 40s than television did in the 50s and 60s onward. You'd often hear unselfconscious accents on radio eighty years ago, but you very rarely hear a professional broadcaster with any kind of an accent today.

 

[tonyb]

Mark Twain also said something to the effect of “The British are mentioned in the Bible: The meek shall inherit the Earth.”

He offered that little pearl back when the sun didn’t set on the Empire.

The colonial efforts were so successful that the language was spread all around the world. I have had very little difficulty comprehending English as spoken by a Nigerian or an Indian or a Belizean.

It’s a myth that any particular English grammar is the standard. And a dangerous myth at that.

 

[tonyb]

FWIW, a nephew of mine had real difficulty reading “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” back when he was in sixth or seventh grade. This was mostly on account of the author telling the story in “unconventional” dialects, including that of Huckleberry Finn, his first-person narrator. On top of that, Twain used unconventional spellings to more approximate the sounds of those dialects, and it took my nephew a bit to learn not to fight it, to just pick up on the pronunciations and cadences. This is understandable, seeing how he hadn’t yet ventured far from home, nor far from speakers much like himself. In that regard, it was rather foreign to him.

I’m of the view that “Huckleberry Finn” is best taught a few years later than sixth or seventh grade. I fear that the gist of that tale is wasted on people who haven’t been around the block a few times.

And, alas, I’ve encountered teachers who apparently didn’t get it, either.

“All right, then,” Huck says, when faced with choosing between what he had always been told is right and what he knows in his own good mind and decent heart is actually right. “I’ll go to hell.”

People invested in existing power structures aren’t the best candidates for imparting that lesson.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Why anyone thinks Huck Finn is a "children's book" is really beyond comprehension. Twain himself never intended it as such -- when it first came out it was marketed as a novel for adults, and it only became associated with kids by being lumped in with "Tom Sawyer Detective" and "Tom Sawyer Abroad," which *were* kid-oriented books that Twain wrote for money rather than for ideology. It was actually considered an inappropriate book for young readers as far back as the 1910s, and it was only the success of the MGM movie version in 1939 that really cemented the image of it as a kids' book -- even though it wasn't then and isn't now.

A bright sixth grader might be able to understand the point of it, but I don't think most kids are at that level until high school --- especially nowadays when the language makes the book far more fraught than it was when my generation read it.

 

[tonyb]

...

A bright sixth grader might be able to understand the point of it, but I don't think most kids are at that level until high school --- especially nowadays when the language makes the book far more fraught than it was when my generation read it.

A more or less average kid of that age or even a year or two younger might understand the point of that story if it were explained to him. But in most cases it would be a superficial understanding at best. Most lessons aren’t really learned, really internalized, until there’s firsthand experience of them.

I had the misfortune of knowing at too early an age that adults were perfectly capable of complete rationalization. Maybe I wasn’t able to clearly articulate that knowledge, but I knew that grownups didn’t necessarily gain ethics or wisdom, or even reason, with those superior years of theirs.

Perhaps the good teaching of a story has this much in common with the good telling of it: Let the reader figure it out on his own. Don’t hit him over the head with it.

 

[vitanola]

Goodness, thank you. Certainly it all makes sense.

1:06:32 "Mr. Paul Whiteman will now dance, So help me Bob!"

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[EngProf]

There are a lot of people who think the various dialects of Northeastern US English are honky (it's even the source for that particular racial insult), but we *need* to be honky and loud to rise over all the honking horns of clueless tourists driving the wrong way down a busy one-way street.

In all seriousness, I really enjoy a real, honest, old-fashioned New York accent -- the kind that started to go extinct after WWII. I have a bunch of aircheck recordings from little peanut-whistle radio stations in Brooklyn from the mid-thirties, and there's one in particular that has a local precinct cop doing a talk on traffic safety in the richest, purest Flatbush accent I've ever heard. Absolutely music to my ears.

Thanks - I have always wondered where the supposed insult of "honky" came from, and why it was supposed to be an insult to begin with. A word/insult without apparent meaning never carried much weight with me, and now that I know where it came from, it carries even less weight.

I have never had trouble understanding New York accents. As a Southerner, they sound a bit odd to me, but in an amusing and entertaining way. Not quite "music to my ears", but still enjoyable.

While on the subject, I think I remember reading that Bugs Bunny speaks in a combination of Bronx and Brooklyn accents. Obviously I can't tell which part is which. Can someone point out by example some of the origins of Bugs-speak?

(The name "Bugs" itself may be a "Northernism" - "Bugs" Moran (Chicago gangster), "Bugsy" Siegel (New York gangster) - around here we have some "Bubbas" but no "Bugs".)

 

[LizzieMaine]

Most of the differences in the New York accent at the time Bro. Bunny was getting his start were more ethnic than geographical, although you could take them as geographical because of the way ethnic groups concentrated in various neighborhoods. The New Yorkese spoken by an Irish-American differed in cadence from that spoken by a Jewish-American or an Italian-American, and Bugs sounds to my ear like a combination of Irish and Jewish influences: Ed Gardner, on "Duffy's Tavern," used precisely the same type of accent. This would fit in roughly with the way Mel Blanc described the voice as a "Bronx-Brooklyn" combination, although Blanc himself was from Portland, Oregon, and could be excused for making geographical assumptions about speech patterns in NYC.

Irish-influenced New Yorkese had a very fast, staccato rhythm -- think of James Cagney -- while Jewish-influenced New Yorkese had a subtle Yiddish rhythm: "Who knew?" You can hear both of these, at various times, in Bugs' speech.

New Yorkese, with all its ethnic influences, may be the most "All-American" of dialects -- the non-rhoticity is English, the stopped initial fricatives are Yiddish and Italian, the raised vowels are Yiddish and Irish, and the vocabulary is drawn from all the many ethnic groups in the city.

 

[MissMittens]

Most of the differences in the New York accent at the time Bro. Bunny was getting his start were more ethnic than geographical, although you could take them as geographical because of the way ethnic groups concentrated in various neighborhoods. The New Yorkese spoken by an Irish-American differed in cadence from that spoken by a Jewish-American or an Italian-American, and Bugs sounds to my ear like a combination of Irish and Jewish influences: Ed Gardner, on "Duffy's Tavern," used precisely the same type of accent. This would fit in roughly with the way Mel Blanc described the voice as a "Bronx-Brooklyn" combination, although Blanc himself was from Portland, Oregon, and could be excused for making geographical assumptions about speech patterns in NYC.

Irish-influenced New Yorkese had a very fast, staccato rhythm -- think of James Cagney -- while Jewish-influenced New Yorkese had a subtle Yiddish rhythm: "Who knew?" You can hear both of these, at various times, in Bugs' speech.

New Yorkese, with all its ethnic influences, may be the most "All-American" of dialects -- the non-rhoticity is English, the stopped initial fricatives are Yiddish and Italian, the raised vowels are Yiddish and Irish, and the vocabulary is drawn from all the many ethnic groups in the city.

Makes a lot of sense. I remember speaking to WW2 vets for a project on D-Day 50th, and the gentleman from Queens had a totally different accent than the gentleman from Brooklyn, even though in modern terms, both would have been seen as New Yorkers.

 

[Trenchfriend]

"WÜSTLING", in German.

You would say "rake" or " a proper rake!".

 

[tonyb]

“Fettle”

I used it myself just a few minutes ago, in a text message responding to a friend’s favorable account of her experience at a veterinary clinic I had recommended.

“I trust your kitty is in fine fettle,” I wrote. And then it occurred to me that perhaps the person receiving the correspondence would be unfamiliar with the term, seeing how it is now almost archaic, and seeing how she isn’t yet 30.

I doubt she would need to look up the meaning, though. Context would be adequate. But it’s to the better that I didn’t write “I hope your kitty is in rude health,” as the potential for that to be completely misunderstood, to be taken for the direct opposite of its intended meaning, is just too high.