THE VOMITORIUM OF MY BRAIN

“I am very excited to meet Alex’s mystery man”

deadpool vs rogue one

Think carefully. Everything after this moment will not only determine your career, but life. You can spend it in a corporate office drafting contracts and hitting on chubby paralegals before finally putting a gun in your mouth, or you can join my firm and become someone you actually like. So decide. Do you want the job or not?

If you want to anger a linguist, try bringing up a speech pattern called General American. “General American is a concept for which I’ve struggled to find a satisfying definition,” writes Ben Trawick-Smith of Dialect Blog. Dennis Preston, a dialectologist and sociolinguist at Oklahoma State University, goes even further. “General American doesn’t exist,” Preston says, “He was demoted to private or sergeant a long, long time ago.” […]

But where does General American come from? Is there a place where people, young and old, speak like newscasters? […]

As an experiment, try listening to some news broadcasts around the country. These newscasters all supposedly speak in the accent-less General American way, so they should all sound pretty much the same, right? “I can take any handful of broadcasters you want, and unless you cheat and get them all from the same area, I can show you acoustically and probably by ear pretty convincingly that they still have for the most part the same acoustic system they had growing up,” says Preston. I wasn’t sure I believed it, but, well, look. […]

One thing that is consistent, and is not exactly an accent but is related, is in their enunciation. “They don’t really change their language, as such; they change their articulatory precision,” says Preston. This is probably a remnant from the way performance worked live; to reach the entire crowd and make sure you’re speaking comprehensibly to everyone, it was important to enunciate very precisely. Very precise enunciation can actually change the way someone sounds; it may be an effort to be more proper, but it can also shift you to that theoretical General American zone.

One example: the letter “w”. When Americans pronounce the name of this letter, it’s almost always shortened in some way. Most stereotypically, those from the South will shorten it to “dubya.” But nobody says “double-you.” Even in the North and West, the name is typically shortened to something more like “dubba-you.” Go ahead, ask someone to spell the word “white.” They’ll compress it, somehow. Newscasters, in the interest of proper enunciation, will say “double-you.” Another example: most Americans will do something called palatization in a phrase like “did you,” turning it into “did joo.” Newscasters will not, for precision’s sake.

This kind of stuff can add to the feeling of nowhereness, because English really isn’t spoken that way anywhere.

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