Near the end of the video she says she’s American, but her accent is unlike any American accent I’ve ever heard. She sounds kind of like Barbara Walters … sort of Received Pronunciation meets Trans Atlantic.
Can anyone identify this?
I cheated a bit and looked up Dr. Wood. Given her background – two post-graduate degrees earned in the UK plus a doctorate at UPenn in the US – I hear her accent as a melange, especially with certainly vocabulary (e.g. pronouncing papier-mâché close to the original French vs. American “paper muh-SHAY”).
Just listening to her speak, sometimes Wood’s pronunciations seem to move from American to British word-to-word. I’d be interested to hear her speaking casually, when she’s not presenting.
I’m curious as to whether she’s lived much in the US since beginning teaching in the UK.
I was getting overtones of Margaret Dumont…
Yeah one of the things that threw me was her pronunciation of the -r at the end of a word, like theater. She pronounces it the American way.
She sounds like George Plimpton to me. According to Wikipedia he grew up in the 1930s & 40s as an upper-class person from NYC, and his family descended from Mayflower passengers.
Same, with a hint of William F. Buckley.
I thought I was hearing something like a Boston accent, but with some British influence.
To me, Received English with a touch of trans-atlanticism.
(My mother is an English English teacher, and despite never living in England, my English accent is very strong)
Not her case specifically, but it does happen. A brother-in-law of mine grew up in Rhode Island but has spent much of his adult life in Central North Carolina. He has an odd mix of New England and Carolinian accents that vary from word to word.
Sounds kind of like Angela Lansbury. (I mean, yeah, sometimes she’d really British it up, but sometimes she’d just sort of do — that.)