Hey, he or she apologizes and I’ll say thanks. That’s very friendly!
Fair enough, and thanks. I want to remind you, though, that I wasn’t objecting to any particular conclusion about Bush: I was objecting to the following idea:
Having been around folks who switch registers a lot (my mom and my wife both adopt much greater Southern accents when talking to certain people, for example), I’m just about convinced that it’s NOT a conscious decision. It sounded to me as if you were claiming that register-switching in general is a conscious decision so that you could attack Bush for his folksy pronunciation of nuclear.
Is Bush adopting the pronunciation deliberately? Honestly, except as a matter of the greatest trivia, I could care less*. This is a man who has been arguing for months that the US shouldn’t explicitly outlaw torture; this is a man who literally** wipes his ass with the Constitution; this is a man who mocks death row inmates during interviews; this is a man who lies us into a war in which thousands of American soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians have bloodily died. And I should care about how he pronounces nuclear?! He could begin every sentence with “Aw, shucks,” pull out a corncob pipe in the middle of press conferences, scratch his butt and sniff his fingers, and that’d be fine: I care about the atrocious way he’s running the country, not about his idiosyncrasies.
Daniel
- That’s right: I could care less means I don’t care. Suck it, prescriptivists!
** Oh yeah: literally, as in figuratively. Bite me, schoolmarms!
This is exactly why I hate the whole “OMG SHRUB MISPRONOUNCED NUCLEAR!!!11!!one!!eleven” thing. There’s so many real reasons to be pissed at the guy that it just makes us liberals look like whackjobs when we start picking on how he pronounces words.
I did not intentionally misrepresent anything. I will happily withdraw any “lie”* once I know what I lied about. I’ll look in the post in the meantime, but I didn’t set out to lie (I knew you’d read it and you clearly have an attention to detail.wouldn’t it be stupid for me too? Don’t answer) so I’ll probably not find it.
Ok, here is where I mentioned you:
“Yet I felt like, despite reasoned argument taking into account facts regarding things other than linguistics (like say, someone’s parent’s accent, where someone went to high school and college, that someone is a politician and might, just might, “try” to fit in with his base), I was having my lack of qualifications as a linguist tossed in my face and Monty had hoisted his qualifications so high that any opinion of his on matters even tangentially involving language was superior to mine. I am sure my impression was not 100% on par with reality. I apologize for being defensive.”
I’m guessing you took offense to the portion in bold, specifically that I was claiming that you hoisted your qualifications. And you’re right, that’s unfair. You did no such thing, to my recollection. I apologize and withdraw the comment to the extent that I claim you “hoisted” anything, most particularly your qualifications. I was attempting to account for my defensiveness and did so poorly. To my credit though, I said, “I am sure my impression was not 100% on par with reality.”
I also mention you here:
“Excalibre, you agree with my conclusion, but according to Monty it has been disproved (any debate foreclosed) by the arguments advanced in this thread. In fact, according to Monty, our (yours and mine) shared conclusion regarding Bush’s affected speech, smells like a sphincter (esophageal? rectal?).”
But I believe you did say those things. To quote you:
“It’s (conclusion that Bush does it on purpose) already been shown that such a deduction isn’t valid. Again, consider the concepts of code switching and register.” (commentary in parentheses and emphasis mine)
and,
“Just because you have an opinion doesn’t mean it smells any different than a sphincter.”
FTR, he
You’re right. On re-reading I get the same impression. It’s not what I meant to write. I meant to suggest that selection of register could be (although certainly always isn’t) controlled and as such, the concept of register does not, in and of itself, defeat or render invalid my conclusion regarding Bush’s accent/pronunciation.
Thank you.
Excalibre, I was aware that whole bean is from the South. Both he and my mother-in-law are from small towns in Southern Alabama. Individuals in groups that are looked down on by others run the risk of buying into the prejudice.
This very liberal Democrat thinks that if there are recordings of his voice using another dialect, it is just as possible that he slips back and forth between the two, perhaps depending on his state of nervousness. (shrug)
I pick up other people’s dialects very easily – to the point where it is embarassing. Many years ago when a young man from Denmark spent the summer with me, I spoke English with a Danish accent even around my parents. I would try not to because I knew that it sounded pretentious, but I would slip into it without thinking.
whole bean, I’m glad that you don’t view the South as culturally inferior. I had incorrectly assumed in reading your posts that somehow you did. Your apology to the others was very fair and a sign of good things to come from you at SDMB.
For the record, I adore Sampiro and read just about every thread he posts. But I suspect that I was using those old Southern phrases in their appropriate context long before he was born. I am an eleventh generation Southerner. The ninth generation, my grandfather, was a Civil War soldier.
My favorite “voice of America” belonged to the late historian Shelby Foote.
You come from a beautiful part of the country and there are still a lot of “educated” people at the Dope who have strong biases against it. That may help to explain my interest.
{Not related at all to the thread, but I’m curious.}
whole bean: BTW, do you perhaps remember a restaurant in Atlanta called Pilgren’s? I’m unsure of the spelling.
FYI only: There’s a partisan clip which shows W in a Texas gubanatorial debate: he sounds like an MBA. Yahoo | Mail, Weather, Search, Politics, News, Finance, Sports & Videos
There was some speculation in 2004 regarding the source of his declining speech patterns. Here are 2 possible causes: 1) the Presidency is simply more demanding intellectually than being Governor of Texas: slowing down one’s speech and taking on a disarming down-home register may be politically saavy. 2) Bush is affecting a Hollywood cowboy because they think people like that.
There are other hypotheses.
When it comes to the disfluency of his speech, I suspect a couple causes are at work. First, he’s just not that great a speaker (nor was, for that matter, his daddy). And I think there’s a major tendency for confirmation bias. People have noticed that he’s a bad speaker, so they come to expect it. A recent post on Language Log discussed his speech, and gave a transcription that they said was the president. Then it was revealed that the transcription - which looked incredibly disfluent - was of President Clinton, who has been rightfully noted for his oratory skills. Everyone speaks badly sometimes; people have come to expect it so much with Bush that they are finding every minor example and taking it as more confirmation that he can’t talk right.
Pilgreen’s? A meat and three right? I’ve heard but never been. I think the Atlanta location burned, but there might be one in Morrow. I do like a good meat and three and the Atlanta area has some fine choices (although some ride on a fair amount of hype).
Zoe I am constantly reminded that some people do view the south as culturally inferior, but I do not share their opinions at all. I guess at some point I got tired of fighting the prejudice and did what I could to avoid it (that’s the perspective I was writing from earlier with the whole “how would you teach your kid to say it” bit). At the same time, I am also very aware that I can employ my southerness to get bona fides with other southerners. I think that’s what irked me about W, but in reality it’s not a fair criticism. I don’t live inside the guy’s head (bet that’d be lonely), so I can’t say for sure why he speaks the way he does.
In the interest of full disclosure, I am not from a one traffic light kind of small town. I grew up on the outskirts of Mobile, which in comparison to Atlanta is incredibly small, but it’s not like Luverne small. It is the deepest of the deep south though.
I don’t see how some people discount the fact W puts on an affected Southern accent. It is not a small thing, although small compared to other stuff he’s done and indeed small compared to a lot of things other officials have done to get elected.
However, most of the time you can’t really tell for certain so you can’t pin it on them. But W’s diction and received pronunciation got remarkably better after he secured his second term. That speaks of blatant anti-intellectualism to me.
Even though he’s Ivy League, Joe Schmoe from both sides of the Mason-Dixon heard him speak and thought his accent proves he’s not “ivory tower”: after all would a hoity toity librul elite speak like a Southerner? :rolleyes:. Then after he won he was free to drop the pretension.
It’s a double spit in my face both as a thinking person and as a voter.
Yes it is. WHy on earth wouldn’t it be? Unless you’re the sort that writes weekly letters to the editor about imagined slights, I can’t imagine why anyone would care what sort of accent someone else uses.
There’s a big wide world out there full of big issues. This ain’t one of them.
Daniel
I didn’t say it was a big issue. I said it wasn’t small 
It’s a small issue elevated to medium importance because of the stature of the issuer and the things it implies about him.
If it were a one-off occurence, I could brush it off, but combined with other evidence of his cowboy/jock/anti-intellectual stance, it’s frightening. If someone has the power, and won’t listen to reason, (and won’t listen to the voice of compassion, as evidenced by making fun of death row inmates, for one,) how can it not be scary?
How do you, you personally, know it’s an affected accent? Are you the man’s brain?
Good gravy, this thread is still alive?l
Nuke it! Nuke it!
Us other ivory tower intellectual liberals in this thread don’t really give a crap about Dubya’s fake accent, except to roll our eyes at it. Know why? Well, I for one vote on the issues. This is not a popular thing to do nowadays, but I make my voting decisions on the basis of examining a candidate’s statements about particular matters of public debate that matter to me, and deciding which among the candidates to a particular office appeals to me on the basis of their stances on these matters.
Now, as I mentioned, that’s not popular. Most people vote on the basis of “character” - that is, they don’t really know about or understand the matters at issue, so they vote based upon some assumption about what the candidate is like in their soul. As a matter of fact, that’s a big part of the reason that Dubya was elected: he was perceived as somehow more honest, more down to earth, and more in tune with the majority of the electorate. Now, your own perceptions of his character (and mine) suggest quite the opposite. This reveals the basic problem with voting on the basis of “character” - it’s subjective. You can’t actually determine a thing about Dubya’s character beyond what the TV cameras, newspaper columns, and spinmeisters put out there for your perusal.
That’s why I pretty much ignore the concept of “character” in voting. Since I can’t make any sort of accurate judgment of his inner thoughts, or his motives, I prefer to make voting decisions on the basis of things I can evaluate objectively: a candidate’s stance on things like abortion rights, the environment, the United States’ position in the new global society. I think this is the right way to go.
So no, while I have an opinion about Dubya’s accent, it plays zero roll in my voting decisions. Such things don’t matter at all to me when there are issues of real importance to be discussed. Congrats, though: you’ve joined in with the eighty or ninety percent of the electorate that ignores matters like “what a politician will do” in favor of “what he feels like in his heart of hearts”. I’d rather not be part of that group, myself, even if making actual decisions about who I’m voting for means I’m gonna have to sit at the nerd table in the political cafeteria.
whole bean, Mama was practically a Northerner compared to you. She was from a little town about ten miles north of Montgomery.
Monty, I will confess now that I chose California because of its multiple dialects and diversity.
Excalibre, if this thread ends with the meat of your last post, just that one alone will have been worth the reading for me!
Hey, it’s not so bad: I’ve got the new Gary Jackson module, and the party needs a magic sword.
Daniel