nobody asked…

Following JohnB’s lead, I ventured over to Dr. Goodword’s Office to be tested for that dread condition known as Yankeeness. This is a quick little quiz that scores your Southerness (or Yankeeness) based on your pronounciation and/or usage of some common words.

For example, here in Tennessee, the epicenter of all that matters, we refer to other people as y’all. We have all seen enough TV (think Archie Bunker) to know that the natives of N’Yawk and Joisey are most likely to say youse or youse guys. As a Southerner moving to Pittsburgh in my mid-twenties, I had the challenge of learning a second language. The other people that we called y’all and New Yorkers said youse, in Pittsburghese are referred to as yins, which I suppose is a corruption of what started life as you ones.

My test result was 76% Southern, with a commentary of “Your neck must be a little pink!” Southerness I proudly accept. A tendency to rednekkidness? A resounding HELL NO! The 24% of my syntactic linguistics that is representative of non-Southern patois is not surprising since about one-third of my life was spent in captivity in Pittsburgh, Indiana, and Iowa. Corporate captivity, that is…

Readers who never met or talked to me have no idea what my voice sounds like. Many probably imagine a Gomer Pyle-ish or Hee Haw twang. Actually, it much scarier than that… closer to James Earl Jones without the classical training. Since my teen years, and even now many years later, people say things like “Boy, with a voice like that you should be in radio or TV.” Or, “You should be singing bass with a group.”

Being back in Tennessee for 20 years now, it is only natural that my dialect has also shifted South. For many years in the corporation, travelling here and there, and making frequent stops on the rubber-chicken circuit as an after-dinner speaker, I continually honed my speech patterns to be as neutral as I could be, short of getting professional training. It worked because people could never guess my origins, most putting me somewhere in the middle of the Midwest. Today, there is no mistake. The booming Richter-scale contrabass is unmistakable and unchanged, but the dialect is most positively Southern … without the aforementioned rednekkidness twang…