Talking Southern

     Let’s talk about our beautiful English language, specifically about how it is spoken among Southerners of reasonable education and breeding.  It’s a lilting yet languid manner of speech, one that’s disappearing by a larger than comfortable margin each generation, as accent-free TV and radio commentators drive us ever closer to the dubious goal of a homogenized American speech pattern.

     The talking heads do this in at least two ways.  One is the mostly patois-free way nearly all such commentators speak, as if everyone is from Iowa or a similar Midwestern clime.   But the second way is what truly gets your commentator wrapped around the axle:  the tendency in any emergency or disaster to broadcast an interview with the least articulate or grammatical member of the affected community, and often the most poorly dressed, to boot.  The hateful cumulative effect of all this is to make native Southerners seem slow and backward, which is as unbecoming a notion as it is an unfounded one.

    As if that is not enough, then Hollywood jumps in and makes things even worse.   They understand that we tend to drop, or at least glide over, the letter R in our speaking, but they make the mistake of thinking we glide over ALL such R’s.  This gives us abominations of mimicry like “Mistuh Gah-hisson” in the 1991 move, JFK, and “Fah-hest” (or maybe it’s “Fawest”) Gump of the eponymous 1994 film.

     They would probably pronounce Forest Park, formerly Forrest Park, Georgia, the same way were they getting a fake Southerner to say it.  And there we happen to have a wonderful example of when to glide over an R and when not to.  A Southerner of reasonable education and breeding would pronounce that town name something like. “Forest Pahk, Jawja.”  In short, we do not drop R’s which begin words, those which follow most consonants (as is “ludicrous” or “travel”), or upon which syllables hinge (such as “For(r)est,” “Garrison,” or “marry.”)

    Perhaps the best story your commentator has ever heard on the propensity of non-Southerners to laugh at our R-dropping involved the late Congressman Robert G. Stephens, Jr., (1913-2003) of Athens.   A diminutive man with a presence which lit up a room, the congressman spoke with a pre-television piedmont of Georgia accent of the highest caliber – a Southerner could close his or her eyes listening to Congressman Stephens and almost thing the Lord was talking, so comforting and soothing were his inflection and textbook-quality grammar.

     One day, as the story is told, a standing committee on which Congressman Stephens served was interviewing a man whose surname was Moorhead.  Anytime Stephens asked the witness a question during the proceeding, he would precede the question with the witness’s name, which he pronounced, “Mistuh MOW-head.”  As the proceedings continued, a solon from the Midwest became amused at what Stephens was saying, and asked in a gently teasing tone, “Does the gentleman from Georgia not realize that the witness’s surname contains the letter R?”

    In mock affront, Congressman Stephens puffed out his chest, rose to his full but still diminutive height, and proclaimed, “Of c’ose Ah ree-lize the name ‘MOW-head’ contains the lettuh R – if it didn’, it’d be pronounced ‘MOO-head,’ and yonduh witness dudn’ look the least bit bovine to me!”  The assembly broke up.

     May we glory in differences of the spoken word and may any fun we poke at each other’s ways of speaking be just that – gentle, good-natured fun.