Tragedy has once again struck the sweet, sweet life of mrpeenee. I recently realized I have somehow dropped the lovely and useful Southern word of "y'all." "Y'all" is a wonderful word since standard English uses the same word ("you") for both the singular and plural second person pronoun, which is obviously stupid. It is also a prominent feature of a Southern accent and I was slightly horrified to notice I had switched to using "you guys" instead.
I am not ashamed of my Southern accent, even though a drawl like that is commonly associated with a lower intelligence. Uh, fuck you, that's what I say to that. And so I have made no effort to eradicate it even though I left the swampy embrace of the South decades ago. Still, living away from other people speaking in that way eventually eroded my accent to something, dare I say it, more Californian. That's why I'm surprised when people comment on my speech. "Honey," I want to say, " if you think I have an accent now you should have heard what I started out with."
R Man and I were once listening to some NPR story about how Southerners speak and how the accent varies so drastically from place to place in the South. One of the examples they offered was that urban people in the South would switch "these and those" for "dese and doze." I told R Man "I don't talk like that" only for him to point out I had just said "I don't talk like dat."
While we're on the subject of speech, I have noticed the real rise in people dropping the double consonant in the middle of a word, like button or butter or kitten and replacing it with like a glottal stop so that they wind up saying something like "bu' on" and "bu' er" and "ki' en". I used to think of this as a phenomenon in British speakers and a signifier of lower class, but now it seems to have jumped to America and is pretty prevalent. As usual I blame the internet for this and so much more.
Guys, I wouldn't mind having a chat with:
