0:02

If you watch any movie from Hollywood's

0:05

Golden Age today, you'll notice

0:07

something distinctive about the way

0:09

many actors speak.

0:11

Oh, we're going to talk about me.

0:13

Good Catherine Hepburn in

0:16

Philadelphia Story, Orson

0:18

Wells in Citizen Kane.

0:20

You're right, mister Thatcher. I did lose a million

0:23

dollars last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this

0:25

year. I expect to lose a million dollars next

0:27

year. You know, mister Thatcher, at the

0:29

rate of a million dollars a year, and I have to close

0:31

this place in sixty

0:33

years.

0:35

Or Betty Davis as Margot

0:37

Channing in All About Eve.

0:39

Nice speeches, But I wouldn't

0:41

worry too much about your heart. You can

0:44

always put that award where your heart.

0:45

On t V, I've

0:49

always been fascinated by this old

0:51

timey accent, whether in black

0:53

and white movies or in the TV

0:55

commercials of my youth.

0:58

You see, high Point has a special way of

1:00

capturing flavor, deep brood

1:02

flavor.

1:05

You see, high Point has a special way of

1:07

capturing flavor.

1:09

Better. Yes, deep

1:11

brood flavor.

1:13

Deep brood flavor.

1:15

Nice.

1:16

Who knew Lauren Bacall was such a coffee

1:18

connoisseur. But just where

1:20

did this peculiar accent come

1:22

from?

1:23

It was a real accent. It was

1:26

a really dominant sound in

1:28

the northeastern part of America.

1:31

And one that commanded authority.

1:33

Let me upsit, my family.

1:37

That's the only thing we have to

1:39

fild.

1:41

Bird the

1:44

idea that that's the way you wanted to hear your leaders

1:46

speaking is a different kind of America

1:48

than today.

1:49

So why does almost nobody

1:51

talk like this anymore? With the exception

1:54

of Kelsey Grammar.

1:55

Rather than truckle to the forces of commercialism,

1:58

I've decided to take a stat and on principle

2:01

it's.

2:01

A mystery I'm determined to solve.

2:05

From CBS Sunday Morning and iHeart

2:08

I'm Morocca and this is

2:11

mobituaries, this

2:18

moment the death of

2:20

an accent. Now,

2:41

this is where it gets a little bit controversial.

2:43

There's a lot of disagreement around what

2:46

to call this because it's

2:48

been commonly called the mid Atlantic

2:50

accent.

2:51

I call it the old Rless

2:54

dialect, or that way they talked

2:56

in old movies. It's Betty Davis roughly.

3:01

That's linguist and New York Times

3:03

columnist John mcwarter. You

3:05

may remember John from our episode on

3:07

the death of once popular names.

3:10

He's helping me today with some of this dialect

3:13

detective work. Let's listen

3:15

to Betty Davis herself. Pay

3:17

attention to the way she says Parker's

3:20

written.

3:20

By that outstanding leading lady

3:23

of.

3:23

Literature, Dorothy Parker. Dorothy

3:26

Parker is the one who said men

3:29

seldom make passes at

3:31

girls who wear.

3:31

Glasses Paka instead of

3:33

Parker. Yeah, that excellent, And is.

3:35

That the primary characteristic

3:38

when we're discussing this way of

3:40

talking burlessness?

3:42

Yeah, what sticks out today is

3:44

that ours at the end of syllables

3:47

have a way of softening or even not

3:49

being present. And there's a certain

3:51

archness that we detect. We imagine that

3:54

the women had fluty voices, etc. But

3:56

then again, Betty Davis did not have a fluty

3:58

voice. She didn't talk like this. She had

4:00

a rather low, cigarette stained

4:02

voice. And yet what we hear in

4:04

her is paka instead

4:07

of Parker, corner instead

4:09

of corner. And that's where you get

4:11

this accent that sounding ever

4:14

more exotic as the decades go.

4:16

By, sounds almost alien and

4:18

it makes people, i think today, especially

4:20

young people, kind of laugh.

4:22

I think that's absolutely true. It makes a lot

4:24

of older movies difficult for people. I would

4:26

say, at this point under fifty

4:29

to take because everybody seems

4:31

to talk funny. It's been a long time since

4:33

any real person spoke that way.

4:37

Where does the R lists come from?

4:39

There are some consonants that are

4:42

less hardy than others,

4:44

Like R is a very

4:47

muddy kind of sound. It's almost like a vowel.

4:49

There's a difference between going puoh or

4:51

too and going it's

4:53

muddy. When you hang a R on

4:56

the end of a vowel, it's delicate. It's kind

4:58

of like hair and split ends. You know that

5:00

that R is ripe for getting soft.

5:02

It's going to change the color of the vowel before

5:05

it, and pretty soon the our is gonna probably

5:07

disappear. It's gonna erode,

5:10

as we put it. And so in any English,

5:12

any rs that are at the end of syllables,

5:14

such as in Parker, are in

5:16

danger in a way, and it's almost a matter of not weather,

5:19

but when stuff is going to start to

5:21

happen.

5:24

Would you find this all over the United States?

5:27

Well, actually no, it's interesting.

5:29

You have it most prominently in New

5:32

York and thereabouts, and then also

5:34

you have it in Boston, and then it also

5:37

happened in the South. But that was also

5:39

partly because African

5:41

languages on the West Coast tend

5:44

not to have ours at the end of syllables.

5:46

Slaves were brought to the Southern United States

5:48

often helped to bring up kids. That meant

5:50

that the ours were certainly going to fall away in

5:52

the South. So it's a different

5:54

reason. So that's why you have the r less

5:57

Southern accent, and so that

5:59

means Black English is r less

6:01

all over the country. But the main

6:03

things that people tend to think about if we're talking about,

6:06

say Betty Davis, is what was going on in the northeastern

6:08

United States starting in the eighteen

6:10

hundreds.

6:11

And she was from Lowell, Massachusetts.

6:12

She was from Lowell.

6:14

Well, let's listen to her right now. In

6:16

all about Eve Eve.

6:17

This is an old friend. Mister DeWitt's mother, Missus

6:20

Caswell, was.

6:21

Having to miss kiswell, how do you do

6:23

Edison. I've been wanting you to meet Eve for the longest

6:26

time.

6:26

It could only have been your natural timidative, but kept

6:28

you from mentioning it.

6:29

You've heard of her great interest in the theater.

6:33

Clip and it's where she's meeting Marilyn Monroe, right, and

6:35

Marilyn Monroe walks in.

6:36

And.

6:38

She's a luminous closed.

6:40

She really does. You should close. Okay,

6:43

now let's listen. Oh and I just have one other

6:45

thing to say about All about Eve. My father

6:47

once said to me. He said, the

6:49

two most purely evil character

6:52

is sort of in Western arts

6:54

and culture, in the Western canon where Iago

6:57

in Othello and Eve Harrington

6:59

and all about.

6:59

Eve, if not Addison to but Eve, Yes,

7:02

she is more evil. That's definitely true. She

7:04

has no feelings. That is absolutely the

7:06

case.

7:06

I want to be Addison, right, you're referring

7:08

to Addison Dewett, the imperious drama

7:10

critic.

7:11

I wish Sondheim were still

7:13

alive so that he would do a musical

7:15

of All about Eve that actually is all about Eve,

7:17

as opposed to Applause fifty years ago, which

7:19

wasn't. And because I'm kind of the age and

7:22

the temperament and we're now so interested in diversity

7:24

in the theater, I want to play Addison, but I can tell

7:26

nobody is going.

7:27

To do it.

7:27

You would be great that I should want

7:29

you at all suddenly strikes me as the

7:31

height of improbability, and

7:34

that in itself is probably the reason.

7:37

Did people speak like this in all cities

7:39

on the Eastern Sea border?

7:41

No, they didn't. This hourlessness

7:43

developed by chance in some places

7:45

and not others. New York and Boston have it,

7:48

but Philadelphia and Baltimore don't. And

7:50

particularly there are Philadelphia and Baltimore

7:52

were our full rhodic cities,

7:55

as we call it.

7:55

It just skipped those cities. So it's ironic

7:58

then that Katherine Hepprince, because come Back,

8:00

Early, Comeback was playing Tracy Lord

8:02

in the Philadelphia story.

8:04

You seem quite contemptuous,

8:07

and.

8:07

They all of a sudden she wouldn't have sounded

8:09

that way.

8:10

In other words, Tracy Lord would

8:12

not have ordered a cheese steak.

8:15

She would have ordered one. Other

8:17

aspects of this accent,

8:20

it's posh, it's proper. What

8:22

would you say, how would you describe it?

8:25

That is an accent that sounds British

8:27

to us, And I think there's an

8:29

idea that everybody was trying to sound

8:32

British. I question that. I think that

8:35

the way American English happened

8:37

to develop was something that would

8:39

have happened, whether there was a great Britain, and whether

8:41

we associated it with poshness

8:43

or not.

8:46

Here's a surprise. John mcwater

8:48

says, early Americans didn't

8:51

talk this way.

8:52

We have a tendency to think that the Founding

8:54

Fathers, for example, because they were

8:56

such formal and educated people, we assume that

8:59

they sound that like masterpiece theater,

9:01

or if that's a dated reference, like many of

9:03

the actors in Every Potter. And actually

9:05

that's not true. That accent

9:08

actually developed after America was already

9:10

up and running.

9:11

So Thomas Jefferson would have said went in the course

9:14

of human events, definitely, And

9:17

John says the Brits themselves

9:19

only started dropping their rs

9:21

in the late seventeen hundreds, so the

9:23

early sixteen hundreds it was William Shakespeare,

9:26

definitely.

9:27

Yeah. And there was no horelessness

9:29

among the people in the Globe.

9:31

Theater, okay, all right. And it was the Virgin

9:33

Queen.

9:33

The Virgin Queen, not the Virgin Queen, right.

9:36

Although Betty Davis dislay she

9:38

was all the quing Queen.

9:42

I'm suddenly imagining Betty Davis walking to

9:44

the hunter Acre would and having to

9:47

greet that donkey eawe.

9:54

This accent, with its emphasis

9:56

on enunciation was especially

9:59

prevalent in the early American theater

10:02

before the invention of the microphone.

10:04

It tended to carry all the way to

10:06

the back of the house.

10:07

And then once amplification comes in,

10:10

old habits die hard. And so you have these

10:12

people, you know, on the soundtracks of these old

10:14

movies, still talking in a way that maybe would have

10:16

been thought of as a better way

10:18

to sound if you're doing Our American Cousin

10:21

in eighteen sixty five as opposed

10:23

to what you need to do now.

10:24

Thank you for the Our American Cousin reference,

10:27

which, of course was the stage comedy that Lincoln

10:29

was watching at Ford's Theater. Now, I've

10:31

always wondered there was a star of it. But

10:34

then there was a guy who was the second Banana,

10:36

who played kind of the funny guy role.

10:39

And there's an insult he lays

10:41

on her, and that's the big laugh line. And that's

10:43

when John Wilkes Booth fired the gun.

10:45

He was waiting for a laugh line. You

10:47

suckologizing old man trap,

10:50

And that was the big That was sort of like

10:52

the sit on It Potsey of its time.

11:00

So few people are going to get them, all.

11:01

Right, it's that's what she said of

11:03

its time. Right, Wait, what are the people laughing

11:06

to now? I don't know what they're laughing to now.

11:10

Now, it wasn't only Hollywood royalty

11:13

who spoke like this, but also the

11:15

political elite. Here

11:17

is Teddy Roosevelt campaigning to

11:19

return to the White House in nineteen twelve.

11:23

These prohibitions have been given by the

11:25

gods from safeguards against political

11:27

and social privilege, in the barriers

11:29

against political and social justice and

11:31

the bastie our papers.

11:33

He is not to impume the gods, but to

11:36

emancipate them from a position where

11:38

they stand in the way of social justice.

11:40

That was amazing. I've never heard him. There's

11:42

a story of him going up

11:44

to Albany when he is

11:47

in the Assembly and he was made

11:49

fun of for the way he talked, because that arl attack

11:51

scent sounded silly to a lot of the people from other

11:53

parts of the state. They imitated him as saying,

11:55

mister speaker, miss the speak up when he wanted to talk.

11:58

That's not the way people from further upstate

12:00

spoke.

12:01

Let's hear now his fifth

12:04

cousin, Franklin Delanor Roosevelt,

12:06

let.

12:06

Me ussit my firmilie. Let's

12:10

the only thing we have to

12:12

fish fire,

12:15

so nameless,

12:17

unreasoning, unjustified terra

12:20

with paralyses needed up, We'll

12:23

convert with creek enter

12:25

advance.

12:26

It's perfect.

12:27

Okay, this is twenty one years after that clip

12:29

we heard from Teddy, but it's still there,

12:31

that accent very much in the thirties,

12:34

Like so many millions of others. My Italian

12:37

grandmother, she to

12:39

her dying day, was grateful to him

12:41

for the new deal for the WPA. And

12:44

you know, she didn't talk anything like that.

12:46

The idea that that's the way you wanted to hear your leaders

12:49

speaking is a different kind of America

12:51

than today.

12:52

You know, It's funny. My grandmother might have not only

12:54

expected it, but demanded it.

12:56

That's right, let her leaders speak like that. John

12:58

mcwater says that in politics that

13:01

accent is as much of a relic as

13:03

the art of oratory itself.

13:06

Your grandmother would not have tolerated

13:09

the way a lot of our leaders today

13:12

speak in public. And it's not to say

13:14

that there isn't a such thing as being very eloquent

13:16

within the bounds of being

13:19

colloquial and casual. But for

13:21

someone to get up and talk the way Trump does.

13:23

And this is independently of the content, but just that kind

13:25

of scattershot half sentences and

13:28

you know, rarely completing a thought that would

13:30

have been processed as amateurish,

13:32

as offensive.

13:33

But it's interesting the transition that happens, because

13:35

you know, FDR's last vice president, and

13:37

his successor, of course, is Harry Truman, who does

13:39

not talk like that. He's not a habadasha.

13:42

Oh, he's a Midwesterner. He has

13:44

his urs.

13:46

I can't tell you.

13:47

How very much I appreciate the

13:49

honor which

13:51

you just confarred upon me. I

13:55

shall continue to try to deserve

13:58

it.

13:58

And what's interesting is that his speaking

14:02

is not something anybody was particularly

14:04

interested in paying attention to. He wasn't considered

14:06

an orator, he wasn't a performer.

14:08

But yes, he's somebody who did not

14:11

have that kind of hourlessness, and no one ever expected

14:13

that he was going to become president. Anyway.

14:18

Let's now hear from one of Teddy Roosevelt's

14:20

six children. And no one had more

14:23

fun children than tr had in the

14:25

White House. Okay, so let's hear from Ethel

14:27

Roosevelt Derby.

14:28

The children especially will be interested in

14:30

seeing that odd little animal under

14:32

the table there. His name is Josiah.

14:35

And my father, knowing how he

14:37

liked to have things brought home to us whenever he could

14:39

from his trips out west, used to bring us home

14:42

treasure. One time he brought us

14:44

a bear which lived in the woodshed.

14:47

This time he brought home a little badger.

14:50

I took a picture of my brother Archie

14:52

in his ordinary girl barefoot

14:55

is little ragged trousers holding Josiah.

14:58

My father used to say.

14:59

Hissing like it, boy, And

15:01

you can see why people think this is about great Britain.

15:04

Actually, the badger that was a wonderful

15:06

cliff.

15:07

It is so great. And I had to tell you the picture of Archie

15:10

holding Josiah the badger is just adorable.

15:12

Really, Yeah, you've got to

15:14

look it up.

15:14

You will, of course not remember that I wrote a book about

15:17

presidential pets in two thousand and four, and so

15:19

Cheddi Rosevelt was my favorite chapter. He didn't

15:21

know, no, of course he didn't. I've

15:24

seen the sales figures, and so he

15:26

had thirty six pets, and he

15:29

hated amazing pets. He had amazing pets.

15:31

Did the Lincolns. How many pets they did.

15:33

They had a horse samed Old

15:35

Bob. They had a dog, which

15:37

is the very first photographed

15:39

presidential pet. The dog's name was Fido.

15:43

It's actually really a very sweet picture of

15:45

Fido. He was a mott which is perfect for it.

15:47

But there's of Lincoln.

15:48

Yeah.

15:48

And then they had two goats named Nanny and Nanco.

15:51

Did the dog sit still in the Lincoln picture? Is

15:53

it all blurry?

15:53

Because no, the dog is actually

15:56

seated on what looks like a pedestal,

15:58

like a plinth.

16:00

Yeah.

16:00

And after Lincoln died, a drunk

16:03

with a knife stabbed the dog.

16:05

You're kidding.

16:06

I'm just bringing all of us really

16:08

down. It's really, really terrible. But

16:11

let me just make it better by saying the teddy Roosevelt.

16:13

They had a bear, a little bear that they named

16:16

Jonathan Edwards. So next time, listened to Ethel

16:18

Roosevelt saying Jonathan Edwards, the

16:20

bad and the Bad. And

16:24

they had a hyena. Did they really have they

16:26

did have a hyena?

16:27

No?

16:27

It was crazy. I mean, I hope those kids had all their

16:29

shots.

16:33

I want to give this guy some props. Cornelius

16:36

Vanderwbilt the fourth because

16:38

he was an outcast from the

16:41

Vanderbilt family because he dared to get

16:43

into newspapers. Can imagine that as

16:45

if he'd gotten an OnlyFans account

16:48

he was working for the newspaper My God. Okay.

16:51

He produced

16:53

what is arguably the very first anti

16:56

Hitler documentary, Hitler's Reign

16:58

of Terror, in nineteen three four. It

17:01

was met with a cold shoulder as

17:03

hysteria warned people

17:05

about anti Semitism. So if

17:08

just for that, let's listen to him.

17:10

There was money enough in Hollywood to tempt me to

17:12

go through it again. I'll tell you that last

17:14

day on the frontier, I felt like Mickey Mouse.

17:17

It was one tough.

17:17

Squeak for me.

17:19

I knew just what I would be up against if the Nazzies

17:21

ever found my films.

17:22

The last few weeks I've been carefully watched.

17:25

He sounds like Betty Davis and

17:28

Nazzy.

17:28

Nazzy.

17:29

Yeah, you hear that occasionally, especially that

17:31

Nazzies. Yeah, yeah, that's that's something that people

17:34

It was a spelling pronunciation if you don't know German,

17:36

and so it looks like Nazzy and some people would

17:38

get away with saying it. That guy

17:40

says is a piece of work.

17:42

Yeah, he really is.

17:43

Did he have a family?

17:44

He was married seven or eight times,

17:46

never had children. It seemed

17:48

like a guy I look just for the documentary

17:51

along. We've got to give the guy some props. I mean, I don't

17:53

know what it was like to be married to him, but I like

17:56

him. I like him. Okay, let's hear

17:58

another voice often associated with this

18:00

accent. This is a conservative

18:02

intellectual, founder of the National Review

18:05

and co host of the TV show firing

18:07

Line, William F. Buckley.

18:09

If the telephone company

18:12

projected the number of people using telephones nineteen

18:14

thirty eight, they figured that

18:16

at the rate of which people were using the telephone

18:18

by nineteen hundred and sixty, in order

18:20

to service that many calls, they'd

18:23

have to hire. Every woman in the United States is a

18:25

telephon operator.

18:25

Now, this is a much parodied

18:28

accent. What is it that we're

18:30

hearing there that we're reacting to.

18:33

He's speaking rather quickly, not

18:35

a whole lot of melodic change,

18:38

almost as if he can't be bothered

18:40

to enunciate too much. There's

18:42

a privilege in it, and that he sounds

18:44

like he can't quite be bothered to try

18:47

to get himself across. He assumes that you're

18:49

listening.

18:49

Closely, there's a certain lack of effort

18:52

or I'm not sure if it's a fatigue in

18:54

there, a detachment,

18:56

detachment.

18:57

It might also be brilliant,

18:59

because he he was brilliant, whatever you think of

19:01

the content of the things that he wrote and

19:03

said. And so he's so

19:06

committed to the thinking that he can't be bothered

19:08

with performance is one kind

19:10

of quick psychology you might

19:13

pull.

19:13

Buckley indeed had a cosmopolitan

19:16

upbringing. Born in New York, he

19:18

grew up speaking Spanish and

19:20

received his early formal education

19:23

in France and England. But

19:25

it wasn't just those to the manor born

19:28

who spoke this way. Let's turn

19:30

back to entertainment to listen to

19:32

a commercial from the early nineteen

19:34

eighties starring The Bronxes.

19:36

Betty Joan Persky aka

19:39

Lauren Bacall.

19:41

My favorite time of day is night. I

19:44

love curling up with a rich cup of coffee.

19:47

You think coffee and sleep down mix.

19:49

They do.

19:49

If it's high Point, it's

19:51

decaffeinated and the flavor

19:53

is marvelous. You see, high

19:56

Point has a special way of capturing

19:58

flavor, flavor.

20:03

It's a coffee lover's dream.

20:05

Betty Joan Persky was born of the Bronx. Okay,

20:08

okay, grew up pretty hard scrabble.

20:10

Now we can only guess because she started

20:12

in Hollywood when she was so young. But do

20:15

we think that an adolescent

20:17

Betty Joan Persky soon to be Lauren

20:19

bacall, was arless.

20:21

She definitely would have been ar less, because

20:24

this hourlessness was not only people

20:27

of a certain means, it was also

20:29

people who were middle and even

20:32

lower class. Lauren McCall had an air

20:34

about her, especially as she got older,

20:36

and so it ends up sounding rather

20:39

high toned that she says flavor.

20:41

But she learned to say flavor, probably

20:44

in the Bronx, in a very hot third

20:46

floor apartment, because that's the way everybody would have

20:48

spoken there.

20:49

She's playing a high status character in one of the high

20:51

Point commercials. She's in a limousine drinking

20:54

high Point coffee. She's actually pouring it, which is

20:56

insane. That's because how you I mean? These

20:58

are New York City streets, pop holes everywhere.

21:00

That's a major LOSSU youit ready to happen.

21:02

My pants are full of flavor, my

21:05

dad.

21:05

These pants are full of flavor. I'm

21:10

the woman of the year with third degree

21:12

burns. Okay,

21:15

sorry, coming.

21:19

Up after a break. How to speak

21:21

with distinction when quoting from

21:23

the classics.

21:25

Don't say flavor and hold

21:27

it, get off it quicker flavor.

21:29

You see high Point has a special way of

21:31

capturing flavor better. Yes,

21:45

you see high Point. You see high

21:47

Point.

21:47

That's not bad. You see high Point

21:50

has a special way of capturing flavor.

21:53

You see high Point has a special

21:55

way of capturing flavor.

21:58

Cap cap Chuck

22:01

like cha sharing

22:04

capturing dialect coach

22:06

Jessica Drake is teaching me to

22:09

pitch decaf like Lauren Bacall.

22:12

Since the late nineteen eighties, Jessica's

22:14

been helping major Hollywood actors

22:16

get into character for movies and TV.

22:19

She helped Sean Penn play Harvey

22:21

Milk and Anada Armis become

22:24

Marilyn Monroe. I'm

22:27

curious, what are you asked

22:29

most about.

22:30

It's Forrest Gump. It's always

22:33

Forrest Gump. That's it.

22:34

The Alabama accent.

22:36

Yes.

22:37

Now, because I've been a football starg and

22:40

war hero and national celebrity

22:42

and a Shrimp and Bolt captain and

22:44

the college graduate this city follows

22:46

at Greenbow, Alabama decided to get together

22:49

and offered me a fine job.

22:51

You know, for an actor, it's another piece, right,

22:54

It's like a false nose or a limp.

22:57

It's a thing that they add to

22:59

the character, or it's a piece that brings

23:01

them closer to that other person

23:03

they're playing.

23:08

The accent that we're talking about

23:11

is commonly called the

23:13

mid Atlantic accent, the Transatlantic

23:16

accent. Is that a

23:18

misnomer?

23:19

Yes, it is, first

23:21

of all mid Atlantic. I just want to say, would be

23:23

Delaware, Maryland, something like

23:25

that. The idea, the notion

23:28

is it's halfway between English and American

23:31

speech, and so it's this mythological

23:33

place that doesn't exist in the middle of the Atlantic

23:36

Ocean.

23:36

Oh my gosh, I know exactly right. The closest you

23:38

could get it's a southern tip of Greenland. And

23:40

I don't think they talk like that there.

23:42

No, definitely not well observed.

23:45

It's got nothing to do with that. It

23:47

was a real accent. Loads

23:50

of people spoke that way.

23:51

So what would you call this accent

23:54

we're talking about.

23:55

I would call it probably Northeastern

23:58

elite, because it's a sod

24:00

with those regions. I

24:02

mean where you really would hear its,

24:05

places like New York

24:07

City, Newport, Rhode Island, Darien,

24:09

Connecticut, Kenny Bunkport,

24:11

Maine, and Boston.

24:14

Now this way of speaking wasn't only

24:17

about dropping ours. You'll also

24:19

notice a softening and elongation

24:22

of the vowels, especially

24:24

the A sound. And can

24:26

I say my father, who grew up in a

24:28

factory town called Leminster, Massachusetts,

24:32

I would hear every so often

24:34

he would say bathroom instead

24:36

of the bathroom. He'd say bathroom,

24:38

bathroom, the bathroom, I need that or

24:41

bathroom? Yeah yeah that

24:43

a and I would go bathroom, but he'd

24:45

go bathroom.

24:46

Yes, yeah, it's pretty good, Moe, you have a

24:48

pretty.

24:49

Good middle a. Jessica Drake

24:51

says that for most people, this accent

24:53

wasn't learned formally in school.

24:56

The influences on most people's speech

24:58

are pretty basic. It's your parents

25:00

and it's your friends when you're

25:03

young, and that's

25:05

pretty much where it gets formed. But

25:08

where their classes, I

25:12

think unless you were pursuing either

25:15

a career in the arts or perhaps

25:18

going to say some sort of a finishing

25:20

school, which is a thing that existed,

25:22

then yeah, but

25:24

otherwise no.

25:31

One piece of misinformation you'll find

25:33

online about this accent is

25:35

the notion that it was taught to Golden

25:38

age Hollywood actors by a woman

25:40

named Edith Skinner, a speech

25:42

teacher best known for writing a book

25:44

called Speak with Distinction. Jessica

25:48

Drake was one of Skinner's students

25:50

at New York's famed Juilliard

25:53

School, and she wants to set

25:55

the record straight about her late mentor.

25:58

Edith Skinner was dedicated

26:01

to the theater more than anything

26:03

else. The theater. She is

26:05

responsible definitely for training

26:07

a whole generation of regional

26:10

theater actors.

26:11

But Jessica says Skinner couldn't have

26:13

coached those old, tiny Hollywood

26:15

stars because she never once

26:18

worked in Hollywood. How

26:21

did she become associated with

26:23

this.

26:23

Accent misinformation

26:28

is the simplest answer. Unfortunately,

26:31

there have been things put into print that

26:34

have claimed that she was in

26:36

Hollywood teaching in the thirties, or

26:38

that actors were running around the studio

26:41

lots carrying her book under

26:43

their arms. This is all

26:45

complete and total fabrication.

26:49

In fact, her book wasn't published until

26:51

nineteen forty two, and then it

26:53

was only available in the bookstore at Pittsburgh's

26:56

Carnegie Tech, where she taught at

26:58

the time. Now, Skinner

27:00

did teach a later generation of actors

27:03

something that would come to be known as good

27:06

American speech.

27:07

So the sound that she came up with,

27:09

the good American speech, is

27:12

certainly based on

27:14

what we've been talking about. That Northeastern

27:17

accent. However, it had specifically

27:20

something she called the seven points.

27:23

One of those seven points Skinner prescribed

27:26

was softening those rs, but

27:28

not quite as much as old time Hollywood

27:31

actors often did. Skinner's

27:33

method also encourages performers to

27:35

pronounce certain words with a middle

27:37

a.

27:38

What she called the ask list

27:41

of words. Those are words that Southern

27:43

English would pronounce with a long a.

27:45

Ask pauls Claus and

27:48

she had it at ask

27:50

pass class, which

27:52

is not ask past class,

27:55

which would be more general American.

27:58

One of Skinner's students, the

28:00

actor Ellis rab Here, in

28:02

a production of the comedy The Royal

28:04

Family, he.

28:05

Said, who's directing this picture? I said, you're directing

28:07

the picture. You're not directing me. I'm through with it

28:10

and you can take that to remember me.

28:11

By Ellis rab taught

28:14

by Edith Skinner, was

28:16

the inspiration for Kelsey

28:18

Grammar's voice for

28:21

side show Bob on The Simpsons,

28:23

which means that side show.

28:25

Bob was trained by Edith

28:28

Skinner.

28:29

Lisa, you always wear the one

28:31

rose petal floating atop the cesspool.

28:34

That is the Simpsons.

28:36

You see.

28:36

You can tie Edith to these things

28:39

that way. Kelsey was a student of hers

28:41

at Julliard as well, and I would

28:43

say the frasier sound is

28:46

in no small part connected

28:48

to that Edith training.

28:51

It's hard to say what to hate.

28:52

Most about Crane's show is Papa's

28:54

sanctimonious style, his constant

28:57

self congratulatory references to his own

28:59

life, or his voice a

29:01

mock sympathetic tone, so sickly

29:03

sweet. One wonders if the man graduated

29:06

from medical school or from some mind

29:08

controlling cult.

29:10

And how's this for influence? That's

29:12

truly out of this world.

29:14

Robin Williams. He

29:17

took some of the speech exercises

29:19

and turned them into that language

29:21

that Mork spoke. She has an

29:23

exercise mo may me

29:26

my mo moo

29:28

nona nine

29:31

no new LAWI

29:34

li lo lou, Oh

29:36

my god, that's where nyeah come from.

29:38

Belief out of that.

29:40

Wow.

29:41

I'll catch you on the rebound your magnitude until

29:44

next week.

29:44

I know.

29:45

No Coming

29:54

up more with linguist John

29:56

mcwater. Is

30:12

this a white accent?

30:15

This is of course largely associated

30:18

with white people. But an

30:20

interesting thing about the

30:22

olden times is that there

30:24

was a sense in the United States that

30:26

if you were going to be a person of influence,

30:28

you had to learn to talk in a certain

30:31

way.

30:33

I'm back with linguist John mcwarter

30:35

to finish talking about the way some

30:38

of us used to talk.

30:40

And one of the most counterintuitive

30:42

things I think these days, because of all

30:44

sorts of layers of assumptions that we make, is

30:47

that black public figures did the same

30:49

thing. So Booker T. Washington was

30:51

born a slave, he learned

30:54

to sound like William Jennings

30:56

Bryan because that is just what one

30:58

had to do, included for black

31:00

audiences as well. And so you listen

31:03

to people, especially in the first half of the twentieth

31:05

century, when you can have recordings of them black

31:07

leaders, and it can be jarring.

31:09

How frankly, what to our ears

31:11

is white? They sound today, But really

31:14

what it was was public

31:17

oratory American style.

31:19

Let's hear the voice of educator and orator

31:22

and founder of the National Negro Business

31:25

League, Booker T. Washington.

31:27

It may be a little hard to make out since it

31:29

was recorded in nineteen oh eight.

31:31

Through the frays who depends

31:34

on suttering back and begins a

31:36

foreign land, or wonder that fat

31:39

eatavating friend relations for southern

31:42

white men? Who is the next door

31:44

neighbor? I would say, cast

31:46

down your bucket where you are pass

31:49

down making friends in every man the

31:51

way.

31:52

So Bucker T. Washington, we can only speculate

31:55

he would not have said I'm trying to sound

31:57

white. He would have said, I'm trying to sound like a

32:00

public figure who's respected.

32:01

He would almost certainly have said that. Yet

32:04

the idea that we would listen to him and think he sounded

32:06

white, he would have to wrap his head

32:08

around that. He would think, how else was I supposed to sound?

32:10

If I was standing up in front of a massive audience

32:13

making a speech, and this would include a

32:15

black audience. Booker T. Washington didn't try to

32:17

sound white. He tried to sound formal.

32:19

Let's listen to who is often used as sort

32:21

of the counterpoint to Booker T. Washington.

32:24

This is the activist, pioneering

32:26

sociologist, and socialist

32:29

W. E. B. Du Bois, reading from

32:31

his autobiography, so presumably

32:33

this is much later in his life.

32:35

I went from my home in

32:38

Massachusetts when I was seventeen

32:40

don to Fisk University in Tennessee.

32:44

There I stayed three years. Then

32:47

I came from there to Harvard

32:49

University in the fall of

32:52

eighty five and stayed

32:54

there four years.

32:56

You know why that's perfect? That's

32:58

so perfect? Do boys was rful?

33:01

He has his ours. The reason he's ourful

33:04

is because there is this otherwise utterly

33:06

boring difference. It's a dialecticians

33:09

thing between western and eastern

33:12

New England. Boston accent is

33:14

eastern. Western is say, Great

33:16

Barrington, where he grew up. I actually

33:18

went to college for two years in Great Barrings in the

33:21

Berkshires, And that's why he says year instead

33:23

of the year. And so he's on the other side

33:25

of that line.

33:26

Isn't that neat Well it's such an

33:28

interesting clip to me because vers goes

33:30

Massachusetts, but he keeps

33:32

his ar on Harvard. And there are moments

33:34

and I could be getting this wrong. He almost

33:37

it almost sounds like a burr. He almost sounds Scottish.

33:40

He also just sounds like he's very

33:42

much from another time. His vowels are

33:44

something that we wouldn't hear in anybody in the United

33:46

States these days, because if you're listening to Dubois,

33:48

you're listening to somebody who learned to talk at

33:51

the end of the eighteen hundreds, and yet

33:53

he lived long enough to be recorded in good sound

33:56

in that way.

33:57

And I think a whole

33:59

heck of a lot of people who know who w

34:01

eb Boys was and who have read him

34:04

would be shocked to listen to that.

34:06

Oh, you know, to tell you the truth. And this is getting

34:08

into a less cuddly

34:10

dimension of these things. But as a black

34:13

person, I have often thought this, many

34:15

people who are big fans of people

34:17

like Duboys today might

34:20

find themselves involuntarily put

34:22

off by the way he spoke, because he had

34:25

There's no hint of

34:27

what we today think of as blackness in

34:29

the voice of that man. And it isn't

34:32

an affectation. That's there's all

34:34

evidence that that's the way he and people like him

34:36

always spoke. And I think

34:38

many black people today, quite innocently

34:40

would be waiting for him to kind of get down

34:43

and use certain expressions

34:46

and to you know, have some horlessness and

34:48

to have some vowel colorations, and he would

34:50

never do it. And I think it would make a lot of them

34:52

rather uncomfortable. Whenever I've heard do boys,

34:55

I think to myself, hmm. Socially,

34:57

it'd be a little awkward now for many black

35:00

leaders, even black intellectuals and black thinkers,

35:02

we have a whole different sense of what

35:04

makes a person approachable, and perhaps even

35:06

our value of what approachability

35:09

is very interesting.

35:10

Well, so we talked about William F. Buckley earlier,

35:13

his famous one of his famous

35:15

debate partners James

35:17

Baldwin. So let's listen to James

35:20

Baldwin.

35:21

The reason for the political hesitation and in spite

35:23

to the Johnson landslide, is

35:25

the one that's been betrayed by American politicians

35:28

for so long. And

35:30

I am, I'm a grown man, and perhaps I

35:32

can be reasoned with.

35:34

I certainly hope I can be.

35:37

But I don't know, and

35:40

neither does Martin Luther King. None of us know

35:43

how to deal with those other people whom the white

35:45

world is long ignored. We don't believe

35:47

anything the white world says, and

35:50

don't entirely believe anything

35:53

I or Martin say.

35:56

And one can't blame them. You watch what has

35:58

happened to them in less than twenty years.

36:01

I mean, James Baldwin's voice is

36:03

beautiful, and it sounds

36:06

pretty close to British to my untrained

36:09

ears.

36:10

He was a performer. I'm a huge

36:12

admirer of Baldwin, but he also he was cultivating

36:14

a persona. But to be honest, I

36:17

just hear black

36:20

and nineteen twenties

36:23

New York. If anything to me, he

36:25

sounds like Earth a Kit, and Earth

36:27

a Kit was not trying to sound British. He

36:29

was trying to sound like Earth the Kit.

36:31

I want to be evil. That's my

36:33

favorite. Earth the Kid, the kids, I

36:36

want to be mean. One

36:38

interesting point here, and tell me if you think

36:40

this factored in. James Baldwin's

36:42

stepfather was a preacher. I

36:45

wonder if that had any bearing.

36:50

You know, it probably did, because

36:53

Baldwin had a very close relationship

36:56

to the preaching and the

36:58

church and the performance aspect of that. That

37:00

definitely would have affected

37:03

him. What you're not supposed to say, though,

37:05

and I'm going to say it because I think many people are thinking

37:07

it, is that another thing he was doing I think

37:10

was imitating the way many gay

37:12

men of that time spoke. I

37:14

think that there's some amount of

37:17

playing with that dynamic too, So if there's

37:19

the preaching, there's the performing, There

37:21

is his sexuality, there is his blackness.

37:24

You could pour all of those things and mix

37:26

them up and almost predict that what would

37:28

come out is him saying matn in

37:30

the way that he does.

37:33

We spent so much time focusing on

37:37

the eastern part of the United States. Let's

37:39

hear a clip from a great playwright

37:42

from Chicago, Lorraine Hansbury.

37:45

In other words, what I was trying to say

37:50

exactly the opposite of what you paid

37:52

attention to. That is

37:54

that we are not

37:57

concerned, or perhaps

38:00

to say, I am not concerned with

38:03

doing away with the mere paraphernalia,

38:06

traditional paraphernalia of the inexpressive,

38:12

crude Negro character. That is not

38:15

the point. I very arbitrarily,

38:17

very deliberately of thought

38:21

and intention, chose to

38:23

write, for instance, and I come from the Negro middle

38:25

class about the Negro working

38:27

class deliberately.

38:29

So I love the way she talks.

38:31

There's something about the way she spoke.

38:34

And what's interesting is that she has a few arms

38:36

in there. She's almost certainly smoking

38:38

chainsmoker, and so there's some false starts

38:41

as she kind of composes her thoughts

38:43

while taking puffs on the cigarette,

38:45

and yet I must admit, as

38:48

a modern linguist, I spend a lot of time

38:51

arguing that there are no grounds for looking

38:53

down on new

38:56

speech habits, and I very much

38:58

mean it, But I must admit I'm going to only say

39:00

this once on this show, and

39:03

I'm never going to say it again. I must admit I

39:06

liked that she wasn't saying like

39:08

and sort of every two seconds, because

39:10

her equivalent today, including that she could

39:12

be just as fierce, just as educated, just as talented,

39:15

it would be sort of every

39:18

four sentences or so. That's

39:20

not as good as we just heard. And

39:23

it's because she lived in a time when

39:25

public eloquence was

39:27

still valued in a way that it just isn't

39:30

today. You don't grow up living

39:32

under the strictures that she did in terms of how

39:34

you were expected to speak in public. And she didn't sound

39:36

like George Washington's inaugural address, but

39:39

that was different from all of the humble

39:44

hesitations that are part of the way most

39:46

modern people express themselves. I must

39:48

admit I'd rather hear that.

39:50

Her father was a successful

39:52

real estate broker, her mother was a ward

39:54

committee woman in municipal politics,

39:57

so they were rich, but

40:00

there's something And she describes herself as a member

40:02

of the Negro middle class.

40:03

Middle class and not and

40:06

she wrote about the Negro working class.

40:08

But she went to school beside

40:10

you know, many white people, and she lived

40:12

in an environment where there was a sense that if you

40:15

were going to present yourself in public, you

40:17

had to speak in a certain way. And

40:19

I am quite sure that she did not think

40:21

of herself as speaking whitely.

40:24

She thought of herself as speaking the way

40:26

one was supposed to in order to go out into

40:28

the world and try to make a difference.

40:30

You know, I had to say, of all the clips we've heard,

40:32

this is the one that if I heard today,

40:37

I would say, I

40:39

really like hearing this person talk.

40:41

This is this doesn't seem like a put

40:43

on, This doesn't seem alien to me. It's

40:46

like she's speaking in a way that's almost a

40:48

bridge between that

40:52

accent we've been talking about and today.

40:56

Because she is somebody who's in

40:58

her late twenties in that clip, I think, and

41:01

she's speaking in.

41:03

That nineteen sixty is nineteen

41:05

sixty one.

41:06

Okay, yeah, And so she has learned to speak

41:09

in the middle of the previous

41:11

century. So she's not going to sound

41:13

as arch as say black

41:16

female activist Mary McLeod Bethune,

41:18

where if you listen to her making speeches, she sounds

41:20

like Eleanor Roosevelt. But she

41:22

also Lorraine Hansbury is not a

41:24

modern person yet, and

41:26

so she speaks with a certain crisp directness.

41:29

You sense that she knows there's a microphone

41:32

in front of her, and she's therefore supposed to switch into

41:34

a certain mode.

41:35

And she treats her vowels right

41:38

surely. But she's also from the

41:40

Midwest, and we love the Midwest.

41:41

And therefore there's none of the weird rlessness.

41:44

She's got her proper urs. Yeah,

41:47

that's let's make her the voice of the twentieth

41:49

century. That's the best voice of the twentieth century.

41:51

I really really loved that clip. So

41:56

what happened to the accent? The

41:59

last time I hear it in the movie was probably

42:01

twenty oh four in The Aviator

42:04

when Kate Blinchett played Katherine Hepburn.

42:07

It's all been a grand adventure,

42:09

but it couldn't possibly last.

42:11

But to alike you and I, the

42:14

truth is some Golden Age actors

42:16

had never adopted it through

42:18

the thirties and forties, manly man

42:20

actors like Gary Cooper and Clark

42:22

Gable brazenly brandished

42:25

their rs.

42:26

Frankly, might hear I don't give a damn.

42:28

But then the accent started disappearing.

42:32

There certainly seemed to come a time after

42:34

World War Two, and no one knows

42:36

exactly why when that

42:39

accent was no longer fashionable.

42:42

The war itself was probably a factor,

42:45

with infantrymen from all over the country

42:47

mixing accents in dialects

42:49

blending together. And then,

42:52

six years after the war ended, a

42:54

film performance that dealt a blow

42:56

to the accent. Here's Jessica

42:58

Drake again.

43:00

Marlon Brando and Streetcar Name

43:02

Desire changed a lot of

43:04

people's ideas about what had to happen,

43:06

certainly in movies and entertainment

43:09

and in the theater in terms of

43:11

speech.

43:12

You know what I say, ha ha, you

43:15

hear me.

43:18

But I also think that the culture

43:20

began to shift because the

43:23

television came about. Now

43:25

we had sources from

43:29

all over the country, but a lot coming

43:31

from the West, which in many

43:33

ways to

43:36

this day I would say, has

43:38

gone a long way to kind of leveling

43:41

a lot of regionalisms too,

43:43

not just the Northeastern elite sound

43:45

but all accents.

43:47

The year after Brando in Streetcar,

43:50

the movie musical Singing in the Rain,

43:53

with a hilarious scene between

43:55

the ridiculously untalented

43:57

actress played by the wonderful

43:59

Genie Hagen being tutored by

44:02

an equally ridiculous addiction coach

44:04

played by Kathleen Freeman.

44:07

Now, let me hear you read your line.

44:09

And I can't stand him.

44:12

And I can't stand him.

44:15

And I can't stamn.

44:19

Can't get

44:22

can't.

44:24

Kid.

44:26

Yeah, you know that's a good that's a good

44:28

timeline piece, because there that is it's nineteen

44:31

fifty two and they're making

44:33

fun of the idea that there's a

44:35

certain plumby way that people need to learn

44:37

how to talk. And that's that's a sign of

44:39

the times. That character wouldn't

44:41

have been as funny in nineteen forty

44:43

two.

44:44

And then thirty years later The knockout

44:47

punch against the Accent, a

44:49

nineteen eighty two performance by

44:51

Hollywood heavyweight Meryl Streep.

44:54

I don't care that I would die.

44:58

I'm afraid that you would die.

44:59

With a to me, what is

45:01

the significance of Sophie's choice?

45:04

I think it made a huge impact

45:07

because Meryl Streep's

45:09

Polish accent is

45:12

flawless and real,

45:16

and it does so much to amplify

45:19

the emotional life of

45:21

that character and the truth of that story.

45:25

So I hid it maham

45:27

under my skirt on the train. I'm

45:29

pretending that I am pregnant, you know, Oh

45:33

you're so afraid shaking.

45:37

And I think after that, suddenly

45:39

it became very important to

45:41

get the accents right. And everyone's

45:44

trying to be real now and not

45:46

a fantasy or better than us

45:49

in the old days of the Golden Age and

45:51

Louis B. Mayer it's not that at

45:53

all. It's now, let's really get down

45:55

in it.

46:01

And do you miss what I guess we'll just call this

46:04

old timey accent.

46:06

You know something, though, I don't miss it.

46:08

And the reason is because

46:11

one with home video and

46:13

streaming such as it is, so much of

46:15

it is at our fingertips that we can have it whenever we

46:17

want it. And too, I enjoy listening

46:19

to the variety of normal

46:22

modern voices. To me, it's all

46:24

just a menagerie of different vowels

46:26

and consonants and melodies

46:29

and slang and new ways of using

46:31

words. So no, I don't miss

46:33

it, but I think it's very charming.

46:37

As for me, I kind of do miss

46:39

it, and you never know, it could

46:41

come back and I'll

46:43

be ready.

46:47

It's a coffee lover's

46:49

dream.

46:50

That's your best line. Excellent.

46:56

I hope you enjoyed this Mobituary.

46:58

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47:00

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and you can follow me on the social media

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47:10

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47:13

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47:15

Wednesday wherever you get your podcasts,

47:18

and check out Mobituaries Great

47:20

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47:25

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47:28

This episode of Mobituaries was

47:30

produced by Aaron Shrank. Our

47:32

team of producers also includes Hazel

47:35

Brian and me Moroka,

47:37

with engineering by Josh Han. Our

47:40

theme music is written by Daniel Hart.

47:42

Our archival producer is Jamie

47:45

Benson. Mobituary's production

47:47

company is Neon Hum Media.

47:51

Indispensable support from Alan

47:53

Pang, Annie Cronenberg and everyone

47:55

at CBS News Radio. Special

47:58

thanks to Tim Monk, Diane

48:00

Camp, Steve Razis, Rand

48:02

Morrison, and Alberto Robina.

48:05

Executive producers for Mobituaries

48:07

include Megan Marcus, Jonathan

48:10

Hirsch, and Moroka. The series

48:12

is created by Yours Truly