lirazel | Entries tagged with words words words

I'm sure I've posted something along these lines before, but I've made a lot of new friends since then, so I'm talking about it again!

It's spring break here, so there are almost no students on campus. I had to take the campus bus from one side of campus to the other on Monday, and I was the only person on the bus. The bus driver got to talking to me, and he had a pronounced southern accent, and as we talked I could hear my own accent coming out more strongly to meet his. So here we were, him from West Virginia and me from Tennessee, sitting there talking about how insane it is that students actually pay the tuition required to go to the institution that employs both of us.

Anyway, it got me thinking about how my southern US accent comes and goes. When I was in Vienna during study abroad in undergrad, my two roommates (from Ohio and Oklahoma) thought it was hilarious the couple of times I called my family back home because apparently my accent came out super thick. Since that time, I've paid attention to it, and realized I definitely do code-switch.

My standard way of speaking is much less obviously southern. There are shibboleths--I say "y'all" constantly and I do the typical southern thing of putting the emphasis on the first syllable of some words (umbrella, guitar, insurance, thanksgiving, etc.), turn -ings to in's, don't differentiate between certain vowels (pin and pen are pronounced the same), add extra syllables to things (we love our dipthongs!), etc. But by and large in settings where I'm surrounded by people without obvious southern accents (work, most of my socializing these days), my accent doesn't come out very thick.

However, when I was a small child, my accent was very thick. We only have one VHS of home videos from my childhood--we never had a camcorder, so we would just get a few minutes here and there whenever someone else had one. But I am struck when I watch that footage of just how thick it was. What changed?

I think I realized on a sub-conscious level as a child that the people who I admired for being smart all spoke less accented English. I think I taught myself to talk like them without realizing I was doing it, and I internalized it so much that it takes an outside trigger to turn my real accent back on.

I'm kind of sad about this? I love accents of all kinds; I find them wonderful. I like them on an aesthetic "this is fun to listen to" level and I like what you can learn from them. There are lots of different kinds of southern accents, for instance--you can usually tell not only what sub-region within the south someone is from (the deep south, the coastal south, the mountain south, whatever) but also what their class background is.

For instance, my maternal granddaddy's family was poor and from Appalachia and so they had very different accents from my maternal grandmother's. They sounded like hillbillies, whereas she was from Alabama and did the non-rhotic thing (she pronounced her friend Martha's name as "Mah-thah"), she turned ohs into ahs (taco was "tah-cah"), and she did some weird things that I can't categorize (her other friend Sarah was "Say-rah"). She sounded like what she was, which was a middle class, well-educated woman from a city (Montgomery) in the Deep South. Her accent was noticeably different from the accents of everyone I knew from Roanoke and Wedowee in Alabama--two hours' drive further north, but very small town, less well-educated. They sounded more like, well, hicks (I say this with all the affection in my heart). I don't think my grandmother's family was ever anything other than middle class, but they had the echo of old southern money in the way they spoke (perhaps this was aspirational?) in a way that everybody in Wedowee simply did not.

It's amazing how we all pick up these things--for instance, I am not great at distinguishing geography in British accents (I mean, I can tell a Scottish accent from an English one, but I can't really listen to an English accent and tell where in England the person is from), but I absolutely can hear the differences in class--just from watching UK TV and movies growing up, I can easily hear the difference between a posh accent and a working-class one. Nobody had to actively say, "Now this is what a rich person sounds like."

I know that there is a ton of discrimination built into this whole thing, and lots of people purposefully choose to learn to speak more "standard" (read: how the newscaster sounds) versions of their own native languages to avoid that discrimination. I don't blame them for this at all--it's a useful survival tactic--but it does make me sad because I just find accents so fun.

And I like to think about accents in other languages even if I can't hear them! In Spanish, I can tell a Spanish-as-in-Spain accent from a Latin American one, mostly because of the c/th distinction, but that's about as far as I've gotten. (And I will say: I prefer Latin American Spanish to European Spanish. But then, I'm an outlier and think that Spanish sounds way more beautiful than French.) I have learned that a bunch of the specific vocabulary my sister's family uses are used in Ecuador but not in, say, Mexico--some because they're Quecha loan words, other times just because different regions have different words for different things. (The one that comes to mind is "chompa" for jacket/sweater, which is used in the Andes but not in other Spanish-speaking areas, though there are lots of other ones.) It's always fun when she points out, no, that's not the Spanish word for something, that's the Ecuadorian (or Andean) word for it.

I have no takeaway from all of this, I just like thinking and talking about accents! So feel free to share any thoughts you have about accents of any kind--I'd especially be interested in hearing from non-native speakers about accents in your own language!

I am glad my native language is not one that has levels of formality built into its grammar nor has a vast and nuanced way to refer to every kind of relation you have (too fraught!) but I gotta say: nothing in storytelling makes me feral quite like when a character shows intimacy by lowering their language or choosing to refer to another character by an intimate form of their name or a certain relational designation/honorific OR when Character A hurts Character B and Character B reacts by raising their language or reverting to a more formal version of character's name/honorific??? INSANE-MAKING.

We just can't communicate that kind of intimacy in English, and there's no way to translate it, so if you aren't aware enough of the language (even if you don't speak it, like me) to know it's happening, you're missing out on SO much nuance and sometimes actual plot developments.

I had an entire plotpoint in one of my fics about whether Sungyeol was going to call Woohyun "hyung" or whether he'd use his name for him. The way that Shangjue is always "ge" to Yuanzhi on My Journey to You? And that Shangguan Qian is calling Yu Weishan "jiejie" in like the most ironic, suggestive way possible? WOW. And don't even get me started about Wangxian calling each other by their intimate names constantly in front of everyone's salad. Like you learn SO much about what people's relationships are to Wei Wuxian by what they call him. And some of that can be conveyed in translation, but not all of it.

And in Korean dramas, the banmal/jondaemal divide is so so so important! The switch always signifies something about the relationship, often something very important. But how on earth are translators supposed to convey this to an audience who doesn't know anything about the language? They try, and bless them for that, but it never quite works.

Sometimes, as in the drama I'm currently watching, the characters address it correctly. In one episode of The Guest, Yoon demands to know why Hwapyung is using informal language (banmal) with him. He's offended. In the next, Hwapyung demands to know why Kilyoung is using informal language with him. "How old are you?" he asks, a very relevant question. She ignores him. It's such fun. (I wanted Kilyoung to ask Yoon why he's using banmal with her in the next episode, just to complete the triangle...but Yoon is not using banmal with her. Alas for the triangle!)

But like, if you know something about Korean, you were aware of which level of formality they were using before and this just brings it out into the open. If you don't, this is brand new information and it might change how you perceive their relationships. Although I know there are even more layers of politeness and formality in Korean that I am unaware of, I am glad I can usually tell when someone's using banmal or jondaemal because otherwise I would lose out on so much.

As a person living in the world, I like speaking a relatively informal language. But as a writer? I am very jealous of those gradations of intimacy that can be conveyed through language. Do I like a more egalitarian approach for day to day living? Yes, but you do lose something for sure.

I was in a discussion the other day on Mastodon with

sophia_sol and some other people about language.

Soph was pointing out that they're hearing and seeing a lot of people using the pronoun "I" instead of "me" in situations like, "They gave it to Mary and I." Which is, from a prescriptivist perspective, wrong! And it sounds wrong to my ears. But I hear people using it all the time (I would say especially in the southern US), to the point that I think we're somewhere on the slope that leads to it being a widely accepted alternate use.

We ended up talking about how I am now a descriptivist (I care about how language is actually used by actual people to communicate with other actual people) and not a prescriptivist (I no longer care much about what's in the grammar books or what is technically correct), but there's a big caveat to that. What I care about is can your audience understand you? The more narrow and niche your audience is, the more out there you can be with your grammar and syntax. The wider, more diverse, and less personal your audience is, the more you need to at least try to hew towards the standard rules. So there's a huge difference in what I say to friends on Tumblr (I love to speak internet! It makes me happy!) and how I would communicate the exact same thing if I was, say, writing a letter to the editor.

Right now, we're in transition times where people still can use literally...er, literally and you can mostly tell whether someone is by tone, context, etc. We're also at the beginning of that transition period with the use of "me" in plural forms in situations like objects of prepositions, etc. People will still keep pushing back against that, but imo, once I start to notice something, it's probably too late to turn that train back around. Because of inertia, it'll keep chugging in the same direction despite all the grammarians running after it telling it to turn around. *sigh* The way words are used always trumps the way words are supposed to be used. (And of course there's loads of class and race stuff going on in all of this that makes it all complicated, but that's the subject of another post.)

Still, just because I think it's more useful to talk about what language does than what language should be doesn't mean I don't have opinions! There are language shifts that I can't do anything about, but that I still dislike. (And others that I like--I think we're finally reaching the point where the singular they is being more widely accepting, which is great since we've only been using it for centuries and centuries!)

So I was thinking about which grammar or words that have changed and which ones bother me the most. My selection for biggest loss: literally, which I see used as an intensifier ("It was literally so cold outside!" and even--in extreme cases--like, "It was literally a million degrees outside!" when they mean...figuratively) to the extent that I think the word's literal meaning is totally lost (thankfully, the adjectival form seems okay). Which I think is a big loss, because in a world of increasing lies and misinformation, we really need words that emphasize veracity and reality.

What shifts in language are you seeing? How do you feel about them?

I recently listened to a (very interesting, recommended) 6-episode podcast called Sold a Story about why so many USAmerican kids (and Kiwi kids, too, apparently!) can't read. Long story short: a lady from New Zealand came up with this theory that kids don't learn by sounding out the words but by paying attention to context and stuff like this ("three-cueing"). Her ideas took off and schools stopped teaching phonics. There's a big publisher and some superstar reading pedagogy authors who have made an empire from teaching this weird theory despite the fact that neuroscience is very clear that, actually, yes kids do indeed learn phonetically. This is accompanied by a theory that if you just give kids books on topics they're interested in, they will learn to read automatically? I guess? The idea is to make them "passionate" readers but not actually, you know, worry about whether they understand the mechanics of reading. Which, as a lifelong passionate reader, seems wrong-headed.

It's a depressing story (mostly because it appears that upper and upper-middle class families have papered over this problem by hiring private tutors, while poorer and working class kids just suffer), but what I kept getting hung up on was that this has to be an English-language problem, right? The root of this thing has to come down to the fact that English has such weird and quirky spelling for so many words. A language like, say, Spanish that uses an alphabet or syllabic system for phonetic spelling--in which you always, always know how to pronounce the word just by looking at it--could never give rise to such a theory, right?

So the fact that this took off in the Anglophone world has got to be just another manifestation of the way that Anglocentrism bites us in the butt--if any of these people had looked at how kids learn to read Korean or whatever, they would have realized that their theory can't be right?

Or am I missing something?

Got on Instagram for a minute to check my messages and saw that my cousin had posted a story with a yes/no poll asking whether tart and bitter are synonyms, and she should thank God that I don't have time for social media right now so that she didn't have to deal with one of my essays on my favorite Katherine Anne Porter quote: "There is no such thing as an exact synonym and no such thing as an unmixed motive."

CONNOTATION IS EVERYTHING, Y'ALL.

(This quote is literally on the wall directly in front of me as I sit at my desk, that is how strongly I feel about it.)

Today in Spellcheck Fails: HOW CAN GOOGLE DOCUMENTS NOT KNOW THE WORD CHIDE???? NO I DO NOT MEAN IBID. SERIOUSLY???

And because it’s freaking out on me about something else, too, let’s have a poll.

[Poll #1970690]

It has come to my attention that many of my friends on tumblr are (mentally) mispronouncing my name. So! PSA: It's Lah-ren. Like the 'la' in 'lalalala' when you're singing a song. NOT Lor-ren. (It is also, for those of you who are Spanish-speaking, not Lau-ren like it's spelled. I know Spanish is super consistent about phonetic pronunication, but alas, English isn't.)

It honestly hadn't occurred to me that so many people didn't think of my way of pronouncing it as the default way. Everyone in my area of the country pronounces it my way. I went to middle/high school with FOUR other Laurens, a Laura, and a Laurel, and every one of them pronounced their names 'lah.' (Also, by the time we graduated, I was the only Lauren left, so clearly I am the dominant Lauren.) In the grade above me there was a guy whose name was Loren, which was a completely different name.

The only times I've had trouble with people pronouncing it wrong is when I go to other areas of the country, especially the north and the northern part of the midwest (Ohio, Michigan, etc.). Apparently the default there is different? But even my family from that area (Indiana) never had trouble with mine, possibly because my dad's cousin's name is Lori, spelled and pronounced completely different? Who knows.

If you find this hard to remember, think of how Lauren is the feminine version of Laurence/Lawrence. And think of Laurie in Little Women--it's not Lorie.

Man, people are forever spelling my last name wrong, but I had no idea my first name could cause trouble for so many people!

Current Mood: determined

I say British here because the books I read where I picked up these spellings were British, not because I’m ignoring the existence of other countries who spell things that way.

Not too crazy about all those extra “u”s, and I like the letter z, so we’ll keep that one around in things like “realize.”

But!

Judgement. LOOKS WRONG WITHOUT AN E. QUIT YELLING AT ME WITH YOUR SILLY RED LINE, SPELLCHECK!

Grey. I usually use “grey” to talk about a pretty or natural shade of grey—mist or the sea or clouds or something. On the other hand, I use “gray” when I’m talking about something more metallic or ugly—concrete or an ugly building or something.

I’m sure there are others, but those are the ones that leap to mind. Got any of your own? And if you are from not-America, is there any American spelling you actually like better? English as a second language speakers, which did you learn when you were taught the language? American or British spelling and pronunciation? I AM INTERESTED.

Also, Oxford commas forever and ever and ever.