End of ADS-L Digest - 19 Mar 1994 to 21 Mar 1994

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There are 5 messages totalling 96 lines in this issue.



Topics of the day:



 1. Actors and accents (2)

 2. Bouncing message reports (2)

 3. lucrative consultantship



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Date:  Tue, 22 Mar 1994 06:47:00 EDT

From:  "David A. Johns" <DJOHNS[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]UFPINE.BITNET>

Subject: Actors and accents



The stereotyped identification of Southern accents with hickish

themes, interestingly enough, is reversible.



For any of you who admit to having watched Hee Haw, recall the regular

who played the announcer at radio station KORN. When I first heard

him, I was living in rural Wisconsin, and I remember thinking that he

sounded just like some of the older farmers in that area. Later

someone told me that he was actually a Canadian Shakespearean actor

who was doing the Hee Haw shtick on a lark, and was apparently

imitating rural accents from his home area. I've pointed him out to

several Southerners over the past few years, and none had ever

identified him as a Yankee. Rural <--> Southern.



An even better example was the actor Walter Brennan. He always played

Appalachian or Ozark hillbillies, but his accent always sounded to me

like rural northern New England (I grew up in western Massachusetts).

It turns out Brennan was born and raised in Lynn, Massachusetts, a

suburb of Boston. Coming from there he shouldn't have sounded so

rubish, but the basic vowel patterns would have been the same as in

New Hampshire or Vermont. Again, no one I have ever asked, including

Southern and Southern Midland speakers, ever suspected that anything

was amiss -- unless they were familiar with that particular accent.

Once more, rural <--> Southern.



David Johns