Speaking of that. . .

The Source

I was a senior in high school and had somehow made it to the state finals in public speaking. There were six of us left after sectional and regional competition in the event of extemporaneous speaking, five girls and myself. One of the hard and fast rules of IHSA speech is that at the state the level the judges will have no indication of where the contestants come from, thus keeping them as objective as possible. Only my name appeared on the judge’s sheet with no mention of my school. I drew my topic, spent an hour preparing, and then gave my speech for the judge. When I finished he motioned me back toward his desk and said, “You’re from Pike County, aren’t you?” I was astounded knowing that the judges weren’t allowed to have this information. I stuttered and said, “Yes.” He said, “That’s what I thought. I’ve sort of made it my life’s study to learn the regional dialects of Illinois. I can’t identify every county in the state, but Pike is very distinctive.” This Perry boy was totally impressed and for the first time I realized that perhaps I had an accent. And by the way, I didn’t do well in that speech contest. I drew the topic, “Should parochial schools receive federal aid?” and spoke against the proposition. When I walked into the contest room and saw the judge wearing a priest’s collar I knew I might be in trouble and I was. However, thinking back a bit, I remember an even earlier time when I found that we didn’t all speak the same brand of English. My parents took our family to a John Deere convention in one of the Carolina’s, a region with a very definite southern drawl, and the next morning’s newspaper had an article on the convention headlined, “The town is full of strange-talking people!” And all this time I thought they were the ones with the accent. Our little church in Arenzville was mightily blessed a few years ago when a lady from the deep South married a man in our congregation. She’s a lively southern belle and often stands to make announcements since she’s a great cook and our church does a lot of eating. I love hearing her talk, as she will add a syllable to every word she says. A fork becomes a “fo-work,” a trip is a “tree-up,” and alright becomes “a-wul-right.” Love it. So far we’ve not had to hire a translator when she speaks but many of her announcements are followed by a whispered, “What did she say?” in our congregation. Of course accents can carry with them their own negative responses. I know people who voted for Nixon instead of Kennedy and to this day cringe when they hear a Boston accent. There’s many a downstate resident of Illinois who after decades of Springfield politics will get a sour stomach when they hear a Chicago speaker, and veterans of our various wars remain leery of the accent of their former enemy, even long after the conflict. Linguists tell us that regional accents are slowly dying out and that in a few more decades we’ll all sound about the same. The culprit, they say, is television and other media that bring all these various dialects to our ears and homogenize our speech in such a way that sort of takes the fun out of things. I guess we’re lucky here in the Midwest since broadcasting schools still teach Midwest-speak as the “American standard.” Tom Brokow, Peter Jennings, Walter Cronkite all modeled their speech after the Midwest accent and others like Texan Dan Rather had to re-think his pronunciations to appeal to a national market. But the really fun part of our language differences is the quirks, the little oddities that belong to certain regions or generations. We grandsons used to think that our grandmother was speaking of her pajamas when she say, “I’ve a nighty.” She meant “I have an idea,” but it came out flannel. When Grandpa said, “Spect so,” that meant he was agreeing with her. One of my earliest traveling memories concerns a time our family stopped to fill up out car in Florida back in the days when station attendants actually came out and attended to you. After filling out tank the fellow said, “Y’all want me to check your all?” We finally figured that he meant “oil,” but from that point on no one in our family said “oil” correctly. I realize that I’m mixing accents with dialects and euphemisms here, but they all go together to make this delightful mix that we call American speech, and as the influx of immigrants continues we’ll be treated to an even more lively language. And I have a nighty that’s good. Yep, I spect so.