The Curious Case Of The Absentee Accent

We have never taken off in these parts as a great tourist destination, which can likely be put down to two key factors: we have no colorful native garb, and we don’t have accents.

These are the things that people like to see or hear when they visit other regions mainly, I suppose, so that they know they are not actually back home and simply around the corner from their house. It lets them know they have been somewhere.

The presence of native garb, accents, and local craftsmen, I forgot that one, native craftsmen, gives the traveler confidence that his money, gasoline, wear and tear on the car, reserves of patience, and curiosity are well-spent.

The native garb would be easy enough to come by; we could all get together this afternoon and determine from here on out to wear kilts or Alpine vests or Victorian top hats and become known for that, but the absentee accent is likely here to stay.

However we tried to add inflection or color or a lyric song-like cadence to our speech, the real and final flat thing, flat like a snake that has been run over by a car, would emerge again soon after lunch. It is not beautiful but it is constant, and it will not be held back or muffled.

We are told by scholars of the subject to not be ridiculous, everyone has an accent, you just can’t hear your own due to overfamiliarity, but if so, tell me this: have you ever heard it remarked upon, this supposed 'accent' of ours? My guess is that your observation is the same as mine: nope.

If we do have an accent in these parts it isn’t much of one, in fact it may be more of an anti-accent than anything, devouring other people's accents that stray unwittingly into our territory, uncurling and straightening them as some hair treatments promise to do.

If accents under study reveal a certain up and down cadence, dips and rises along the roadway of syllables, lingerings or abruptnesses in managing consonants and vowels, then it is no great reach to assert that the accents in these parts reflect the level landscape of the region, and what can only be called its non-showoffy nature.

I have used the phrase ‘in these parts’ three times already I see, which is ironic considering that this is a phrase that is never, ever used around here, in these parts.

They say it all the time down south, in Texas, in the western states, in The Ozarks I believe, and I would bet in Alaska, but it is almost never used around here, mainly because the middle swath of the continent, what you might call the breadbasket of the nation broadly defined, is so wide and expansive and as I say, non-showoffy, that one part of it looks remarkably like another part of it, lending no distinction in specifying ‘these’ parts.

You may be standing in Nebraska, Oklahoma, or Kansas, granted, the listener will give you that, but no one wants to hear you talk about these parts when these parts extends for some hundreds and hundreds of miles in all directions. It is hard to get someone to take your personal these parts seriously when they cover a full third of an impressively-sized continent.

We were talking about the levelness of the landscape, which perhaps has a determinative effect on the personality of the residents and thus on their speaking patterns.

These other regions of the country sport soaring national forests, majestic mountains, ocean-kissed beaches, all that stuff, but...but...it’s not exactly polite to say it, but we have agreed between us to be frank in these discourses, doesn’t it seem that some of these landscapes are trying a little too hard? 

‘What are you hiding?’ one certain type of person might ask these landscapes, while another might diagnose a deep-seated lack of self-esteem from the get go. 'Why this big old show? This song and dance?'

We feel no such need here, no craving or longing for these florid flourishes of canyons and swamps and granite outcroppings, though yes, yes, these features are majestic or soul-stirring, or whatever, I suppose. I suppose.

The landscape here however is content with itself and quietly satisfied.

It doesn’t require gasps of awe or a brisk stirring of the soul. Perfectly nice of course, this awe and stirring business, but these grabs for attention, this need for the spotlight, just isn’t its way. 

Now, I will say that accents don’t really come to your attention until you get outside the region and hear the crazy way that other people talk. Then it is brought home to you.

On first traveling to the south the gal at the motel desk told me, when asked, that checkout time was ‘twave.’

There is only one response to a statement like and that is, “pardon?”

“Twave, that’s the check-out time.”

“One more time.”

“Twave. You know, ten o’clock, eleven o’clock, and twave o’clock.”

There are times, perhaps after a few sarsaparillas, or simply after conversation long into the night, that accents slip out among acquaintances, which you might never have known they had.

The vowels start to round and the consonants to purr, so that when otherwise this person might have said, ‘you guys going to the downtown harvest festival tomorrow?” it now comes out as “y’all goan to that harvest festival thang come the mawnin?”

It is hard to know what to do when faced with this switch in speech patterns.

As already discussed, natives around here don’t have an entirely other speech identity to pull out when it suits us; this is how we talk, this right here. We talk this way at two in the afternoon and two in the morning and all the times in between, sarsaparillas or not.

I suppose all you can do in the circumstances is to serve as a plain flat backdrop for this onrush of colorful idiom to bounce off of, like the concrete wall at the backcourt of every player of handball or racquetball.

A new fellow, a visiting relative of a neighbor, wandered in to this same harvest festival thing downtown that next day, and upon first hearing him speak you might have guessed that while he wasn’t necessarily directly from The Plains, he nonetheless likely didn't hail far from The Plains. Catch him now, though, this new fellow, see him over there holding court at the all-you-can-eat ice cream station, sounding as though he was born and bred in Drawl Falls Township smack in the center of Molasses County, Mississippi, “Why, Midgeville, properly speakin’, is just a wide spot in the road, and when I tell y'all that we live ten minutes outside Midgeville, then y’all get an idea of how far out we all is! Law, we are out there! It is what I call real country livin’. I tell ya, Midgeville looks like a danged metropolis from where we all set up homesteadin.”

You see how the endings have dropped off of words entirely, and the mere fact of living in a home can now only be referred to as homesteading, or excuse me, homesteadin.

It works though. People cluster round this fellow and eat it all up along with the free ice cream. A lady of about his age asks if he won't have another scoop or two of vanilla, just as though they are all on her front veranda, and he replies, "wail, missy ma'am, I bleeve I will, I just bleeve I will."

Wail, the Midwesterner has nothing to bring to this contest.

No one is going to be swept off their feet by the musical cadence of our speech, which has the same relation to one of these juicy accents that the drone of a single note on the bagpipe has to the rhythm section of the Count Basie Orchestra, and even if we offered something like, “and then I disarmed the bomb and swept the orphan children off to safety,” it wouldn’t likely make the same impression. Maybe if I said ‘chillun’ instead of children I would have a chance.

A foreign accent is worth more through the course of a long life than a Maserati, if I have my terms right, in any event a very expensive car. There was a boy whose family located here after fleeing Castro’s Cuba, this was in the latter years of grade school, and he had a Latin tinge to his speech, as though each sentence was dipped briefly in a rich South American broth, it was evident without being obvious. You can say with confidence that in regard to gaining attention from the opposing gender this fellow had it made for the rest of his life. Every time I checked in with him, and even now these many years later, he usually has to bring the conversation to an early close because some woman walking by wants to propose marriage. 

Other foreign accents leave their impression upon you, this is for sure, but you recover from most of them once you are out of their home territory, except for the Irish who really do seem to be singing their sentences, not doing something as mundane as simply saying them.

There are other accents as well that have nothing to do with region or heritage. Everyone can sense in even a handful of quiet words the buoyant warmth of loyalty or I suppose too the serrated scrape of glancing disdain, I do not care whether the syllable themselves rise, fall, or lie flat on their back. It is not a syllable thing, but a tone thing.

And then there are manners of speech that in terms of identifying a type, blow accents clean out of the water.

The grocery business three quarters of the way through the last century was rich in the wide range of human types, yes, that is a good way to put it, it was rich in the wide range of human types. I suppose most lines of work are. At the time also the slow heavy grind of  one generation replacing another, never a kind process, was well underway. Maybe that had something to do with it. 

To take but a single instance, if you were ever in a position to night stock in a grocery store in the 1970s, you might call across the storeroom in back to your colleagues, “say, Bill, or Andy, or Mike, any idea how we’re doing on the petite green peas over in the canned goods aisle? I can throw a couple boxes on the cart and trot ‘em over if we’re running low.”

Now, Bill or Andy might say, “oh, I think we’re good for the weekend, but make a note of it, we’ll check on Monday night,” or “can’t say, you might bring a half case just to be safe.”

Mike though apparently has been looking for something monumental to grapple with and pin to the mat and petite green peas, otherwise an unlikely candidate for the gathering storm, will just have to do.

“How are we doing on the petite green peas? How are we doing? I’ll tell you how we’re doing! How we’re doing is disgraceful! We’re near enough flat out! Them shelves are nearly bare of petite green peas and here you are standing around gabbing! Instead of asking questions why don’t you do something about it, man? The naked metal of the shelf which the petite peas ought to be stacked upon are staring up at the unwary customers like all the hopelessness of the world made visible, and here you stand discussing the ins and outs of the situation! Good God, I don’t know when I’ve heard such foolishness! Heave those boxes of peas onto your cart! Heave, I say! Put your back into it, man!” And so on.

While not an accent as such, at least as described in the textbooks, Mike’s response is distinctive and easily identifiable as the type of speech pattern that is heard in only one small patch of the universe, in Mikeland, where every third question from someone my age provokes this tempest of response and where, like a swollen river, the currents of temperament are always rising out of their banks. And we do get tornadoes and flooding around here, and he was born and bred, so perhaps we see the influence of landscape even in this instance.

I can hear it to this day though, the onslaught, and recall that the next time in that long ago year that I wanted to know the state of the petite green peas on the shelves I just walked over to the canned goods aisle and checked on the damned things myself.