Southern Accents

I raised two Southerners who seem to think they are not Southerners. They act as if they are merely passing through the territory, and that it's permissible to mock the locals (i.e."yokels"). Luke, alone, does not find it beneath him to pronounce his words in the Southern manner (as, probably, did Adam and Eve).

A person can't say "oil" around here without the mockery of an eye-roll. Ben and Allie find their sophisticated ears positively molested by their parent's pronunciation of the word "oil" (which is actually so bad, I can't think of an accurate enough phonetic equivalent to illustrate my point). The issue is the same for the words "toilet", "boil", and "spoiled" - all of which I use frequently.

The cause of this marked difference in accents between generations has to be the series of moral tales my children listened to on tape as youngsters: Adventures in Odyssey. None of the voice actors were from around these parts, and if you add to that the books they listened to on CD's, one can see the odds were stacked against the bestowal of any significant Southern language heritage.

Hence, the generation gap that causes our Southern children to linguistically cannibalize their Southern parents - a spectacle we witness every time we pull out the deep-fat fryer and fill it with "awl". (There. That's the closest I can get. But you still sort of have to round out your mouth a little on the "aw", making it sound more like an "o". But not exactly.) (Sigh.) (Whatever.)

But I also have to blame the lovelies lack of "hick" on the fact that they weren't raised, as I was, in Greenville, Mississippi - the place where I somehow learned to substitute "thar" for "there". An appalling development for my father who, as a brilliant, educated man, had worked hard to jettison most of the Mississippi Delta from his own accent. But soon after we left Mississippi, my male, fifth grade teacher, tidy and effete, broke me from using the word "ain't", and from the usage of the words "pin" for "pen" and "tin" for "ten". Eventually, I backslid on the "tin" and "pin" dealio, but for that one, brief shining period I was pretty cosmopolitan.

My sister successfully parlayed her Southern accent into quite the attention-getter in lower Missouri (because she's purty cute), but I bet you that her five Missouri-raised children, who are less easy to trick, still shake their heads at her.

My husband wonders, wisely, why anyone cares what we do in the South when there are those in the U.S. who say "tawk" instead of "talk" and "aiggs" instead of "eggs". So, it's primarily in the interest of modernity that I do not fully bemoan my children's lack of Southern accents. They are decent people, and it's silly to complain that they pronounce their "ings" (but I can sigh).

However, it's not always the new generation against the old; I, myself, fold in my lips judgmentally when I hear Arkansans replace "night" with "nyte". Even Allen, who was raised closer to the north than I (in Tennessee), takes occasional issue with my Mississippi pronunciations. Mainly, because he accuses me of believing I speak smarter than others, and finds it delicious to catch me in thoughtless mistakes. Now, admittedly, I can't be vigilant twenty-four hours a day, but I certainly don't think I'm smarter than anyone else.

Except maybe Tennesseans.