Why do they do this?
Clinton's was demonstrably worse -- there are clips of both at the link -- but for Harris it's a pain point. Her inauthenticity issues are not going to be improved by fake accents. Whatever else she may be, she's not a Southerner, and nobody raised in Canada or California ever did a plausible Southern accent. It's obviously fake and skin-crawling.
11 comments:
raised in Canada or California
Also Wisconsin. And we're proud of that./sarc
Heh. Jim Hanson is from up that way, as is one of his aides. They like to lapse into their old accents from time to time. I agree, we should definitely not attempt to cross the streams with those regional accents!
Having moved slightly south (Louisville) from Iowa, I've found I've adopted some local lingo and maybe a slight accent on certain words just by immersion. Also sweet tea :)
Skin-crawling--is that a dog whistle? [/sarc]
Eric Hines
I wish it were. I can't hear dog whistles.
Accent, schmaksent. When I am ordering meat from the butcher at the local Mexican grocery, I put my Spanish into Mexican mode, with a more nasal approach. But when speaking Spanish on the street, usually w my neighbors, I don't do that.
When south of the border, I usually modified my accent somewhat to fit in better, such as "ly" instead of "y" for "ll" when in Guatemala. Ditto changing 2nd person "vos" versus "tu" depending on where I was.
My mother lost her Okie accent when she moved north. Yet her cousin, who grew up in the same town as my mother, didn't lose her accent when she moved north after marrying a Yankee airman. I asked my mother why she lost her accent. She told me she got tired of strangers coming up to her and asking her, putting an arm around her shoulders, while asking her, "What part of Texas are you from, honey?"
Though I moved from NE to TX over 4 decades ago, I haven't changed my accent much, probably because I have always felt tied to both SW and NE. As such I feel no need to abandon one for the other. But I do use regionalisms, such as INsurance.
Politicians will phony up their accents if they feel they will get more positive than negative feedback for doing so. From Bob Dylan's 115th dream:
Now, the man on the stand he wants my vote
He’s a-runnin’ for office on the ballot note
He’s out there preachin’ in front of the steeple
Tellin’ me he loves all kinds-a people
(He’s eatin’ bagels
He’s eatin’ pizza
He’s eatin’ chitlins
He’s eatin’ bullshit!)
Let's see. Moved from SoCal to WNC when 17. Basically have lived in the South ever since. I gained a southern accent from immersion in the dialect. A few southerners can barely detect that I might not have been born and raised in the south.
On the other hand, my wife, who is from Mid Maine, what she calls "the upper south", still has her Maine accent even after living in South Carolina for the last 30 years or so. But then, she didn't move down here until her late 30's.
My family's from east Tennessee, where they have been since before the Revolutionary War. My father moved to Atlanta for work, though, so I was born and raised in Georgia. I've lived many places, both in and out of America, and occasionally people around WNC ask me where I'm from because they can tell it isn't here.
I don't think I have much of an accent, though, when I'm traveling outside the South. When I'm here I relax into it, because it helps make people comfortable. As one of the WNC guys said when I explained I was from the north Georgia mountains instead of the WNC mountains, "At least you're not a Yankee."
One problem with trying to fake a southern accent is that there are so many of them. The one my parents had was East Texas, but we were living in southwestern Colorado, so I could "do" both. My father had a business partner (in the 1960s) from Atlanta and he spoke with what I still mentally refer to as a "thick Southern" accent and I had trouble understanding him. I think it's his accent that politicians and actors try to emulate while mistakenly thinking this (coupled with questionable grammar) is how blacks now speak.
Donna B.
One problem with trying to fake a southern accent is that there are so many of them.
I worked in the oil field with a German national. He learned his English in Colombia, from Texan oil field expatriates. He did not speak with a Texas accent, but in a softer accent, perhaps Alabama. Or at least he sounded like people I knew from Alabama. He sounded as if he were a native English speaker, a rare feat for someone who had learned English in his 20s.
Had he learned from a standard American English speaker, he would probably not have sounded like a native English speaker. But his non-native rendition of Texan English sounded like another native English speaker accent.
The Texas- with Tennessee parents- accent that some elderly cousins born in the early 1900s had some resemblance to the Down East Maine accent that you can hear in Bert and I.
My East Texas parents both had Tennessee and Alabama ancestors. Not only does the accent in Bert and I sound familiar, but the humor is spot on as well.
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