Saturday, July 26, 2008

One more...

While reading this column earlier today, I was reminded of a man twenty years my senior I worked with a few years back. Following his example, I learned to be at ease with my southwest Virginia upbringing and my unmistakable accent. If only all lessons were so positive...

5 comments:

Σφιγξ said...

Actually, my father was instructed by Inez Hubbard at Crystal Spring. She was his favorite teacher. We would often walk by her house (many years ago, after she retired), and I was struck by her small stature, helped along by osteoporosis. I was taller at five or six then.

About accents: I really like our Germanic hinge-words even if my own diction makes frequent use of French-on-loan. Oftentimes, people say that "you don't sound like you're from around here." Meeting my mother, with her idiosyncratic, instaneous change of register from "Latin verbs spoken aloud" to a slight drawl (I've been asked if she was from Savannah, if that gives you any idea,) one would think that I am an exchange student.

Maybe in my attempt to resist acculturation, or self-invent, if you will, I have incorporated succinct, Goreyesque models or the threads of some academic essay or Elizabethan sonnet I've envied.
Yes, language is a means to hide one's true meaning, which may be a refusal of the ordinary or the banal.

I dismiss the idea and others who embrace it, however, that a regional dialect is something shameful or that is sounds ignorant...I will say that I wish people would be more thoughtful of the things they say--avoiding generalization--only because the world is words.

Southern expressions are some of the richest: they have a very visual quality...Early Cormac MacCarthy (who came from rural Tennesse) writes as a beautifully as Dante, who wrote in the vernacular.

I was reading Charles Wright's "The Appalachian Book of the Dead" and John Ashbery's "Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape" because it is time that I look to something that embraces where I live...the pockets of country and the underpass painted with cartoon, the rarified reading and recirculated hospital ward air...

Σφιγξ said...

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=177976

Σφιγξ said...

*McCarthy

Conchscooter said...

I hate strangers asking me where I'm from so I just make crap up, or agree with wherever they want me to be from, and let my mind wander to happier places.
The preservation of regional accents is another reason to kill your TV.

Σφιγξ said...

Yes, the thought suddenly occurs to me a bit late that I had hijacked this musing...