Terms Which Have Disappeared

BlueTrain said:

...And speaking of telephones, was anyone here ever on a "party line?" It was even in the first line of the dialogue on the old Lum and Abner radio show. The phone rings twice (or whatever) and Abner (possibly) said, "Why, Lum, I believe that's our ring!" I also recall coming home from school one day, probably in 1962 or 1963 and my step-mother (my mother died in 1959) asked me if I noticed anything new in the living room. It turned out that the phone had been fitted with one of those new-fangled spiral cords instead of the plain, straight one it used to have. I never noticed it.....

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I could be wrong, but the first time I think I learned about party lines was when I saw the Rock Hudson, Doris Day movie "Pillow Talk." In mid-state NJ, where I grew up, I don't believe party lines still existed by the late '60s.

When I lived in a very rural area NE of Buffalo, MO in the early 1980s we had a 3-party line. It was a given that the neighbor lady was in on every conversation.

Party lines and circuit preachers. I remember the latter, but the former had gone by the time I came around. You did only have to dial four digits though.

"One three four ring two, please."

I do remember the four digit telephone number (barely) but the next number came quickly thereafter, then the whole area code. I also remember when putting "city" on an envelope instead of the name of the city was sufficient for mailing a letter. Mr. Zip came a lot later.

LizzieMaine said:

That's a great picture. If you think the movie's snappy, you should read the play it's based on. Oooweee.

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I played both Otto and Leo at different times in my younger days. Never got the chance to play Gilda, though...

It is frankly a very difficult show to pull off since it was written as a star vehicle for Coward, Lunt, and Fontaine, who's like we shall never see again.

I must propose that show at the next planning meeting of our Little Theater board. It should give Mrs. Worms and Mrs. Hankins something to cluck about. They are always asking for "Wholesome, old-.fashioned plays"...

I realize that many things I remember were of commercial origin or otherwise heard over the radio rather than from ordinary conversation. Even then, many things people used to say came from things like radio shows, few of which I ever got a chance to hear. The ones I have heard were the latter shows like "Yours truly, Johnny Dollar." In any event, I don't know if anyone on radio still uses this expression:

Send in them cards and letters and help keep this program on the air.

That legacy lives on twice a year at every public radio pledge break.

That sort of direct appeal to listeners went way, way back in radio. In the early thirties, the Pepsodent Company, which sponsored both "Amos 'n' Andy" and "The Goldbergs", was worried about the bottom line, and considered dropping the latter program. But before they did so, they had the announcer read a brief appeal each night asking listeners to send in a flap from a box of Pepsodent Antiseptic if they wanted to keep the program going. They were deluged with box flaps, and kept the program going for another two years, until Gertrude Berg got wise to them and demanded a raise. Then no amount of box flaps could save her.

Old term german "Hupfdohle" (chorus dancer).

Not a term exactly, but have accents disappeared? Or has that always been happening? My mother-in-law, now 93, and her sister, now 90, speak with an accent that I sometimes have trouble understanding. My wife calls it an old Virginia accent. I don't think younger people have that accent.

One used to hear some wonderful New York accents in movies like the Bowery Boys, which may or may not have been a Bowery or East Side accent at all, for all I know, though I'm certain it was a New York accent (not to be confused with a Long Island accent). Chances are, there's still an accent but not the same one from 70 years ago. Huntz Hall's son, by the way, is dean of Washington Cathedral in Washington, DC, or was until recently. Funny how connections with the past can be so close by.

My inlaws had a party line at their cottage into the early aughts (most current). Just the rural area taking time to be upgraded.

There have been detailed linguistic studies done on the loss of the traditional New York accent, which has been on a steady decline since the 1950s, due largely to the changing demographics of New York City itself. When the most detailed study was done by William Labov in the mid-1960s, he found that 100 percent of native New Yorkers he surveyed over the age of 60 (born before 1906) pronounced "bird" as "boyd", but only 4 percent of those under 20 (born after 1946) did so. Nowadays, you're much more likely to hear a Carribbean accent in Brooklyn (or a flat Minnesota accent if you're in Williamsburg) nowadays than anything that sounds like Leo Gorcey.

But that accent -- though played up for comedy in the movies -- was very real in the Era. I have many hours of broadcast recordings from small Brooklyn radio stations from 1936 and 1937, and the traditional accent is often heard, from both men and women. There's a precinct cop who comes on to do safety talks occasionally, and he sounds exactly like you'd imagine a Brooklyn patrolman sounding in 1936. Similarly, a young woman who delivers a political talk on behalf of the Communist Party sounds very much like all those honking Brooklyn women played by Bea Benederet on a million radio shows.

It wasn't just working-class people who spoke in this accent. Broadcast recordings of New York city council meetings from 1938 reveal the accent was common even among upper-level politicians in the city -- all except city councilor/union activist Mike Quill, who had a rich Irish brogue.

One place you can hear vestiges of the old New York accent is New Orleans -- where speakers of the native "Yat" accent share many of the old erl-oil transpositions, the flat "a," and other traits. Linguists believe the accents derive from a common root -- mostly a blend of early 19th Century Irish, Italian, and German/Yiddish accents.

Lizzie would you say Donald Trump has a typical New York accent? I hear it but, must admit it is fainter than in older people. It is interesting to me that some very rich New Yorkers shared the same accent with their less sophisticated or well heeled contemporaries.

Here is Tom McCahill. He was born in Larchmont in 1907. His grandfather was one of the biggest libel lawyers in New York and his father a well known playboy and sportsman. He was educated at private schools in New York and had a fine arts degree from Yale. How would you characterize his accent?

Trump's father was born in the Bronx at the turn of the century, in a working-class German-immigrant family, in a neighborhood with a heavy German/Jewish population, and if he didn't speak the accent he would have been a very rare exception. Donald was born in 1946, and went to a fancy boarding school and college where, no doubt, his accent was refined out of him -- but like anyone who's born with an accent and later sheds it, he's fully capable of shifting back into it at will. Such "code switching" is a very common practice, where people will speak in standard English with one group for one purpose, and then switch to the native accent for other groups and other purposes. I routinely do this with my own accent.

I think that's what's happening when you see him speak on TV now -- if you go back and listen to tape of him from the '80s, when he was first becoming a media figure, the accent, while still there, tends to be subtler. But now, when he's speaking to his followers, he sounds to me like he's deliberately exaggerating the accent to sound more like one of The Peepul. A classic New York accent, due largely to the way it's been portrayed in the media over the decades, carries connotations of a tough, no-nonsense, two-fisted, streetwise character like William Bendix or Bugs Bunny -- which is exactly the type of character Mr. Trump, who, as a card-carrying member of SAG-AFTRA is no stranger to acting, is trying to portray.

Bernie Sanders, who was raised in a working-class family in 1940s Brooklyn, also has a native New York accent, which hasn't much been refined by the years he's lived in Vermont, and he, too, seems to exaggerate it when speaking to audiences. Note that both Trump and Sanders use the pronunciation "YUUUUUGE" when saying "huge" on the platform, but they'll usually say "huge" or "hyuge" in one-to-one interviews.

With McCahill, there's a definite New York trace there -- listen to the way he flats his "a's" -- and it sounds to me like he's exaggerating his r's. That's a sure sign of someone who grew up speaking a non-rhotic accent, which New Yorkese is, and is overcompensating by emphasizing the "r" sound.

For another example of a very refined New York accent listen to Dodgers broadcaster Vin Scully. Scully was born in the Bronx in 1927 and was educated at Fordham, and as a radio announcer he worked very hard to smooth out his accent, but it's still there. In airchecks of his broadcasts from the mid-fifties, you can hear him say things like "This is the Brooklyn Dodgers radio netwoik," and even after decades on the West Coast, he still has traces of his accent. Listen to him do a commercial for "Farmer John's Braownschweigeh" -- that "aow" in the middle and "eh" at the end are classic Old New York coming thru.

As far as popular culture depictions of a New York accent go, the best is still Ed Gardner on the radio comedy "Duffy's Tavern" in the 1940s. Although he drops in a lot of comedy malapropisms in the same way that Leo Gorcey did, Gardner's basic accent is an absolutely pure representation of what the real early 20th Century accent sounded like. Gardner, whose real name was "Poggenburg," was born in Queens in 1901, and it never left his voice. For an accurate representation of a later version of the accent, actor James Gregory as "Inspector Luger" on "Barney Miller" in the 1970s is worth listening to. For an accurate female version of the accent, any of the wartime radio work done by actress Shirley Booth -- who was Ed Gardner's first wife -- is worth seeking out.

As for Bugs accent, some say it's a Flatbush, some say, typical Jewish New York accent of the day, Mel Blanc said he combined equal parts Bronx and Brooklyn.

"I'm going back to Perth Amboy!"

I think it's a common thing to stress one's accent (if indeed one has an accent), usually for the comic effect. The rest of the time when you lapse into your "original" language or accent, it's just informal speech. It's probably true, too, that there is less formal speech now. But one is usually very conscious of the way one is speaking because you are aware of your audience and how it might affect how they hear you and what they think of you. It's almost a form of acting but to an extent, you are playing to expectations or alternately, to overcome them.

It exists in other forms, too. At the church we sometimes attend, the service is very structured, to say the least. As part of the service, there is a reading from the gospels. A little procession is formed with lights and everything and they come down the center aisle and have the reading in the middle of the congregation. But the reading is actually sung (plainsong), as is much of the service. Well, there is a female assistant rector and to hear her sing the reading in her normal high pitched voice is startling. Also in this area one hears strong Southern accents which my wife claims are "old-fashioned." But sometimes you'd swear they were faking it.

And speaking of terms you don't hear anymore, when those radio preachers exhorted you to send in them cards and letters, he was addressing his listeners "out there in radio land." The term somehow seems to make even more sense since the internet and forums came along.

Stearmen said:

As for Bugs accent, some say it's a Flatbush, some say, typical Jewish New York accent of the day, Mel Blanc said he combined equal parts Bronx and Brooklyn.

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Where Bugs doesn't quite get it right is his er/oi transposition. A lot of people "doing" a New York accent will simply substitute "oi" for "er", and vice versa, but that's not entirely correct. It's not so much a transposition of sounds as a merging of them -- both er and oi become a sort of blend which is hard to render in print, but sounds sort of like a slurred "eroi." A coin is a "ceroin" not a "kern," and Archie Bunker to the contrary, a toilet is a "teroilet," not a "terlet." It's hard to visualize in written form without resorting to phonological notation, but if you hear an actual speaker and a comedy speaker side by side you'll pick it up immediately.

I'm going to see what my office neighbor, a native from Brooklyn and later, Long Island. We even have another Long Islander here and they both graduated from the same school even.

I have read on several occasions that Mel Blanc was combining Bronx and Brooklyn accents. To a Southerner, there are no identifiable internal differences in Bugs' speech. Bugs Bunny just talks like a Yankee...

On the other hand, I can name and usually identify at least a dozen regional variations of Southern accent. (Wait! We don't have an accent - you do.)

Glad to have been born and bred in southern Ontario by the sounds of it!