Hillary Clinton is taking a bit of stick over her tendency to change her accent to suit her audience while on the campaign trail. I say "taking a bit of stick," a British expression, because even though I've lived in Flarduh for 18 years and lived in the Carolinas (both of 'em) before that, my husband is English and I have visited England now and again myself and, well, I'm a bit of a linguistic polyglot myself.
I myself doubt it was intentional; somehow, when I go home to Carolina, I pretty soon find myself talking Carolina too. It just happens without my noticing it. In any case, talking Arkansas to a bunch of South Carolinians isn't going to win anyone any gold stars. I know that Rush Limbaugh and Wonkette probably can't tell the difference, but between the brogue of low country South Carolina ("like a Scot trying to imitate Br'er Rabbit" an English friend described it) and the hillbilly snarl of Arkansas there is a vast difference. She probably started talking southern reflexively, because you just do, because every southerner knows (and no northerner understands) that every southern accent is different.
Al Sharpton was asked what he thought about this.
[quote begins from Beth Fouhy, Breitbart.com, "Clinton's Headed South: Will Drawl?"]
For his part, Sharpton said he
didn't notice Clinton's speech pattern changing much when she speaks to
black audiences, but said it wouldn't bother him if it did.
"When she speaks on the Senate floor, she's not as animated," Sharpton
said. "And it's normal for speech cadences to change because of the
style of your speech. Maybe she learned it in Arkansas. But I don't
think it's a programmed, intentional thing."
[quote ends]
He's so right. Besides, doing an Arkansas accent in lowcountry Carolina wouldn't cut a bit of ice with the locals. You might not be able to tell the difference, but we can.
When I was growing up in Lancaster, South Carolina, an upcountry milltown, we had endless fun mocking my mom's accent. She said "air" for "ear," "bear" for "beer," and pronounced her own name "Calline" instead of "Caroline." Her family's accents were even more outlandish: "stee-it" for "state" and "stow" for "store." But those same low country relatives secretly wondered why Calline was 'llowing her chirren to grow up talking with the vulgar accent of a no-account milltown in the South Carolina upcountry.
I mean, consider John Edwards. I knew the first time I heard him speak that he was from a certain part of North Carolina; the only thing that threw me was that he doesn't say "bovver" for "bother" or "eiver" for "either" the way my friend Mark (a well-educated tax attorney who grew up about 20 miles away from Edwards) does when he's "down home." I assume he trained himself not to, the way I trained myself to pronounce "want" and "wont" differently.
Posted by Teh Nutroots | At our sister blog, Buck Naked Politics, Deb Cupples saw off Maureen Dowd's Hillary-based fiction about the Democratic convention in fine style yesterday. (Maureen Dowd Talks out of her ... Ear Again ). Dowd, as we all know, is wicked envious of just about everyone, so her stock-in-trade is undifferentiated mockery from the sidelines If she told us the sun was shining, we'd assume she meant, er, out of her "ear." 
Camille Paglia 
Some days I say to myself that I just can't bear to go on writing political blogs. Some days it's like pulling teeth. Thank God for D Cupples', who can write three posts of laser-like focus and lethality to my one wambly, watered down one.
