I had an uncle once who doted on his nephews and nieces. He was a hard-drinking, ex-Army MP, ex-Merchant Marine veteran with a lazy approach to life. He’d take us kids out on weekends to buy comic books, and then fall asleep on the couch while we stayed up late rotting our brains with said comic books and late night creature features. He was also a confirmed bachelor almost his entire life. I had a teacher in junior high who was the same age he was, was always asking about him, and as it turned out, had once asked him to marry her, and he turned her down.
Was he gay? I don’t know, and don’t really care. He was my uncle, and his sex life was none of my business (and he didn’t make it mine). I do know that late in life he settled down with a woman and seemed to be happy. Even that isn’t contraindicative, because human lives and relationships are complicated.
I mention this because the press coverage of Lindsey Graham drives me nuts. Once again, here’s another piece speculating on whether he’s gay, and also implying that liberals are mocking him for being gay.
None of it makes any sense.
There’s no reason to even suspect that he’s gay: unmarried is different than having a same sex relationship, just like being an atheist isn’t the same as being religious. There are also all these weird assumptions about the signals for being gay.
Even in 2015, many Americans still assume that anybody who isn’t partnered at a certain age must be homosexual. The fact that Graham talks in a somewhat stereotypically gay voice only makes the assumption more irresistible.
If Graham were more traditionally masculine, I seriously doubt he’d be dogged by so many questions about his bachelorhood. The fun of poking Graham about his personal life lies in the ambiguous presentation of his sexuality.
Whoa. What is a “stereotypically gay voice”? What is “traditionally masculine”, and why assume that masculine is associated with heterosexuality?
Does the author even know any gay men?
But the article does point out another problem: Jon Stewart and John Oliver, who have this schtick mocking Graham by playing on his pronounced Southern accent. The problem isn’t gayness…it’s that they treat the dialect of a significant chunk of the country as a great big joke.
Also, their corny Southern accents are terrible. Stewart is always segueing into a hammy Southern Belle routine, because his accent is so awful he has to exaggerate it into something stupidly recognizable.
I think, in general, liberals are going to be mostly unperturbed by a gay candidate, so that would be an absurd line of attack. But there is still an unfortunate side of classism and contempt for the South that is ultimately damaging to the liberal cause. Add to the list of things that fuel Southern resentment the fact that so many Yankees think the way they talk is effeminate and indicative of low intelligence (and equating those two is another level of problem).
We liberals love to talk about diversity, as long is it doesn’t include people whose voices are a little less flat and nasal than the Midwestern pattern.
Graham actually has one of the more pleasant voices in the senate. It’s the brain behind it that is rotten.
Not that it makes it right, but do you think liberals mock him as being gay because they know it will bug the crap out of him rather then any gay animosity?
Graham actually has one of the more pleasant voices in the senate.
Yeah? Which of his albums is your favorite?
He doesn’t sound gay at all … but I’ve been in the south all my life so most southern accents sound fairly normal to me anyway. His accent is fairly light, too, not like my grandmother who had a very heavy Georgia accent.
It’s definitely classist and I agree the South gets the worst of it, but we northeastern liberals often make the same judgements about our own regional lower-class accents. The regional bias is just icing on the classist cake.
Smacking on Graham for his accent is a cheap shot. The one characteristic (accent) has nothing to do with the actual problem (being a bad public servant), but our culture doesn’t condemn people targeting others for their accent. It’s a cheap shot to land, and harmful for all the collateral damage it does to people who have that accent but are not asinine senators.
god @ 1, i thought you were omniscient. or was yours a rhetorical question?
at the very least, it seems apparent to lowly mortal me that it’s the hypocrisy that most liberals are getting at: the idea of a much-rumored-stereotypical-closeted-but-effeminate-and-overcompensating-chickenhawk gay person seeking to lead a party that’s so screechingly homophobic.
God,
I don’t care to speculate because it doesn’t make any difference.
It really does bother me that Southerners are acceptable targets on the left. Anti-Southern bigotry has gotten me to unsubscribe from several liberal news channels on youtube. Though I have seen some pushback on Freethoughtblogs, not just from you, but from commenters. I remember clearly someone saying something to the effect of “Who is suprised that Jim Bob Duggar is so horrible, I mean he has two first names” and a bunch of commenters called him out on this obvious instance of anti-Southern bigotry.
The Southern dialect is complicated politically. Some racist folks even appropriate it to seem more relatable to certain groups of people in order to essentially trick them into voting for their own disinterest *cough*George W Bush*cough*. By othering people who speak it, you’re helping them.
We are sliding into homphobic and sexist territory and it hasn’t even been 10 comments yet.
That’s precisely what PZ’s post was against.
@7 Addendum: The specific thing that really ticked me off was the time someone claimed that the fact that Southerners talked slower because they were dumber. Psycholinguistically this has literally no evidence supporting it.
Do Yankees actually think a southern accent is effeminate? If true, I’m surprised. I’m from rural NC, grew up in poverty, and I’ve always associated that accent with an authoritarian patriarchal viewpoint. My wife, who is from Pittsburgh, thinks it sounds genteel while I’ve always considered it the sound of ignorance and racism.
I’m sure it’s just a defect in myself, but I still cringe when I hear it from family members. Even more so when I know it’s an affectation.
Heh, I’m a Northern by birth (and a wearer of the Blue by inclination), but I gotta say, I love Southern accents. A tad hard to understand, sometimes, but they tend to have a warm, rolling sound. While the South may have a bad reputation for some things, it has some good sides too (Southern cooking, southern hospitality), and the accent is part of that.
Speaking of bad reputation, is the Southern accent “joke” that Stewart and Oliver adopt a class joke or a joke about the stereotype about the politics of the people that live in the South? Honest question, I don’t watch either of them, but it strikes me that some groups of Southerners (the North Carolina legislature, for example) have a reputation for being backwards, bigoted assholes that is quite fairly earned, and has nothing to do with class. That is, is Stewart mocking Southerners, or Southern Republicans? [I have no interest in defending Stewart, here, the dude is quite capable of inserting his foot in his mouth. It’s just that living in North Carolina, I mock “my” representatives all the time.]
sugarfrosted,
On the other hand you have the stereotype of empty headed girls or women who chatter incessantly.
Bigotry is like bullying – bullies want to hurt you so they’ll find something. Doesn’t matter if it doesn’t make sense.
If Lindsey Graham doesn’t want to be ridiculed, he shouldn’t be ridiculous.
I see your point about his accent, but I just can’t work up any sympathy for him.
He recently said that he knows all Iranians are liars because he worked in a South Carolina pool hall. All bets are off when you try to appeal to a constituency that isn’t automatically repulsed by something as stupid as that.
Or why assume it has anything to do with marriage? Is Mike Huckabee’s more masculine? Are any of the other male candidates’ marriages masculine? The number of presidents and presidential candidates with unfaithful marriages is hardly a ringing endorsement for the institution anyway, particularly when coupled with the messiah complex that seems to be practically a requirement of the job.
Whatever his reasons for remaining single, they’re entirely his own, and it’s certainly better than marrying some unfortunate simply to placate voters who might be uncomfortable with the thought of an unmarried president, or, yes, even a gay one. And the rather sordid history of outed politicians who’ve spent years or even decades maintaining heterosexual marriages to the ignorance of their spouses and/or constituents about their orientation is reason enough to stop insisting they all be married.
If someone is despicable, there is no need to mock them for their physical traits or possible sexual preferences (insulting other people who share them at the same time) when there is plenty to criticize or mock them for.
Is that really so different from the way you set blockquotes from religious folks in Comic Sans? I mean, to equate it with the sort of babbling idiocy from the people you’re quoting seems very unjust. To the font, that is — and I say that as someone who’s definitely not a fan of it.
Also, on a side note about late night comedians and accent stereotypes, the South Carolina-born Stephen Colbert told 60 Minutes in 2006 this about his lack of one:
I’ve never heard of Southern Accent being equated with Effeminate. What? I’ve heard it equated with conservatism, lack of education, and bigotry which is bad, but I don’t know where you get femininity from.
I mean Jon Stewart mocks Graham’s accent because he’s mocking Graham. He does the same with Bush, Cheney, and Obama as well. Obviously if you’re mocking someone’s speech pattern you’re going to exaggerate. I don’t get it.
Wow, what a complete non-sequitur. Are you not supposed to mock people with pleasant voices? Does the pleasantness of the voice have to do with it being “feminine” or not? What are we even talking about?
@Hoosier X, #13:
I was about to say that this sounded very like victim blaming, but you proved your point with Graham’s pool hall statement.
Right. Because the only objection anyone could possibly have to Southern US culture is the idea that Southerners are, on average, of lower socioeconomic status.
I didn’t actually think the Southern drawl was considered stereotypically effeminate.
@Jim McNary, #21:
I don’t think it is the drawl that’s considered stereotypically effeminate, to me it’s the slight lisp that lightens the vowels in Graham’s case. Given my cultural background, this is stereotypical of a certain type of male gayness. Fortunately, I found my preconceptions questioned years ago by getting to know men who spoke like this and clearly weren’t gay, and other men who are gay and don’t speak like this at all…
There was a lot of similar nonsense around the time that (now retired) Justice Souter was nominated for the Supreme Court. I have never been a fan of any GOP judicial appointment, but Souter ultimately did turn out to be one of the good guys (by my calculation) and the treatment given him by the media continues to rankle. There is no such thing as a liberal media, but there are certainly a lot of tittering middle school students who style themselves political reporters.
I’m not a big fan of Graham in any capacity, but his marital status has nothing whatsoever to do with it.
In fact, to most people, simply reading “Oh my god, you have GOT to sip this coconut latte!” conjures up a more feminine voice than “Y’all wanna go muddin’?”
Not that any of this matters. But yeah. People make fun of Lindsey Graham’s voice because he speaks in a high register and sometimes has a bit of a lisp. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but if he spoke like Junior Brown he’d be mocked differently.
Re: HolyPinkUnicorn @17
Colbert’s explanation rings half true for me.
< Personal anecdote warning >
In my experience as a child in NC public schools, regardless of class, the stronger one’s accent, the stronger one’s resistance to new information. Surely confirmation bias affects my memories but I can’t think of a counter example.
My husband didn’t get married until he was 47. And he was a librarian. A lot of people assumed he was gay. He just never really found anyone he wanted to marry, and was a confirmed bachelor. But, like your uncle, he got married later in life, and is quite happy. And he is not gay, even though he was a librarian and prefers the kind of art my parents have decided is a signal for gay (because it’s similar to what my ex-husband liked, and he turned out to be gay). Being single in this world is a signal of something wrong with you to many people. My own unmarried status (I had been divorced for 12 years when my husband and I met, and was happily divorced and living alone with my son) had given a great deal of concern to many people, but my status as a mother at least confirmed to them that I was not a lesbian (why? I don’t the hell know. Many lesbians choose to have children). This is a weird world.
As a Northeastern (originally ) liberal, I admit it’s a stretch for me not to have a kneejerk dislike of southern accents. That is clearly wrong and I will continue to try harder. Some of it is just the political association. I don’t mind listening to Bill Clinton or Jimmy Carter, though both have identifiably Southern accents. But Lindsey Graham grates and and Rick Perry makes me laugh out loud (Let’s git Amurica workin’ agin’ — actually one of the smartest ideas I have heard from a presidential candidate, but I am skeptical of his plans for accomplishing it).
There’s really no excuse for criticizing anyone’s dialect. Languages are learned and they are equally expressive. To identify one as wrong or worse is just nonsense. So if youse can put up with my Philadelphia “wooder” for “water” when I’m not careful about it, I can handle other mutually intelligible variations.
Graham’s accent and mannerisms do remind me of someone who might be a character in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. It’s the juxtaposition of the genteel, soft, pleasant accent and his appearance [a clean-shaven, slicked back PZesque body – I’m ducking right now] with the tough guy foreign policy stance. He just can’t carry out the stereotypical tough guy character. So, he’s just too easy a target.
Anyway, with these burdens, he’s not getting anywhere close to that button on the “football”, anyhow.
naturalcynic #28
I believe you are looking for the word “oleaginous.” (And it’s not every day I get to say that.)
“as long is it doesn’t include people whose voices are a little less flat and nasal than the Midwestern pattern.”
“they tend to have a warm, rolling sound”
“slight lisp that lightens the vowels”
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000983.html
What is a “flat” accent, what is a “warm”-sounding language, and what on earth does a lisp, i.e. a palatalisation and/or fricativisation of certain consonants, have to do with “lightening” vowels, whatever a “light” vowel even is?
(Fair warning, this grumpy post is likely going to be a shit-and-run. I’m tired and about to go to sleep and probably getting unreasonably peevish about people free-associating gibberish when they describe language. Still, the linked article is fairly interesting.)
The more I think about it, I’m not even sure I dislike Southern accents. I’d listen to Woody Guthrie, Willie Nelson, or Johnny Cash any day of the week. Willie Nelson in particular would be a natural born orator if he weren’t a musician. His enunciation is both careful and expressive.
No one thinks the Southern accent is across the board effeminate. Southern accents are also used as shorthand for “rugged, real American” in addition to its shorthand for “ignorant moron” (with sadly large amounts of overlap). There is real classism there. But Stewart’s use of the Southern Belle voice for Graham kind of contradicts classism, don’t it? It’s making fun of Graham for being an aloof, selfish aristocrat, not an ignorant Southern yokel. Yeah, I can see how there’s a at least a bit of sexism in there, but I know I personally wouldn’t make fun of his effeminacy nearly as much if he weren’t putting on so many pathetic attempts to appear butch.
Also, with a lot of these complaints about prejudice against the South, there’s usually a point that’s somewhat complicated by context. Yes, New York liberals have a condescending, insulting attitude towards the South; we’re also fucking sick of seeing transparent Dixie pandering and getting told we’re not “real” Americans. The South is unfairly stereotyped as ignorant; they also have a culture that proudly celebrates ignorance. In some ways, the South is still suffering from the prolonged effects of economic devastation in a way similar to victims of imperialism in the Third World; but that devastation happened because the South fought a war FOR SLAVERY.
In every case, the worst you can say about anti-Southern sentiment is that it’s unfair to the minority of people who reject the predominant values of the South itself. It feels like you might as well say we can’t make fun of Christianity because of the minority of Christians who DON’T hate gays (but don’t really argue as much as they should with the people who do).
sugarfrosted #7
It comes principally from looking at the politically conservative skew of the Southeast without looking at the reasons for same.
The problem is that the political economy of the American Southeast hasn’t actually changed sigificantly in the last ~400 years. The economy is still heavily based on extractive industries and plantation agriculture, which are controlled by the same moneyed elites, who control politics in the area by means both direct and indirect (an excellent analysis of how this plays out can be found in John Gaventa’s book Power and Powerlessness:
Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley).
…This is a common stereotype that I have econuntered, about slow-moving dialects generally. AFAICT, the relevant factor is actually urbanization; dialects from rural areas tend to be slower, while really huge cities are famous for their rapid-fire modes of speech (NYC, Paris, and London all have this reputation in my experience, for instance).
Nepos #11
There’s not really much difference; see above.
PZ:
Re: the “gay” voice-
Years ago, I thought I had a “gay” voice. When I would hear myself on recordings, I thought “you don’t sound like a guy; you sound more like a woman”. Now that I have a much better understanding of how activities and traits are gendered in our culture, I know there’s no such thing as a “gay” voice, and if I did “sound like a woman” (whatever that means), there would be nary a problem with that.
****
God @1:
(love the nym)
Mocking someone by using homosexuality as a cudgel is no better than actively displaying animosity towards homosexuality. I understand what you’re getting at, but given that we live in a society that continues to demean people who are not heterosexual, I don’t think it’s a good idea to punch down in any way, whether through humor or deliberate attempts at offense.
****
Hoosier X @13:
In this case, though, it’s not about him, but about the attitudes of the people mocking him.
You don’t need to have sympathy for him to recognize it’s wrong to mock someone for “sounding gay” or not being “traditionally masculine”.
****
John Small Berries @16:
PZs use of comic sans is to mock ideas.
****
doublereed @18:
I’m right there with you. I still live in the Southeast US and have for the last ~30 years. On the whole, southern accents do not strike me as effeminate (and I’ll add that even if they did, there would be nothing wrong with that, and it would be annoying if people were mocked for that too).
****
paulbc @29:
Thanks for the new word!
THANK YOU for this.
Sincerely,
A Southern progressive who is so tired of all the South-bashing.
Now if we can just get folks to stop telling us we should abandon our home for “brighter” regions.
Speculation about Lindsay Graham’s sexual orientation could be motivated by the observation that so many Republican officials who took anti-gay positions have been later been discovered to be gay. That kind of hypocrisy is loathsome. Denny Hastert comes to mind, but his problem isn’t “The Gay”, but pedophilia (but still, same-sex).
I certainly can’t complain about Southern accents. The maternal grandparents grew up in Tennessee, and moved north during WWII to work in factories. So my mother has a Tennessee accent diluted by years in Michigan. I get near Southern accents, I unconsciously overlay my Michigan roots with the Tennessee accent I heard for years. Confuses those in the South, used to locating state/locality by accents.
cathynewman @36, no, we don’t want people to leave, we need more progressive people in the South!
Left-leaning (that is, in favor of things like justice and equality) North Carolinians have been putting up a heck of a fight with things like “Moral Mondays”, where people protest outside the legislature. And there is a lot to protest. Like that goofy law allowing magistrates to refuse to perform any wedding that is against their religious beliefs.
Luckily, North Carolina is growing, and the areas that are growing (urban areas around the Triangle, the Triad, and Charlotte) are generally much more liberal than the rural areas.
Oh, I say “y’all” and “bless your heart”, does that mean I speak Southern?
Unfortunately, there is always a vocal portion of Democrats who are happy to drag out anti-gay bigotry in order to mock Republicans, so I’ll be surprised if that’s not happening to Graham. As far as I can tell, doing that has always worked against Democrats, but Democrats seem to be rather fond of rhetoric that doesn’t work.
I think it can be relevant to point out hypocrisy, so long as there is some consideration for the fact that in some cases hypocrisy can be far more difficult to avoid than in others, but when it comes to the phenomenon of Democrats using anti-gay bigotry, I think they often seek to disguise it has criticism of hypocrisy, so I think it’s necessary to be skeptical of “I am just pointing out hypocrisy” claims.
Democrats mocking Southern accents is probably more common, and also atrocious, and I think it largely amounts to a message of “we categorically group all the poor red staters with the same people who are ruining their lives, so hooray, vote for us, even though our genius leaders will eagerly obstruct any red state Democrat left of Byrd” .
Re: southern accent as effeminate
There is an episode of King of the Hill where Bobby goes to the south and comes back with slippers, a day robe (or smoking jacket, what have you) and a drawl. He is also seen as effeminate. So I think that is the stereotype people get. I don’t agree with it but am culturally aware of it.
I’m Calif born and raised; my ,mom never quite lost her Brooklyn vowels. Since spending two weeks in Kentucky — mainly Louisville and Whitesburg –, several decades back, meeting with all sorts of wonderful folks, I find Kentucky voices very appealing and associate them with ‘smart.’
So. Carolina voices are harder for me follow, especially when the speaker is talking fast. Hearing Lindsey Graham just irritates the crap out of me, but that’s a reaction to what I take as willful ignorance and meanness on his part. I had the same reaction to Ronald Reagan.
@Zeppelin, #30:
For when your return…
Re: my comment:
My context:
Light/dark vowels is a common description when singing, especially when trying to get multiple voices to blend which we discuss in our choir. There is an (arbitrary) musical convention regarding “light” and “dark” sounding vowels. The position of the tongue in the mouth influences the timbre of the voice. Having a lisp means that the tongue is in a different position – try it yourself: sound “lisp” and “lithp” out loud – the sound of the vowel is altered by the need to place the tongue in different positions to sound the words. To my ear it is a lightening of the vowel.
Zeppelin:
What is a “flat” accent, what is a “warm”-sounding language, and what on earth does a lisp, i.e. a palatalisation and/or fricativisation of certain consonants, have to do with “lightening” vowels, whatever a “light” vowel even is?
Warm sounding language is exactly what it sounds like. Are you really not familiar with cold or warm tone in speaking? as in “cold impersonal” or “warm and friendly?”
I loathe Graham. Like Hoosier X said, if he doesn’t want to be ridiculed, he shouldn’t be ridiculous. I guess since I since I live here, I’m supposed to call this my state, and it is for the worse because of Graham.
As person who has lived in the south for a lifetime, I am no southerner. I have never been one (um, mostly according to the southerners around me), I do not have a southern accent (again, mostly according to the southerners around me), and my personal lifelong southern experience has created in me someone perfectly contemptuous of nearly the entire region, not just my part of Sux Carolina. I am trying very hard (damn internet making me see people as human) to stop ‘southern bashing’ as a monolith, but it’s not easy. The southerners I know (and by that I mean the ones I know, not a monolithic south) made it perfectly clear over 4 of my last 5 decades that I do not fit here is because I didn’t like the things they liked, I didn’t do the things they did, I didn’t fit, I don’t sound like them, and they labeled me smart for some of the ways I was different, then they made sure I understood that if I’d just stop being ‘that way’, they would not have to treat me the way they did.
There is plenty of stuff here fully mock-worthy without worrying about how people speak when they say it. Or what their sexuality may be. I still have a lot of days when my initial reaction is to scorch the earth here and salt it, and start over, but I’m working on that.
This is a pleasant surprise. I read and comment on a number of progressive blogs, and I seem to spend as much time correcting hateful southern stereotypes as anything else. Some of the things people say are just unbelievable. If progressives want to win over more southerners they can start by treating us like human beings, not subhuman mongrels.
karpad @44
Why is election coverage in the U.S. just so awful? Graham has some of the most awful foreign policy of anyone in U.S. political circles, and we’re discussing the minutiae of his accent, and a non-scandal in his home life?
roachiesmom @47:
I think you forgot to close your blockquote tag. When you blockquote, it should look like this-
<blockquote>place text here</blockquote>
The forward slash is necessary to close your tag.
I just had a thought to see if I could come up with an opinion and so far all I’m getting is “thank goodness for whoever it is he’s not married to.”
Another problem faced by people with southern accents: audio technology works against you (us).
Some years ago I had an interesting conversation with the new owner of a radio station in a mid-sized town in SW Mississippi. She was quite unhappy that she could not hire local people for on-air talent: the nasal overtones in area accents reverberated unpleasantly in microphones, such that even those who’d spent their entire lives speaking in and listening to identical speech patterns actively disliked the way they sounded on radio speakers. (I suspect something similar may occur with NE US/Canadian voices, ayep.)
I don’t care about Graham’s marital status or sexual orientation. I do care that he advocated a preemptive strike on Iran, his claim that climate change is “overstated”, his opposition to extending gun buyer background checks, his opposition to Obamacare (because it is Obamacare), his casual racism towards Iranians based on some supposed behavior in a pool hall, and his desire to “surge” American troops to Iraq to fight ISIS.
Pierce R. Butler @51: must be similar to how comms equipment in planes airports make French Canadian accents completely unintelligible.
personally, I make fun of Graham’s accent and unmarital status because of his political stance. To do the reverse: hate his political stance because of his accent, etc is the classic ad hominem fallacy. I want to arrogantly ascribe my stance as the exact reversal: so uhm nad hominem(?).
My reaction to Stewart’s mocking of Graham, looks to me the same, that he is mocking his accent because of his politics, not mocking the accent itself. ;-( but that’s just my opinion…
Zepplin
I can’t speak for PZ, of course, but it often means standard American broadcast English, Johnny Carson English, NBC English, or a Mid-Western accent. You can find programs to teach you the accent if you’re going into broadcasting.
It’s the accent that isn’t Southern, Canadian, Tidewater, New York, Philadelphia, New England, and so on. It’s often thought of as “not an accent,” but that’s just crazy talk. Everybody has an accent. I believe Robert McNeill called it “Mid-Atlantic Flat-A” in his series on English, but I can’t confirm that.
The funny thing about the “Southern” accent is that there isn’t one. There are in fact many. People in East Tennessee have a different accent from those in West Tennessee, much less southward into the Delta and then Louisiana. The Tidewater accent of Virginia is a beast unto itself. I’m from Florida, so something of a “cracker” accent but mostly Southernisms from my college days in East Tennessee.
roachiesmom @ 45 My sincere sympathies to you. I don’t know how anyone lives in the South that isn’t of the South. I too felt like an alien living there, but was lucky enough to move away on a whim a long time ago. I can barely bring myself to go back to see my mother.
Gee, maybe if Southerners don’t want to be ridiculed, they should stop celebrating their bigotry and ignorance, and recognize the fact that they started (and lost) a war over the supposed “right” to own people as property.
Ditching the Confederate Flag and admitting it’s a symbol of treason instead of whining about how it’s “not racist” because it’s your “heritage” would be a nice start, too, thanks.
Echoing @57 WMDKitty — Survivor
I think the biggest problem with the accent is that even the southerners I know will rely on it and exaggerate it when they are either trying to sound dumb intentionally – think “rednecks” who like to parade intentional ignorance or outright offensiveness, I have known too many people like that – or conversely that it is the only way to be a “real” American.
As someone from around the south west, personally I find the sound of certain midwestern and north eastern accents far more grating.
Actually, I should have said “accents” since the southern accent isn’t singular.
And thinking about it more, I don’t have any issue with John Oliver/Jon Stewart mocking Graham’s manner of speech. They do it to everyone when exaggerating including east coast accents (like say New Jersey) or various speech patterns. It’s easier to exaggerate his accent than, say, someone from New Mexico is all.
As an outsider to the US linguistic and political communities, I have to say that in the media that finds its way to England your “Southern” US accents are almost invariably associated with a stereotype. Either it’s being very thick and inbred (the whooping Redneck), being very right-wing and obnoxious (the oleaginous “charismatic” christian preacher), or being a genteel antebellum stereotype who dresses like Colonel Sanders and complains about the heat. Though there are one or two exceptions. We don’t tend to get much of your televised political commentary though, so this stereotyping in a specifically political context has eluded me up ’till now.
In England we have a slightly different relationship between accents and political stereotyping. Here the prestigious, middle-class south-eastern accent forms (RP, Home Counties) tend to be associated with the evil right-wing party (the Tories), while less prestigious, working-class accents from the industrial North (Brummie, Mancunian, Yorkshire etc.) tend to be associated with voting Labour (once the left-wing party, now sadly centrists only a shade less nasty than the Tories). Traditionally it has been the working class poor who voted for the left and the middle-class rich who voted for the right, so our left has never made fun of the accents of the North. In any case our accent-based stereotyping tends to lean on issues of class and supposed refinement rather than native intelligence – indeed, the stereotypical Tory upper-class twit is supposed to have had an extremely expensive public school education, but remains oblivious and stupid despite it all.
WMDKitty @57:
Please be more precise with your language. Since not all Southerners are bigoted or intolerant, not all Southerners should be mocked or ridiculed. And you cannot use a Southern accent to determine whether or not someone in the south is bigoted or intolerant. After all, there are plenty of progressive people living in the South, and there are plenty of People of Color who live in the South-and both groups are likely to have Southern accents to some degree. Neither group has a tendency to support bigotry and racism. If one were to use Southern accents as a justification for mocking or ridiculing a Southerner, that person would be painting with a broad brush, including those that do not deserve it.
Some people are just asexual, they are just not interested the way rest of us are.
@ cartomancer etc.
My dialect is British RP and I live in Texas.
On the phone I am regularly considered female or addressed as “Ma’am” (or however one should represent that), on occasion even after telling them my first name!
So I figure that dialect/accent tell nothing about the speaker.
Being from the western edge of Dixie (Houston), I’ve always found attempts by non-Southerners to portray a Southern accent irritating. Actors who try usually come out sounding like bad impersonations of Jimmy Carter.
In fact, Southern accents are quite diverse, and not all are slow drawls. Down home natives of East Texas, for example, speak with a clipped twang. S. Louisiana residents display the Cajun influence, and in New Orleans, one may still hear that beautiful Creole lilt, though it is fading under the glare of modern influences, alas.
No doubt Upper Midwestern natives are sick of hearing their native accent mangled and lampooned, too. Here’s to the delightful regional accents of American English: may they survive and grow, and let them not be mocked.
But, but, -all- of you ‘merkins talk funny…
Southerners are fat, dumb, and lazy.
Look up the state-by-state statistics regarding obesity rates, educational attainment, and economic productivity.
Or are we just supposed to ignore facts that hurt some people’s feelings?
Generalizations are fat, dumb, and lazy.
Please cite evidence that southerners are more dumb and lazy than their counterparts? Using “fat” as an insult like that is really problematic, as well.
Cry my southern bred and born ass a fucking river for the poor, beleagured south, a huge proportion of which would outlaw interacial marriage, and many other freedoms, if they could. They (as a culture) revel in their ignorance and other negative traits and deserve all the verbal flogging they can get. The only thing I agree with PZ on is that northerners should stop trying to do southern accents, especially New Orleans ones. They never ever get them right.
In case anyone was wondering whether bigotry against the South was a thing, this thread illustrates it nicely.
Yes, much of the South is red–but a lot of it isn’t. As I noted above, North Carolina is rapidly moving to blue, and the Republicans are pulling as many dirty tricks as they possibly can to try to prevent Democrats from taking over.
Tarring “Southerners” as ignorant bigots is just as stupid as any other prejudice, especially since “Southerner” isn’t even an ethnic group!
Now, if you wanted to lambast “neo-Confederates”, go right ahead, those assholes deserve it. Otherwise, please just stick to “Republican”. Because frankly, Southern Republicans really are no more evil than Republicans from anywhere else. Michelle Bachman and Scott Walker aren’t Southerners, y’know.
Just posting to say I complete agree with what Nepos said in 70.
@0, PZ Myers
The reasons are hardly conclusive. However, the GSS 2008-2014 data suggests unmarried men over the age of 40 are significantly more likely to be gay than the general population — chances of roughly 1 in 10 as opposed to roughly 1 in 50. (Of course, there are other possible reasons, like being an unmarriageable asshole.)
Additionally, several years back blogger Michael Rogers indicated he had corroborating evidence about Graham. As far as I can tell, Rogers never released it; however, he also never publicly retracted the claim. Again, it hardly seems even remotely conclusive (I’d still guess Bayesian probability under 50%), but nonetheless seems reason to suspect the possibility — and suspect him more than other currently serving Republican senators.
joel @66:
Stuff like this just isn’t helpful and strikes me as demeaning to vast swathes of people who live in the South. And that’s about the nicest thing I can say to you. Nepos @70 does a good job explaining why it’s problematic to say the kinds of awful shit you’ve said.
And I’ll point out that while I do live in the South, I don’t like the mentality of a lot of Southerners. But I’m not going to make generalized criticisms of Southerners, bc that would cause a lot of splash damage.
Well at least Graham’s accent is authentic. I spend a lot of time traversing the Midwest, and it kills me how people in Wyoming and South Dakota and Iowa and Indiana have appropriated bogus southern accents over the past 15 years or so. There have actually been linguistic studies documenting the phenomenon — and not surprisingly, it’s all about political/tribal affiliation. If you watch Fox and consider yourself Libertarian and admire all of the ugly elements of Dixie’s past, you start talking with that same cornpone accent that all the country singers have now. And which doesn’t exist, in linguistic reality — it’s a mishmash of Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, that our popular media has told is REAL AMERICA. Somehow the cities that 60 percent of us live in and the suburbs another 30 percent of us live in don’t count. You have to be a rancher from a southern dirt road that never existed to be REAL. It’s like Dubya, who went to Andover and Yale, saying NUKE-you-ler, or Rick Santorum putting on his Toby Keith accent every time he tells a wholesome tale of bigotry.
So I agree, @73 Tony and @70 Nepos, the classism of the Left toward Southerners has been and continues to be toxic, culturally and electorally, but there is a genuine linguistic epidemic of Rightwing shitbags affecting a southern accent, nationwide. That none of the 22 Senators from Dixie are Democrats plays into this — one is known by the company one keeps. But it is not merely classism (nor even intellectualism) that paints a southern accent in a certain light. It genuinely has become part and parcel with the Libertarian/TeaPartty/Fox tribe, these past several years. I know several dozen people born and bred in the Rockies or Prairies who spoke with flat Midwestern/mountain accents until the dawn of this millennium, but now talk southern, whenever it comes to evolution of global warming or Obamacare.
Hey, ease up on my liberal peeps!
I believe it Jesse Helms who couldn’t muster any enthusiasm for our boy Lindsey ‘because he was light in the loafers’.
I had my rant about linguistic classism the other day, so I’ll just say thanks PZ for posting this. As a Masshole who’s spent the last 20 years in various parts of VA, I’ll just add that I’ve known racist, misogynist, bigoted, ignorant assholes with accents from New England, New York (city and upstate), the Midwest, even Canada.
joel:
1. Bringing up the “fact” that someone is “fat” is a really piss poor attempt to excuse fat-shaming.
2. Educational attainment hardly is the same thing as “dumb”. (If you are poor, you less likely to get far in education, even if you are as smart or smarter than wealthier peers).
3. Economic productivity does not have a hell of a lot to do with laziness or work ethic. (The alternative is to think that “third world” countries have less massive economies than the U.S. because they are lazy and the U.S. just works super-duper hard. Which would be an absurd way to view the facts.)
When the facts hurt people’s feelings, maybe you should be cautious when presenting them. When you are hurting people’s feelings, use facts as an excuse, and it turns you don’t even have that to justify your bluster, that reflects rather poorly on your character.
While @janiceintoronto hit it on the head, a number of the comments have made me think of Don Williams and “Good Ole Boys Like Me”:
But I was smarter than most, and I could choose.
Learned to talk like the man on the six o’clock news.
Lurker, wading in. I’m a Texan, and a linguist (as in, someone with a PhD in linguistics), and my personal experience during my graduate school days in Massachusetts were as follows: (a) I discovered just how real class was, and that my class background was low on the spectrum compared to my peers, and (b) my native dialect (which I had never thought of as particularly pronounced, but became more than apparent upon arriving in New England) immediately marked me as being from “the South”, along with whatever stereotypes this brought with it. I also came to see that (a) and (b) were by no means unrelated. I must say that some of the comments in this thread make me cringe; the “fat dumb and lazy” meme may make people feel good about themselves, and justified in their pre-existing prejudices about certain dialects, but this is basically no different than punching-down at the poor and under-served. You can do better.
Also, regarding PZ’s question about what a “stereotypically gay voice” is, there is actually research on this question. Note that the question is not “how in fact do gay men talk”, but rather “what features of speech are associated by listeners with being gay”. Just one example of research looking into “phonetic cues for perceived gayness”: https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/icphs-proceedings/ICPhS2003/papers/p15_1855.pdf
Sorry, in my comment above I should have said “what features of speech are associated by listeners with *sounding* gay”; this can be, and has been, investigated experimentally… Sorry for the long string of posts/ over-and-out.
Good to see a fellow linguist here.
Re 79, people tend to ascribe characteristics to accents based on their prejudices. So if you think southerners are stupid and lazy, you’re likely to think that people with a southern accent are stupid and lazy.
Speaking personally, I don’t mock Graham for being gay. I mock the dissonance between his stereotypically effeminate mannerisms and his stereotypically macho warmongering. I grant that the distinction can be difficult to see at times.
Re 82, absolutely. The ugly effects of this are seen most clearly with attitudes toward Black English (aka African-American Vernacular English, aka Ebonics), which are presented as “objective” complaints about a form of speech (it’s lazy, inarticulate, ungrammatical, etc), but are in fact just a proxy for negative attitudes toward the group of people who use the dialect. The rhetoric here is insidious; speech patterns are identified as “inferior”, and the people who employ those speech patterns can then be “legitimately” ignored/shamed/dismissed:
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/december/vernacular-trial-testimony-120214.html
What a Maroon @82:
I wonder if the same (or similar) holds for how some people view African-Americans who speak Black or African-American English (colloquially known by some as ‘Ebonics’).
http://www.linguisticsociety.org/content/what-ebonics-african-american-english
I guess I was onto something after all. Thanks for confirming my suspicions chrisdavis!
It’s not that Southern Accents automatically equal stupid.
But southern accents do tend to correlate with backwards, bigoted, boorish behaviors and beliefs.
You can say “not all southerners” all you want, but come on — the South has a reputation, and it’s earned that reputation fair and square.
Oh boy, New England all over again…
Re 87,
Ok, put yourself in my shoes for a moment. Am I obliged to modify my speech for the rest of my life in order to distance myself from the “backwards, bigoted, boorish behaviors and beliefs” of my co-regionalists, so that I don’t trigger unwarranted assumptions in *your* head about *me*? This is reasonable?
Note, incidentally, that the features of speech we’re talking about here aren’t just the “obvious” ones that are susceptible to imitation (in the case of the pandering politicians or actors) or erasure (in the case of those attempting to suppress their native speech patterns). As a personal example, my native dialect makes no distinction in the pronunciation of pairs like “pen”/”pin” (they are both pronounced roughly the way “pin” is in most varieties of American English). Now, I brought this trait with me up to New England, a clear indicator of my regional origins. So, a question: should I have then trained myself to pronounce these words differently to avoid unwarranted conclusions about my politics/intelligence/”boorishness”/etc?
For what it’s worth, with absolutely no intention of doing so, I found myself beginning to change my pronunciation, but doing it *incorrectly* (eg, I would pronounce “Tim” as if it were “Tem”), a phenomenon known as hypercorrection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercorrection
I now find myself varying between more or fewer Texan features in my speech, depending on who I’m talking to, and I’m pretty darn good at it. But not everyone is good at this. And why should they have to be?
Re 86, :)
WMDKitty @87:
The problem is that there are people who think this. It is unfair to base your opinion of someone’s intellect on their speech patterns or accent. You’ll get a *lot* of false positives.
Love me some alliteration. That aside, having a Southern accent does not automatically make one backwards, bigoted, or boorish. I think it’s dangerous to even make that association bc it’s a generalization about a hugely diverse group of people.
Just saying “The South” is a massive generalization covering a huge part of the Southeastern United States. Yes, there are bigots here with boorish behavior, but they are found all across the country (and the globe). There *might* be a higher concentration of them in the South, but there are enough people who are nothing like that, yet still from (or living in) the South for generalizations to be hurtful.
Also, many of the criticisms I’ve seen (not so much in this thread) about Southerners come across as “ha ha, look at those people in the South with their stupid accents and their bigotry. I’m better than them/The area of the country I live is better than the South.”
Here’s one person expressing exasperation about the treatment of Southerners:
Also, given that implicit racial biases exist and inform our interactions with people of other races/ethnicities, I suspect that implicit biases exist with regard to attitudes and stereotypes of Southerners.
Understanding implicit bias:
Thank you for the excellent link Tony! (sorry, I’m not sure of the protocol for referring to / tagging other commenters.)
WMDKitty #87
.
Does this work for you?
As a southerner, his accent strikes me as fairly normal. I don’t think there’s anything particularly gay about it. Actually, he always struck me as asexual, but that’s only my highly uninformed opinion.
Tony!
I did say “tends to be a correlation”, and we all know that correlation is not necessarily causation. It just so happens that quality A (specific regional accent) heavily overlaps qualities B, C, D, and E. You’re going to get ALL the possible combinations of A, B, C, D, and E in the diagram, because as much as these things overlap, they’re separate things, too.
Now, people who have experienced a heavy correlation between “Southern Accent” and “Racism”, or “Southern Accent” and “Anti-Gay”, or any other combination of categories there, are going to judge people in category A as likely to also be in these other categories, and approach with that in mind.
I agree that it’s unfair, for so many reasons, but there’s also that little irritating grain of truth in there — Southern society, particularly in the Deep South, has some serious self-reflection and cleaning up to do.
Chigau — thank you for demonstrating the exact kind of behavior that drives people away!
chrisdavis @91:
[off topic]
There really isn’t any set protocol. Around here, it’s generally considered good form when responding to someone to address them by their nym (full nym’s aren’t necessary; most people are fine with anything up to the initial punctuation-see my nym for an example) and/or the comment number. My preference is to use both, because I think it aids in following a conversation. But again, that’s not a rule, it’s a suggestion.
As a liberal, atheist southerner, I have no time at all for people who make ANY assumptions about some with a southern accent. You really have no way of knowing just from the voice. Now, I can almost always spot a southern right wing loony from a mile away, but you have to take in all the clues. Accent ain’t much.
Tony @96: Thanks for the pointer, and being friendly to a newcomer.
Theron Corse @93:
Have you considered that you might have some biases that lead you to think that someone might or might not be asexual? How would you be able to identify whether someone is or isn’t? Are there cues? Is it helpful to even speculate about someone’s sexuality or nonsexuality?
Tony!:
You are of course correct. As I said, it’s my uninformed opinion. Asexual may be too strong – but I do sense a deliberate distancing from human contact – which, even if I’m right, tells us nothing about the underlying sexuality.
WMDKitty, #95
Really? Because it seemed like a pretty staightforward pointing out of the problem with your comment – you’re using a very broad brush, in a way that would apply just as well to Americans as to Southerners (and I have actually had discussions with Brits where I’ve had to argue against exactly that kind of characterisation, that all Americans are backwards and bigoted)
chrisdavis, Tony!,
Thanks for the links. Here’s another, a bit old, with a focus on what he calls “Ebonic” (a term that never really caught on; most linguists refer to African American Vernacular English, or AAVE), but one that is equally applicable to other minority languages/dialects. One fascinating feature of AAVE is the verb tense/aspect system, which makes distinctions grammatically that are awkward to make in most forms of English. But that’s a fascinting fact about language in general–they pretty much all encode distinctions that other languages find difficult.
WMDKitty, various comments: Well bless your heart.
RE: “Ebonics”, it used to really grate on me, but I eventually realized that was because I was uncomfortable not knowing what people were saying–but yet, I had never taken the time to learn the dialect. It’s akin to hearing two people speaking Chinese and getting upset because one doesn’t speak Chinese–contrary to what some bigots would say, no one is obligated to speak a certain language or dialect simply to make other people comfortable.
Which, incidentally, points both ways–those of you who are mocking Southern dialects are just as bad as people who mock Ebonics.
Nepos @103:
Years ago, I was in a similar position. I used to look down on people who spoke African-American Vernacular English, but that was a problem *I* had. I thought it was indicative of lower intellect, and that respectable people would speak better. In my head, it just so happened that “better” was associated with how many white people speak. Yeah, internalized racism. I want to reach back in time and smack myself for soooooooooooo many things.
Tony @ 104, exactly! Dialect as a race and class marker is virtually hard-coded into society (every society, not just American), and it can be very difficult to over-ride that. But we lose so much (both on a personal and a societal level) if we assume that dialect tells us anything about a person other than where they grew up. And maybe not even that, because some people switch dialects depending on the situation.
Which reminds me of another thought I had re: African-American Vernacular English–like a lot of people, I used to think, why can’t they speak regular English? Don’t they care that people (people unconsciously meaning “white people”, of course) can’t understand them? Then I realized, hey, they don’t care if my cracker ass can understand them. Language and dialect can serve as valuable identity markers within a group, especially for traditionally underprivileged or oppressed groups.
And to bring this around to the OP, there are, in fact, many southern dialects that do represent traditionally underprivileged groups.
While it may be easy to some people (ahem, WMD Kitty) to lambast “ignorant white southerners”, it is important to recognize that a lot of those ignorant white southerners have been living in poverty for generations, and are themselves looked down on by other whites. “White trash” may not have quite the same vitriol as “n—-“, but it’s still dehumanizing and cruel.
Does this excuse bigotry? No, of course not–but it does complicate things. Which is why intersectionality is so important. Understanding that poor white folk in the South really are underprivileged is vital, because it actually helps drive their bigotry, and one won’t have much success in trying to change that bigotry if one doesn’t understand that. Sadly, the neo-confederates and the rich assholes who back the Republican party understand it all to well–they take the natural resentment felt by poor whites at their situation and twist it against undeserving targets (blacks, latinos, etc.) It’s the same thing that the white elites did during the Confederacy.
Nepos — Your attacks are unwarranted and you need to re-read my comments.
I have said, quite clearly, that Southern culture needs to change.
WMDKitty @107–
And which “southern culture” would that be? Black Southern culture? The culture of the Triangle, in North Carolina? The culture of Atlanta, GA? The culture of Austin, TX?
What you are carelessly referring to as “Southern culture” is “southern white traditional culture”, or “neo-confederate culture”–people who trace their lineage back to the antebellum South and the Confederacy, and want to re-establish their dominance over the South. Certainly, they are deserving of criticism–but this group is also dwindling rapidly, and I would be surprised if they even make up a bare majority of Southerners anymore.
The South is not and never has been a monolithic culture, and you do the people who live there, and youself, a disservice when you lump everyone together.