District Attorney
Nov. 7th, 2005 08:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
philenaPrologue: In the brilliant movie "The First Wives Club," Jane Fonda is quoted as having said, "There
are only three ages for women in Hollywood--Babe, District Attorney,
and Driving Miss Daisy." Bear this in mind as we continue.
In Phonetics today, we were discussing the proper way of saying something--I forget what--and got into a discussion of ages. It seemed at first as if one girl was going to say that since she was older (by, like, six months), therefore she was right, until I mentioned that actually, the younger person was correct, since the first, older girl was clearly (because of her age) speaking an outdated, archaic dialect, and the "true" pronunciation or form accepted in "real" English is that of the youngest speakers.
In related news, a few weeks/month or so ago, I saw "It Happened One Night," starring Clark Gable and some other young, attractive female actress for whom I felt no interest or sympathy, and whose romance with Clarky seemed entirely incomprehensible to me. Yes, she was pretty, and her character, if pretty tiresome, was not significantly more whiney than that of other heroines whose dewey-eyed smiles and murmurs have made me coo with the most romantic movie-goers around. Of course, it helps if they are murmuring and smiling dewily at a Cary Grant and not a Walter Matthau, who, bless his heart, will never be called handsome (that is a particularly flattering picture of him), but that is beside the point. This female lead failed to charm me because of the way she spoke. The movie, which is not that much earlier than the period of classics that make me swoon, somehow managed to cast a female lead who spoke with the accent of women I only associate with women of at least the Distric Attorney calibre in movies. Perhaps it is because that accent is spoken by the generation of women who were of this age before could cast them, and it was lost by the younger generation that was cast as the Babes. However, pockets of the accent survive. I ran into one when I was doing a PSAC phone-a-thon to accepted students, and reached an answering machine that seemed straight out of the 1940s, before there were any answering machines. I was so struck by it that I actually hung up, called again, and made Anne, who was phone-a-thonning with me, listen to the message so she could hear the accent. Only common decency (and the awareness that caller ID also did not exist in the 1940s but does now) prevented me from calling more so that everyone else in the room with me could listen too. The second pocket is preserved in the not-so-dulcet tones of Claudette Colbert. Babe she may look to be, but District Attorney she sounded to be, and it made my teeth shiver. I've never liked that accent, particularly because it's not an accent. I'm a linguist, and I should know better than to make value judgements on different speakers' phonological systems. This, however, is an entire philosophy of speaking, a pattern of intonation and projection, a predatory method of conveying danger, which entirely coincidentally happens to be best realized in patterns of sound waves formed in the back of the throat and shaped by various flappings of tongue and pursings of lips. It swells from behind the speaker's teeth into your ear, suggesting that it's not safe to turn your back, to sleep without checking under the bed, to sink into your pint at the pub, because it will be there, waiting to strike your ears deaf the moment you relax your guard. This is, of course, exactly what we want in a lawyer, and it should be taught in all law schools, but it was remarkably out of place coming out of the mouths of Babes.
I thought Clark Gable carried the movie, anyway..
In Phonetics today, we were discussing the proper way of saying something--I forget what--and got into a discussion of ages. It seemed at first as if one girl was going to say that since she was older (by, like, six months), therefore she was right, until I mentioned that actually, the younger person was correct, since the first, older girl was clearly (because of her age) speaking an outdated, archaic dialect, and the "true" pronunciation or form accepted in "real" English is that of the youngest speakers.
In related news, a few weeks/month or so ago, I saw "It Happened One Night," starring Clark Gable and some other young, attractive female actress for whom I felt no interest or sympathy, and whose romance with Clarky seemed entirely incomprehensible to me. Yes, she was pretty, and her character, if pretty tiresome, was not significantly more whiney than that of other heroines whose dewey-eyed smiles and murmurs have made me coo with the most romantic movie-goers around. Of course, it helps if they are murmuring and smiling dewily at a Cary Grant and not a Walter Matthau, who, bless his heart, will never be called handsome (that is a particularly flattering picture of him), but that is beside the point. This female lead failed to charm me because of the way she spoke. The movie, which is not that much earlier than the period of classics that make me swoon, somehow managed to cast a female lead who spoke with the accent of women I only associate with women of at least the Distric Attorney calibre in movies. Perhaps it is because that accent is spoken by the generation of women who were of this age before could cast them, and it was lost by the younger generation that was cast as the Babes. However, pockets of the accent survive. I ran into one when I was doing a PSAC phone-a-thon to accepted students, and reached an answering machine that seemed straight out of the 1940s, before there were any answering machines. I was so struck by it that I actually hung up, called again, and made Anne, who was phone-a-thonning with me, listen to the message so she could hear the accent. Only common decency (and the awareness that caller ID also did not exist in the 1940s but does now) prevented me from calling more so that everyone else in the room with me could listen too. The second pocket is preserved in the not-so-dulcet tones of Claudette Colbert. Babe she may look to be, but District Attorney she sounded to be, and it made my teeth shiver. I've never liked that accent, particularly because it's not an accent. I'm a linguist, and I should know better than to make value judgements on different speakers' phonological systems. This, however, is an entire philosophy of speaking, a pattern of intonation and projection, a predatory method of conveying danger, which entirely coincidentally happens to be best realized in patterns of sound waves formed in the back of the throat and shaped by various flappings of tongue and pursings of lips. It swells from behind the speaker's teeth into your ear, suggesting that it's not safe to turn your back, to sleep without checking under the bed, to sink into your pint at the pub, because it will be there, waiting to strike your ears deaf the moment you relax your guard. This is, of course, exactly what we want in a lawyer, and it should be taught in all law schools, but it was remarkably out of place coming out of the mouths of Babes.
I thought Clark Gable carried the movie, anyway..
