President Biden: The NEW one and only politics thread

Nice pull! Of course if Major Charles Emerson Winchester was a) real and b) still alive, he'd be about 110 years old. I know plenty of old-line WASPs around my age (late 40s/early 50s) from "Brahmin" families who grew up either on Beacon Hill or in the Back Bay, rich parts of Cambridge near Harvard Square -- or in old-money burbs like Lincoln, Carlisle and Marblehead -- and they have no regional accent at all. Just standard rhotic American English, indistinguishable from the accent I had growing up in Michigan (I don't have a nasal Michigan twang -- neither of my parents are from there, and I don't sound like either of my parents).

The other accent you don't hear anymore is the old rural Yankee accent people associate with those from Maine, Vermont and parts of NH ("You CAHN'T get THEY-UH from HE-AH). A friend of mine grew up in the Winnipesaukee region of NH and has very subtle traces of it when he pronounces certain words, as does another friend of mine who grew up in northern Maine (Houlton, on the New Brunswick border, at the northern terminus of I-95). But it's barely detectable -- you have to listen carefully for it and they're both in their mid-50s anyway.

 

New Civil War huh? OK.

 

The head nun of my grammar school had this accent, and the bearing to match. It is obsolete by now. You don't even hear it in movies.

 

Out-of-state drivers: How original.

 

My mother was from Boston and had no detectable accent until late in life. My grandmother was from Houston and you'd never have known at all.

 

Speaking of Bahstahn accents on TV:

 

The Netflix documentary on the Gardner Museum heist is, as my daughter put it "an artist's palette of Boston accents."

 

It's not "Bah-stahn". It's "BAW-stin". Exhibit A: the late Mayor Tom "Mumbles" Menino:

 

Of course we have a Gadsen Flag plate in Tennessee. ::sigh::

A modern urban Southern accent, courtesy of Sandman:

Note the soft, rounded off edges, the elevation of the upper palate, the sibilant s, the weird lilt that calls back to earlier iterations.

Here's a quick, fun bite of info about where those accents originate.

 

I worked with a guy with a heavy Boston accent
The woman who ran our office was named Barb
For him it was: “Hey Bob, could you do this for me?”

 

Bernie’s getting too old for this shit

 

Not rooting for one, but it sure wouldn’t shock me.

My pessimism in the future of this country is rising faster than the prices at the grocery store.

Basically, I’m turning into Paul Kantner (minus the Jefferson Airplane royalties, child fathered with Grace Slick and rants about Cleveland).