"No, sir, no, sir. We get them on a free-return trajectory. It's the option with the fewest question marks for safety."
--Ray McKinnon as Jerry Bostick in Apollo 13.
Who's got a more authentic Southern accent than Ray McKinnon--he of so many movies in the past couple of decades? At least his is a real, believable, and very familiar accent. Oh, how many times have we cringed when some actor is called upon to play a character from Arkansas, Louisiana or Texas--the famed Ark-La-Tex!--and breaks out in a Joe-Jah accent. As if every Southerner must sound like a refugee from Gone With The Wind. The whole spectacle is, to put it mildly, unconvincing. As when an actor is supposed to play somebody from Alabama, so he breaks into a full-fledged Texas accent that would pass inspection from Beaumont to Amarillo.
When movie directors started casting Ray McKinnon in roles, some of us cheered. Because his accent is a perfect male, south-of-Missouri, east-of-Texarkana specimen of the language/dialect/accent. It uses y'all whenever possibly appropriate (and never when it isn't, as in the singular), and generally comes across as Southern as fried green tomatoes, probably Bradleys.
What's more, nobody thought twice when Ray McKinnon was cast as a rocket scientist in Apollo 13. The space program was full of good ol' boys in those days. Maybe because it appealed to their taste for adventure, specifically for riding off alone into the sunset for parts unknown.
It wasn't as if anybody knowledgeable still associated Southern accents with rednecks, bootleggers, kluxers, and having to take off a shoe to count to 11. That is, if shoes even enter the picture at all. Those stereotypes went out long ago, right?
Right?
Wrong. As wrong as those who take a Southern accent as an automatic sign of know-nothingism. Tell it to Stephen Ramsden, founder and director of the world's first Solar Astronomy Research Project, which is headquartered in Atlanta, where he was born and developed an accent to match. Sometimes it's so thick, it calls for a skilled translator--like one of those at the United Nations who specializes in simultaneous translation. It's not quite a Fritz Hollings South Carolina mush-mouthed mumble, but it comes close.
Yet you'll still find some of these stereotype-pushers in the strangest places. Like a lab/research school officially entitled the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. It's across the line in Tennessee, and has something to do with the U.S. Department of Energy and the like.
Oak Ridge was back in the news last week. It's famous for its role in the Manhattan Project that played so critical a role in the development of the world's first atomic bomb. Critical as in critical mass. It made embarrassing news last week when some of the brainiacs there took it into their eggheads to set up a six-week course in . . . ahem . . . Southern Accent Reduction.
It seems the Human Resources department over at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (may we call you ORNL, sir?) sent out registration notices for a new course. This one was in linguistic assimilation.
The description of the new offering read, in part: "In this course you will learn to recognize the pronunciation and grammar differences that make your speech sound Southern, and learn what to do so you can neutralize it . . . ." Neutralize it. The way artillery does a target.
Just why a Southern accent needs to be neutralized isn't spelled out, as if it were just understood. To put it plain, you don't want to sound too Southern if you want to be taken seriously in some circles, especially some academic/scientific circles. That part wasn't surprising. We've been stereotyped before. And have stereotyped others, especially Yankees, dam- and otherwise, who sound like traffic when they talk.
And get this: A certified speech pathologist was engaged to teach this course before second and better thoughts occurred, and this course and bad idea was scrapped. But its brief shelf life was but another example that in some benighted quarters a Southern accent may even now be considered a pathology.
What in tarnation!
And six weeks?
It would take more'n six generations to scrub the Southern accents out of some folks in these latitudes, and why would they ever want to do that--to pass as colorless?
In some cases, all the treatment in the world wouldn't work, not for long. No telling how many would backslide into some y'alls, and that would be a sure give-away. Maybe even before the Certified Speech Pathologist left the room.
Remember the furor when some expert was sent South to cure African Americans, then known as Negroes, of the dialect that now has been recognized as a full-fledged language of its own under the formal appellation African American Vernacular English, complete with its own rules of grammar and pronunciation?
Language, especially one dismissed as inferior, a defect to be cured rather than a tradition to be honored, can be quite wonderful in that way, proving more expressive and disciplined than any of its snap critics. Ditto, the Southern Vernacular in general.
Some of y'all might have to resist the urge to take offense (Southerners can be a mite touchy) at the over-educated types who assume a Southern accent is synonymous with . . . what, exactly? Not being smart enough for the lab? Some might get all het up about it. (Just picture Ray McKinnon getting ready to fight in the "Woolsworth" in O Brother, Where Art Thou.)
Others of us keep thinking, six weeks? After a lifetime of dropping G's, and drawing out two-syllable words into four, and pronouncing fill and feel, oil and all, the same democratic way, and prefacing the most unlikely verbs with a gratuitous a-, as in a-fixin' to, and using like to mean almost (I like to have had a conniption readin' that story about ORNL), and understanding intuitively when you use a good Biblical word like Yonder and when you might could use Over There instead, and, oh yes, stressing the first syllable in Po-lice.
Six weeks?
Never would be more like it.
But there are some things that not even esteemed academics in white coats get. One of them is that the Southern accent in the United States is not just bone-deep, it's marrow-deep. You couldn't kill it with a two-by-four, an ax handle, and a whole team of Certified Speech Pathologists, bless their hearts. That's fo' a fact.
Editorial on 08/03/2014