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26 October 2007
Best word to say in a Boston accent ever:→[More:]Scofflaw.
Outstanding, it's a good one. Half of my family is from Mass and thus I've spent a million days there in my life. As a teenager I would slip off to Boston to hang out with a disreputable crowd that was different from the disreputable crowd I ran with in New York. I had a friend named Punk Rock Sean who you could always walk up to and say "Seanie, say park the car in Harvard Yard" and he'd look at you for a second and then say "Waaaat, aahhhh you fahhhkin retaaaahhded?"
Oh how i loathe the extreme boston/cranston accent.
And i love accents.
But that one just rubs me the wrong way.
It's possible jersey dialect poisoning.
Y'know, I don't think I've ever heard an authentic Boston accent. Plenty of actorly re-creations, yes, but I don't know that I've ever run a cross a native speaker.
I love the Boston Honk and the (now very rare) Brooklyn Bark. I have (more and more each year) the modified old NY Cawfee Dawg fuwkin wudderver yo Queens drawl in my speech. It appears when I'm not actually thinking about what I'm going to say and always when I'm agitated or pissed or excited. The same way you can always tell if I'm really mad at someone because I call them "money."
I don't mind it, but I don't know why it's crept in so late in the game.
Science Girl and I go back and forth as to the existence of a Northwest accent. She says there is no such thing, yet she says "bag" and "beg" exactly the same way. (They both sound like "beg".) To my ear, it's got bits of the California up-talking thing mixed in with some Canadian and Scandanavian influences.
I wrote "ya et yet", but in thinking about it, it's "Yiz et yet?", the "yiz" is the great sound. I sometime say "How yiz doin'" and then regret my affectation, but I can't help it, it's too good.
"Yiz et yet? I jus made groceries, come in and have a lil sumthin'"
Rhode Island Is LONG Island and MA crossed...and I've loathed it since having a slutty cop's daughter as a roommate for my first three weeks of freshman year.
I'd much rather hear misplaced r's than nasal whine.
I got into a rather nasty argument with someone about this very thing: many British people are under the (very, very) mistaken impression that there aren't many regional accents in the states (because everyone on TV sounds the same). In Britain, there are thousands of variations all tightly packed into one small island. You can literally travel 10 miles and hear a big difference... so naturally people here assume that they've cornered the accent market.
There are just as many in the states, they're just spread further apart. The Baaaaaaaahston accent is very different to say, the accent in Madison or San Diego or Austin or Seattle.
No one believes me. Fucking television... it makes us look so homogenous.
I was just in Boston. As far as I can figure, the rule is to squirrel away the R's from any words that have them, say AAAAAH type a's, and then recycle all those R's on any word ending in a vowel. Such as "good ideaaahr to paahk mah caah there."
Nope. Sorry, but it just plain isn't. Haha. I first heard the Long Island accent last year in college, and to this day it grates against my soul. Rhode Island accents are nowhere near Long Island accents, much closer to Brooklyn accents I'd say.
Unless you're thinking of Cranston accents. That's a horse of a different collor. Very nasal, also grates against the center of my being.
Oh yes it is! I had three weeks of living with slutty cop's girl( from Providence) , the rest of the year living next to her in a sixties era dorm with paper thin walls (during which time she contracted scabies, passed it on and everyone thought it was the crabs), a semester at University of Bridgeport before the moonies bought it; at the time crawling with people from Long Island, and my last BA credits at Emerson in Boston, which makes everyone take two speech classes--one of which works on getting one to speak with the generic broadcaster's American accent. There was another girl from Rhode Island in one of those classes. I know what I'm talking about.
Heh, not to mention that Brooklyn is part of Long Island. :P
The people I know that are from Long Island have accents that are distinctly not Rhode Island, in my opinion, but perhaps the parts of their accents that I don't notice are the parts that are extremely similar to RI accents. It strikes me as very nasal and just sounds... I don't know. Jewish? I hear it and just think of Jewish mothers. Was Slutty Cop's Girl from East Providence? There is (was?) a very large Jewish and Irish population on the East Side.
This is a great example of the Long Island accents I hear at college.
The Rhode Island accent I know and love reminds me not of jewish mothers but of Italians, the sopranos, the mob, etc. It is, at many times, completely inscrutable to those not used to it. What'suhmatta w'you? Youseguyz. Fugheddaboutit. I got an idear. It's acrosst the road. My favorite example is one my father says often: "Jeet? K, sko," which means "Did you eat? Ok, let's go."
A great example of the RI accent is this scene from Brotherhood. They do a damn good job.
So yeah. Similarities? Yes. But they're extremely different.
Years ago on vacation, I was standing in line behind two people having a conversation with very heavy, noticable "Fargo"-type accents. We struck up a conversation and I said, "So...where are you from? I'm going to guess Wisconsin." And the woman replied, "Ya! And you're from Philadelphia, then?" I didn't even realize I had an accent. Ugh. Philly accents are so UGLY.
I don't know what part of town slutty was from; her last name was LeBoeuf. The RI girl's last name at Emerson was Strickland--her accent sounded exactly the same to me as the roommate from hell.
The Farrelly Bros. Set most of their work in RI. I didn't say that the RI and Long Island accents were alike; I said RI was LI mixed up with MA, which makes sense geographically.
The only thing I've heard that is a Northwestern accent is from people who live in Eastern WA or are from there - they get rid of their A sounds in favor of E sounds:
Monday becomes Mundy, Tuesday becomes Tuesdy, etc.
My NE accent is coming right along - I've been known to drop a's and r's non-selfconciously, and I once referred to my career counselor as Sheiler.
My mom, a daughter of Providence who has lived in California for over 20 years, gets asked if she's from Australia/New Jersey/England on a weekly basis. I go home for a week and my friends notice the accent seeping back into my voice (I left when I was 5).
I lived with a guy from Canton for 2 years; I used to make him tell me how the accent was subtly different in Revere or Malden, just because I enjoyed hearing him say Revere and Malden.
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