You Talkin’ to Me? The Unruly History of New York English
literaryreview.co.uk
literaryreview.co.uk
It was a curious mix of warnings, and for the most part I certainly noticed the accent and different patterns, but didn't think twice about it.
Then one day at 3am on a conference call I was frustrated and interrupted "No that's not how it works, let me tell him what to do for a minute!" I didn't try to sound rude about it but I was tired and my voice didn't sound like I expected.
Then from the silence came a voice from the VP who was listening to the chaos "Yo, Mark is that youse!?!?" oddly this VP had a very practiced non accent but in this case he let it out.
"Hey let's give Mark some time here and see what he can do."
So I gave instructions and things were fixed promptly.
Everyone on the call was happy and congratulated me and went on with their night.
What I realized after the call was that me interrupting and sounding like I did wasn't taken as rude anymore than they were rude when they did the same. It sounded like CONFIDENCE (and to a lesser extent it sent a signal I was engaged in the issue form the start) to them.
The verbal tussling involved a lot more than just folks talking over each other, we were establishing who thought what, but also how sure they were, who wanted in on the decision making and etc.
It also became clear that when they would doubt or challenge my ideas in the past, it was more of a 'challenge' to get me to respond and make it clear how confidant I was. If I withdrew verbally ... well then I was sending the signal I wasn't sure. If I changed my voice, interrupted, sounded a little annoyed, or even just made a joke... we would have more to talk about.
The real fun began when those big banks merged with some west coast operations and they'd both appeal to me with help getting through to 'those guies' ;)
And if you're somebody from a very different-sounding background, or a woman, how your intended assertiveness level is read by the audience may be a problem.
I've heard numerous stories where she didn't talk like that and nobody would listen to her.
And I've heard the other stories where she did talk like that and got complaints from the other employees and ended up being talked to by her boss, even though she was correct and got stuff done.
So while it's nice to recognize that that tone can get stuff done, it doesn't work for everyone and people who don't use that tone can also get things done. You might just have to listen harder.
in some cultures interrupting is necessary to get heard even at the slightest, while at others people will outcast you as a 'different to work with'.
in her next job, stuff might be totally different
i've been in both cultures.
putting it on the sex takes responsibilty away and creates a victim role which is not necessary.
heck my last cfo was a wonder women. sharp as a knife and she pushed the company more than all other male leaders combined. and she was rude af which probably helped as everyone was alpha there
Some behaviors can be both correct and make people uncomfortable. Of course this mechanic is also “gendered” in the sense that women would probably be less inclined to dismiss said feedback due to a lifetime of being raised as people pleasers (obviously not all women/cultures/etc), but this may be a place where it makes sense to undo some of that training and say, “if what I say is correct and useful, their discomfort with my speaking up is a problem for them to deal with.”
There was one woman who worked at that place. She was super smart and way senior compared to me.
She'd call me over and I'd pretend to be her manager from time to time.... the moment I said the same thing she did, they'd accept it.
Sometimes I didn't even know what she was asking me to say, she'd just sigh and hand me a piece of paper and I'd read it to them...
The most prominent example I can think of is Cardi B. She has a heavy Bronx accent, and will say “talk” and “walk” in the old New York manner of “tawlk” and “wawlk”.
As someone who grew up in Appalachia, there are certain biases that come with that accent. It's is one of the reasons some professionals from the region try very hard to "talk normally." There is even training you can undergo to lose your accent.
I learned early in my career that people make certain assumptions about you based on your accent. Over the years I have unconsciously developed a "public speaking accent" that is quite a bit different from how I normally talk. I've been told I sound generically Midwestern when traveling or giving a conference presentation (one person even said Canadian.) I didn't even realize I was doing it until one conference when someone pointed it out to me at a bar-track later in the evening.
Though I assume he didn't mention that his family had been fairly well known off course bookies (pre legalisation)
Visiting NYC in 2018 and 2019 made me realize that that phrase is literal. There's nothing like walking down the sidewalk only to have the guy in front of you just stop to gawk at something with no warning, forcing you to stop short or swerve on a dime to avoid bumping into them. Or maybe if you're lucky they didn't just stop short, they'd already been just standing there in the dead center of the sidewalk since they came into view, but you still have to go around them.
After one afternoon of walking around the city, I already felt like shouting "Hey, I'm walkin' here!" several times.
(and being a tourist myself, I was actively self-conscious of whenever I wanted to gawk at something, so I always made sure I moved to the innermost part of the sidewalk and put my back to a wall if I ever wanted to stop and look at something or pull my phone out)
That being said, especially in rural areas, the dialects are well kept. In fact, being from the western regions of Germany, I have a hard time understanding villagers from the Black Forest if they talk their native dialect.
Still, in urban areas, the general trend is the same, no ? Dialects are spoken by less and less people (in fact I don't speak a single word of Plattdeutsch, even if I'm from an area where it was once common). What remains are temporary sociolects and accents. At least that's my perception of things.
I don't have the exact source but I believe research has shown the opposite. When cable television started becoming more common about 20 years ago, there was a belief that a common "source accent" would flatten out regional differences in accents. Apparently, it has made accents more distinct as people, consciously or not, were using those accents as a "tribal marker" to differentiate themselves from the rest of the country.
On a broader note, I remember reading an OpEd in the late 90's that predicted that because people were going to be getting all of their information from a common source (aka the Internet) that it would eliminate debates between regions of the US. The idea was that with shared common information, we would all have shared beliefs. Obviously, this completely missed the ball with regards to personalized streams of information (e.g. Netflix, Pandora etc).
"Alright?"
"Alright."
Thinking of music and NYC also Kenny Gioia comes to mind. After having watched tons of his Reaper instructional videos I think I dreamt in a thick New York accent;-)
When I was a little kid in the 60s, I remember someone interviewing Mel Blanc (voice of Bugs). He couldn’t decide whether a Bronx or Brooklyn accent sounded tougher, so he chose elements of both for Bugs’ voice. Having grown up in CT, it was the first time I realized there were different regional accents even among the different NYC boroughs.
You can hear different accents after walking only a mile or two away to the next village, or the other half of a city.
Oddly fascinating, and something I really miss now I've moved to a different country - a country which to my ears sounds very much like there are only a couple of accents.
A couple Brits I work with say it's pretty good.
"In line," meanwhile, suggests a line of people, any member of which is, well, "in."
But if we get pedantic we accept this will never satisfy the definition of a geometric line and the Brits were right all along to call them queues.
You're always 'in the' queue (or queuing) though, not 'on' it. So if you must call it a 'line' or a 'line-up', I sympathise most with 'in'.
But turns out it isn’t.
(Edit: Elaine, not Ellen. Thanks for the correction)
Did a brief stint at our London office in the 90s and had a long debate with one of the locals about 'on' vs 'in.'
> Talk Like a Texan: How Texans Use “Down,” “Out,” “Over,” and “Up”
https://www.texasmonthly.com/being-texan/being-texan-preposi...
Thread with 131 posts : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16327812
The interaction pattern is still the same though. I'm from New Jersey and (under normal, non-COVID circumstances) work in New York, and interrupting in conversation is taken as pretty natural.
My grandmudda spoke liked dat. She grew up in Brooklyn, one of 9 kids in an Irish immigrant family. Another fond pronunciation I remember was she pronounced toilet as ter-let. "Dija flush the terlet?"
I myself still maintain a "disgustingly thick" (as a co-worker once put it) NYC accent owing to growing up among many Italian Americans in a little neighborhood called Ozone Park. When traveling, upon opening my mouth, people immediatly recognize where I'm from.
Growing up in New Jersey I've learned to subdue my own inflections after realizing most other American professionals seem to view any hint of the accent as low class.
Nevertheless you can still go back to the old more tech heavy frontpage (AFAIK it uses a previous HN ranking algorithm?):
- cooperative overlap: old school interfaces were based more on turn-taking, with the computer providing a 'prompt' when it was ready to accept more input. Nowadays we tend towards an overlapping style of UX, with the computer following the link which is now under the mouse instead of the link on which one thought one had been clicking, before the last relayout.
- dialect adoption, like software adoption, shows strong network effects and path dependence.