Posted on 10/28/2016 12:18:38 PM PDT by MUDDOG
In the Golden Era of Hollywood, actors such as Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn spoke with a strange form of English that placed them somewhere between America and Great Britain.
The so-called Mid-Atlantic accent actually wasn't an accent at all, but an affectation concocted by a Canadian elocutionist.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Cooper? You mean “Judy, Judy, Judy” Grant?
Fugetaboutit, youse guys know nuttin about new yawk tawk.
Sad thing is it being replaced with black ghettoese. And amongst lily white suburban dopey kids
no less.
Dan Ackroyd did his version of it as Louis Winthorpe III in “Trading Places.”
Cary Grant is a pretty poor example. He spoke with a near Cockney accent. Katherine Hepburn, indeed, spoke with the famed mid-Atlantic accent which means between England and America, not the region of NY/NJ/Delaware, etc.
I have noticed that some people from Virginia and Washington D.C. area say “woik” instead of “work”.
That’s the New York accent you immediately think of, but FDR’s old-line upper-class New York accent is what I’d think of as Mid-Atlantic.
Good point. Cary Grant though did have a bit of a lockjaw way of speaking which is considered a Mid-Atlantic feature.
“Woik” and “joik” could also be considered Brooklynese.
Another interesting word is “water.” I’ve noticed the English on the BBC say “wo(r)ter,” like Newt Gingrich says “Worshington.”
I say “wahter.”
And you were thinking of Hillary, admit it!
My grandmother and her sisters (Italian) were born in the 1890’s. Over the years, I heard many black people in D.C. of the same age. If you closed your eyes, you could not tell whether these people were black or white. The large migration of Southern blacks occurred from the thirties on.
OK, ok,.....I admit it!!
With that being said, does the guy who pulls the switch on an electrocution have to be a journeyman electrician and a member of a union?
That’s really interesting!
Maybe that also influenced Gore Vidal’s accent.
Even Bill Buckley had that one.
Not mid-Atlantic as in Mid-Atlantic states, but middle of the Atlantic, in other words, good for posing as an elitist in either Britain or North America.
People go to pains to affect this accent. Without it, no Bilderberg and no Illuminati picnics.
I disagree. He had a unique English accent that no one else had. It’s why he’s so imitated. I don’t think he ever took elocution lessons from some of the New York/LA frauds who “taught” in his era. They are lampooned well in the movie “Singing in the Rain.”
Ronald Reagan?
Jack Benny also did a drawn-out "well," but the way you phoneticized it sounds like Ronald.
There was a time in New York when Shakespeare and classic playwrights like Racine were constantly put on the Broadway stage. The mid-atlantic accent was developed as a way to get American actors away from their regional accents and into a more comfortable way of expressing classic poetry and prose. It sounds stagey now when we hear some actors from the old classic movies use it. Kate Hepburn certainly adopted it well. But she was so unique and brilliant it was unavoidable that she would make a hash of it.
You are not the only one. I did too. Sort of made it more interesting.
The Daily Mail article doesn’t directly say that Skinner actually taught Cary Grant (or even Katherine Hepburn). It implies that Skinner coached movie stars (”by the 1930s she was the go-to advisor for speech in Hollywood”), but doesn’t directly name any as her pupils.
The article does say though that thr accent was taught in drama schools.
I immediately wondered if you had encountered it there!
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