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 ...
Maybe that’s replaced the Mid-Atlantic accent, which wikipedia says has all but disappeared.
Grant said he never said, ‘Judy, Judy, Judy ‘.
(p.s. Grant did say 'Judy, Judy, Judy'...in 1985!)
No, Bogart never said, ‘Play it again, Sam’,
and Grant never said, ‘Judy, Judy, Judy’ in a movie.
He was often asked to say it for years afterward as a joke- and he did- especially in his ‘An Evening With Gary Grant’.
black ghettoese. And amongst lily white suburban dopey kids
no less.
********************
“Wiggers”
Two more Bronx Boys from less than a mile from me in the Bronx (I have since moved on when the neighborhood started to go to crap)....Richard Mulligan and James Coco.
I think a lot of NYC-born actors were trained to use some form of the “Mid-Atlantic Accent” to smooth out what might be considered harsh to a wider audience. Even Jimmy Cagney (Yorkville) had a bit of it and Aunt Bea, Francis Bauvier from Bayside, Queens, was a victim, I mean student . . . or customer of this phony accent. The list goes on and on.
My very Italian grandmother from Italian East Harlem and two of my fathers brothers said Turlit, earl burner, etc. My Mothers side also previously from East Harlem talked pretty much proper English......her father born in Naples didn’t have an Italian accent (well not much) and not really a turlit/earl NYC accent neither did my mother and her two brothers.
I think my father probably did originally have a NYC accent but first the Marines, then marriage to my mother caused him to change his diction.
He would get angry at me if I kidded around saying Turlit etc. like my mom said, “don’t cross your eyes, they’ll stick” my dad probably thought if I said “Turlit” it might stick.
BTW. Dad could tell the difference between Brooklyn and East Harlem NYC-ease. He had less use for people who spoke Brooklynese than other NYC dialects.
Just my $0.02.
The Manhattan-Bronx accent sounds like Shakespearean English compared to the classic Brooklyn accent.
A good example of a NY Accent spoken seriously in Film, as performed by Daniel Day-Lewis as “Bill the Butcher” in “Gangs of New York”. A great film:
Particular attention was also paid to the speech of characters, as loyalties were often revealed by their accents. The film’s voice coach, Tim Monich, resisted using a generic Irish brogue and instead focused on distinctive dialects of Ireland and Great Britain. As DiCaprio’s character was born in Ireland but raised in the United States, his accent was designed to be a blend of accents typical of the half-Americanized. To develop the unique, lost accents of the Yankee “Nativists” such as Daniel Day-Lewis’s character, Monich studied old poems, ballads, newspaper articles (which sometimes imitated spoken dialect as a form of humor) and the Rogue’s Lexicon, a book of underworld idioms compiled by New York’s police commissioner, so that his men would be able to tell what criminals were talking about. An important piece was an 1892 wax cylinder recording of Walt Whitman reciting four lines of a poem in which he pronounced the word “world” as “woild”, and the “a” of “an” nasal and flat, like “ayan”. Monich concluded that native nineteenth century New Yorkers probably sounded something like the proverbial Brooklyn cabbie of the mid-twentieth.
That's very interesting about Gangs of New York. I didn't know that much thought went into it. In fact, I thought Daniel Day Lewis chose his accent from listening to FDNY, many of whom have a distinct "Old New York" voice that is disappearing among the general populace.
I've heard that clip of Walt Whitman. It could be an old Tammany pol speaking, like Al Smith.
Here’s a NOT necessarily NY language screw up story.
My Fathers father, who died before I was conceived was named Vincenzo. Everyone called him James. When my father, the second boy was born, they named him James Junior. Everyone called him Jimmy.
So how did Vincenzo become James. Did a long exhaustive study of this for decades. Dad said in Italian James and Vincenzo is the same????
The same??? Met other people of Italian descent. Some said huh? But some said. “Oh yeah”.....”yeah that’s what they did back then”......
But why? I would ask. ?????
I went on line over the past two decades. I found some folks who heard of it and wrote it in published pieces. But no answer as to why.
Then my company was taken over by an Italian company. Some of the Italians showed up to observe and manage. One young guy was named Vincenzo. Someone kidding around called him Vinny. “No don’t call me that.....some of my friends call me ‘Cenz’.” By he did not pronounce it like I would in my Americanized Italian as ‘chenz’. He pronounced it ‘Chains’ short for ‘Vin-chains-o’.
So as a kid and later a bricklayer and construction company owner when people called my Grandfather ‘Chains’. Other people would miss read that as James.
And that is how Vincenzo becomes ‘James’ in NY English.
I went on line and found my Grandfathers draft card from the 1940s. (He was in his 50s but older guys were required to get them too). He was signed in as ‘James’. And he was ‘James’ in an earlier 1930 census. How he lost the Vincenzo will probably never be known.
One of the great things about talkies from 1929 through the fifties is that the dialogue is musical. I hardly ever miss a word, and the voices are a pleasure. And NO VOCAL FRY. Nowadays, with 12 channels of surround sound, the actors mumble and grunt, and I miss most of what they say.
Good point!
And the actresses spoke like grown-ups.
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