By Larry Getlen
The traditional New York accent, or Brooklynese — the accent of
Archie Bunker, Travis Bickle and Mona Lisa Vito, Marisa Tomei’s fast-talking
character in “My Cousin Vinny” — was once regarded as the height of
sophistication. In the new book “You Talkin’ to Me?: The Unruly History of New
York English” (Oxford University Press; out Tuesday), E.J. White writes that
the language variant, which contains more vowel sounds than any language in North
America, was once “a marker of upper-class speech,” to the extent that F. Scott
Fitzgerald described its speakers as having “voices full of money.”
“In the days when Mrs. Astor held balls in her home on Fifth
Avenue, the sound identified posh speakers,” writes White.
The accent, derived from speech patterns in 18th-century London
and defined by distinguished features such as not pronouncing our R’s — which
is known as nonrhotic speech — was a mark of prestige and accomplishment as
recently as the mid-20th century.
“If you grew up in New York or New England in the 1940s, you
would have learned, either in public school or in private or finishing school,
a cultivated accent known as ‘General American.’ Like the New York accent,
General American was nonrhotic,” White writes.
This New Yorkese was everywhere in America: spoken in movies, in
plays and on the radio — the most influential and most-listened to mass
communication of the time.
The accent was so prestigious that stars like Katharine Hepburn
and Cary Grant studied it with speech coaches.
“In 1918, the Association of New England Deans, which included
the presidents of Harvard and Yale, gathered to discuss what the Association
called — not ominously at all — ‘the Jewish problem,’ ” she writes.
Their “problem” was that the percentage of Jewish students at
these schools was growing quickly.
“The president of Harvard, Lawrence Lowell, argued that
something had to be done about this — that if too many Jewish students enrolled
at a given school, upper-class Protestants would send their sons elsewhere,”
White writes.
To combat this, the Ivy League developed a gatekeeping system
that is not only still in use today, but is also what White calls “the most
recognizable feature of modern college admissions.”
“Starting with Harvard, in 1922, colleges began to ask
applicants to fill out forms that included questions on ‘Race and Color,’
‘Religious Preference,’ ‘Maiden Name of Mother’ and ‘Birthplace of Father,’ ” she writes.
“They asked for letters of reference from teachers and
headmasters to attest to the applicant’s ‘aptitude and character.’ Was the
student an athlete? Was he leadership material? Was he agreeable? In short,
they found ways of determining elements of an applicant’s background that
allowed them to enforce de facto ethnic quotas.”
As part of this effort, these schools also greatly expanded
their recruitment into the West and South, and away from the Northeast, in an
effort to decrease the percent of Jewish students at their schools.
Elite institutions in general followed suit, and the result was
a decades-long decline in popularity for the New York accent, as the sound of
the Midwest became a new marker of the elite.
“Within a few decades, newscasters, college graduates, and
actors in film and television largely adhered to a rhotic standard — a standard
that signified Americanness in large part by distinguishing itself from the
speech of America’s capital of immigration,” White writes.
“Americans sound the way they do because New Yorkers sound the
way they do.”
The decline in prestige of the New York accent was reflected
throughout pop culture, as it became a sign of bumbling, out-of-touch comic
relief.
At first, though, the accent also signified a crude form of
cleverness. In the 1930s, Groucho Marx, who sounded very much like the New
Yorker he was, became one of America’s top comedians by playing characters who
were “not just comic and quick-witted, but pointedly lower class and pointedly
ethnic.”
The following decade, Bugs Bunny, a cartoon character modeled in
part after Marx, became a national treasure with similar sounds and attributes.
White writes that the animators wanted Bugs to be a “tough
little stinker.” To facilitate this, Mel Blanc, who voiced the character, made
him a New Yorker.
“They wanted a tough little character,” Blanc said. “So, I
thought maybe either someone who came from Brooklyn or The Bronx, which was the
toughest-talking area in the world. And I thought, ‘Why don’t I put them both
together?’ ”
In subsequent years, though, the quick wit associated with the
sound became deprioritized, as tough-talking New Yorkese characters often
became either brutal, dumb, lower-class or simple comic relief.
Case in point: Archie Bunker, who was a 1970s symbol of bigotry
and ignorance. On “Law & Order,” “any character not wearing a suit is
likely to have a Noo Yawk accent,” White quotes linguistics author Thomas
Bonfiglio.
Even stories set in mystical or fictional worlds make use of
this. “Guardians of the Galaxy” uses brash-talking Rocket Raccoon (voiced by
Bradley Cooper) as its comic relief, and “Aladdin” employs the same strategy for
Gilbert Gottfried’s Iago.
“Star Wars” was even set for this initially, as, White writes,
the early script drafts called for C-3PO to have “the cadences of a Bronx
used-car dealer.” It was only after British actor Anthony Daniels read for the
role that George Lucas converted the droid to an English-butler type.
The long-term result of all this is that today, the New York
accent is the second-most-widely disliked in the country, according to polls,
behind only the sound of the American South.
It is also the only accent from such a prominent city that is
shunned by its own speakers.
“New York City is an anomaly among world-class cities,” White
writes.
“Normally, the variant that a nation takes as its standard
language comes from its center of finance and culture. But in the United
States, the national standard accent comes from the Midwest and the West.
Rarely do speakers from a world-class city respond to their own speech with
such suspicion.”
E.J. White includes in her book words and phrases that began
right here in NYC and made their way into the popular lexicon, past and
present. Here are some terms that became part of our common language after
getting their start, as so many do, right here in New York City.
Con man: From an 1849 New York Herald article about a swindler
named William Thompson, referred to in the piece as a “confidence man” due to
his approaching strangers on the streets of Manhattan and asking, “Have you
confidence in me to trust me with your watch until tomorrow?” People often did,
and they never saw their watches again.
Flea market: Takes its name from a public market that operated
in lower Manhattan during the rural, swamp-like days of the city’s origins.
Originally known as the Vly Market, “vly” being the Dutch word for “marsh” or
“creek.”
Hooker: Derived from Corlears Hook, a section of Manhattan by
the FDR Drive just south of the Williamsburg Bridge that housed “the majority
of the city’s brothels” in the early 1800s.
Phony: Possibly originated here by Irish police officers in the
1800s. Derived from the Irish “fawney,” meaning “ring,” in reference to a
common ring scam of the time.
Shade: As in “insult,” the word evolved from New York City’s
drag queen culture.
Slumming: Reportedly created by Charles Dickens after he toured
New York’s horrifying, crime-infested Five Points neighborhood in 1842.
Speakeasy: First heard in NYC during Prohibition to describe
clandestine alcohol-serving clubs, it evolved from the British and Irish phrase
“speak-softly shop,” the term for an illegal club where one spoke softly so as
not to be discovered.
Window shopping: This evolved around 1875, shortly after the
mid-19th-century invention of department stores in New York City.