Etiquette and “Affected Speech”

“Fathah awnd grawnfathah were bawn heah.’’ ‘But you haven't lived here much?’ I ventured. “Oh, yes, only a couple of yeahs that I was east at school.” “So there it was; two years east at school had done the mischief. She met a lot of New Yorkers and southerners and no doubt some English people there, and so she tried to fix up a little more elegant accent for herself, with the distressing result.

Affectations of Accent Absurdity

Michigan Professor Makes Observations During Afternoon Tea of Girl Students • 

Type of Talk is a “Poser”• Says Young Women Try to Combine Pronunciations of Their Acquaintances

ANN ARBOR, June 25.—It was no less an authority than a professor in Michigan university who declared not long ago that he was “Sick of affectation in pronunciation.” One of the best loved men in the great school, he has seen thousands upon thousands of men and women go out from his classes in the course of his long academic career, says the Detroit Free Press, “In my early day, when I was a young instructor, affected speech from among young ladies was rare, he told some of his students, then came a wave of it that swept all over and reminded me of those silly foppish French days of the Ridiculous Précieuses (or The Affected Ladies) satire immortalized by Molière, when the bourgeois element began to put on airs that set the whole world a-laughing.” 

“Now, a good pronunciation is to be cultivated, just as pretty modulations of the voice are much to be desired both in men and women, but when it comes to these obviously strained-after apings of somebody else’s English, I think it is time to show people how utterly ludicrous they appear. The fact is, in some forceful slang that appeals to me very much for its terse power of descriptions, these people don’t get away with their airs—not one bit. Not long ago my aversion for this sort of thing got the better of my discretion and of my good manners, I fear, at a charity afternoon tea.”

“Well, there were a lot of Detroit girls among them, and as I stood off for a while listening to them, I marveled where they had acquired their accents. Certainly they didn’t sound like Michigan, nor like anything within many miles of the middle west. To tell you the truth, I couldn't make out what they did sound like and I've done a bit of traveling in this and other countries in my day. But this type of talk was a poser for me. There were a number of broad A’s— some of them quite the broadest I had ever heard.” 

“There were few R’s, except for now and then when someone less alert than her sisters let drop a good, healthy one. At last, one of the prettiest of them, a slender, sweet eyed young thing, that might have been a Rosaetti model, fell to my lot, I never heard such talk. She was mighty nice to me, too, getting the choicest little cakes for me and some very fragrant tea in a pretty cup, and fixed to suit a King. But her accent! ‘You're a Michigan girl?’ I asked. “Oh, yes, indeed,” she beamed, ‘‘Fathah awnd grawnfathah were bawn heah.’’ ‘But you haven't lived here much?’ I ventured. “Oh, yes, only a couple of yeahs that I was east at school.” 

“So there it was; two years east at school had done the mischief. She met a lot of New Yorkers and southerners and no doubt some English people there, and so she tried to fix up a little more elegant accent for herself, with the distressing result. There is no such pronunciation in all the English language as ‘awnd’ for ‘and,’ nor ‘hawnd’ for ‘hand.’ If a child is sent away in its earliest youth it can naturally acquire the accent of its new environment, but when it comes to a grown Michigan girl in a couple of years getting an entirely new version of mother English, it does seem a little miraculous —don't you think?“– Los Angeles Herald, 1910

Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J Graber, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia