Let's settle this! It's driving me nuts!

[Margi Cintrano]

pi - kahn ...

the 1st syllable is just a bit more stressed as it is a noun ...

M.C.

 

[GLC]

there's lots of reasons why people pronounce things the way they do.

One of the most common inaccuracies in period films is British of the American colonial and revolutionary period speaking with what we think of as British accents. At that time, British, both in England and the American colonies, spoke something closer to today's American English. The later breakdown of the rigid social structure in England, when people could be upwardly mobile and tradesmen could hope to become gentlemen, the broad English we recognize today was an affectation of the aristocracy that was then emulated by their lesser compatriots.

 

[Bolas De Fraile]

For you GLC Panorama - April Fool's Day Hoax - Spaghetti Harvest - 1st April 1957 - YouTube

 

[Sir_Loin_of_Beef]

I think you're all nuts!

 

[GLC]

bugger another myth blown apart. We were told that all the spittoons had been made into bullets. This resulted in southern people swallowing the chawing tobacco juice rather than spitting it out.Hence their rather extended bowels or vowels or both at the same time?

That didn't do it. The mid-19th century Southern planter had no hesitation about spitting baccy juice on the carpet. And accounts of Southern speech written before the American Civil War reflect that the planter class and their rural contemporaries, a fairly roughish bunch, even for the times, spoke with something of a drawl. More loud and harsh speech than exaggerated intonation. And when you got more rural, you have to remember that much of the South was extremely remote and primitive prior to the Civil War. Shockingly primitive by more modern standards, with education largely non-existent in many regions. (See F. Law Olmsted's account of traveling through the area.)

Rough speech is something that was not often remarked on in the Southern Atlantic coastal areas where speech was presumably under multiple outside influences as coastal trade involved New England seamen running various triangular trades. The Southern ladies in the film version of Gone With the Wind were modeled more on the fading Southern aristocracy of the early 20th century when the film was made than the mid-19th century it depicted.

The pecan thing is interesting, because the word was borrowed from a native group that probably never saw a pecan. The word meant any nut so hard that you had to crack it with a rock, meaning, for them, hickory.

 

[GLC]

For you GLC Panorama - April Fool's Day Hoax - Spaghetti Harvest - 1st April 1957 - YouTube

It has a great deal of good to say about a people whose very proper (How late was it that BBC radio announcers were relieved of wearing formalwear?) government broadcasters could produce such a thing.

(I do still want to see the bow-tie pasta bush.)