134 thoughts on “For The Love of Comments 8/28

  1. When I was living in Nashville, there was this Thing people talked about called “Southern Fandom”, which was supposed to be much better than fandom anywhere else in the country, but never seemed to be particularly well-defined at least to me. When I asked people why Southern Fandom was so much better, the answer tended to be along the lines of, “Because we have better room parties.” As near as I could tell, what that meant was “because we have more kinds of booze than anybody else”. To this day I don’t get why that makes the whole regional fandom “better”. And it wasn’t like everybody on the circuit was a lush; yes, most of them drank, but “a little lit” was about as far as they’d go. My reaction is still a befuzzled “weird…”.

    @ lauowolf: My mother grew up in the South, and never lost her accent. This produced unexpected effects when we moved from Michigan to Tennessee; suddenly I could no longer reliably find my mother if she was in a different aisle of the store. Apparently her accent, rather than her actual voice, was what I’d always keyed on — and now any woman with a voice similar to hers sounded just like her!

    I’ve lived in the South — TN and TX — for more than 2/3 of my life, and to Southerners I still don’t sound right. (Not that I’ve ever actually tried to alter my accent; I never cared one way or the other.) The one thing I do notice is that my rate of speech has slowed down from the rapid-fire Midwesterner pace. But when I’m back in the Michigan area, people will occasionally mention that I have a Southern accent. Apparently I’ve absorbed just enough, especially in the vowels, to sound “off” to them.

  2. Growing up as a liberal New York Jew in the 50s, I assumed that the South was, in H.L. Mencken’s phrase, a Sahara of the Bozarts, with a “Negro” hanging from every tree. I have of course long since learned that the South is full of culture and the North is full of white racists.

    Likewise, “Southern fandom” always seemed like a granfalloon to me, even when I was a part of it, living there and belonging to SFPA. I had not until now considered the alcohol aspect, perhaps because I joined fandom long after I had decided that the booze would never again be my intoxicant of choice.

  3. Southern fandom I can’t speak to, but I recall talking with someone the first evening of an SCA in St. Louis we’d both been to. Her comment was that if that event had been in a southern location, there’d’ve been people fucking in every available room by now.

  4. Maybe the problem is that we were informed early, but either way, you can’t just handwave this off, there is a problem to report.

    It’s not an issue with the software. The post appeared early and was deleted. When it was posted again at the proper time it had a new ID number, so the old link didn’t work.

  5. Rick Moen, the Harvard Dialect Survey’s first choice put me to within 30 miles of where I grew up. That’s pretty amazing.

  6. I’ve occasionally encountered amazement, surprise, and sometimes outright disbelief when I say I’m from New Orleans. “You don’t sound like it.”

    You know, it wasn’t until Katrina footage that I realized that not everyone in New Orleans sounds like the Cajun Cook. (The only person I ever knew IRL who I knew was from Louisiana was a girl in college who had a very, very Cajun accent. There was also a girl from Brooklyn who was very, very From Brooklyn.)

  7. John A Arkansawyer wrote: “Her comment was that if that event had been in a southern location, there’d’ve been people fucking in every available room by now.”

    Wait, what? I thought that was Midwestern Fandom!

    (Old fannish reference from the 70’s — I think it appeared in an AZAPA mailing — to when someone brought up the “wild sexual promiscuity” among Midwest fandom. I don’t remember if they were complaining about it, or envying it.)

    (I will refrain from explaining the fanhistorical background to the later phrase “sexual gymkhana”, ’cause boy, I’d get a lot of flak if I did.)

  8. @NIcole: interesting that you feel your not-NO ]accent[ comes from choral work. One of my music directors had a stint with the Dallas opera (symphony?) chorus; when he asked for the diction he wanted, he was answered “But none of our friends will understand us!”. (He may have been asking too much of them; the rigor that I well remember probably helped him land the job of Met choral director, arguably the top choral post in the U.S.)

    @Lee: what I remember of parties at the one vaguely Southern convention I went to (Rivercon, 1984 — I don’t count the 4 Worldcons I’ve been to there as specifically Southern) was that their idea of a non-smoking con suite was a completely empty room that burning tobacco had obviously been carried through.

  9. I usually sound like the Canadian Prairies girl I am (an accent pretty much identical in ND and MN, to be fair, which is no surprise when they’re right next door), with what i understand others tend to read as slightly flattened consonants and slightly rounded vowels.

    But when I’m nervous, I enunciate more, even over-enunciate. At one of the first temp jobs I ever took, someone kept trying to place my accent – Scottish? English? Which part of England? – Until someone else told him, in a much-snootier-than-I-am tone that embarrassed me considerably worse than his questions, “It’s an educated accent.”

    (I also don’t have the longer slightly drawly “Canajun eh?” accent, though I know people who have a bit of it. And I have never heard any person say anything that sounds to me like “aboot”.)

  10. @Lenora And I have never heard any person say anything that sounds to me like “aboot”.
    When Peter Jennings used to read ABC news, I would hear “aboot” pronunciations.

  11. @ Chip: Rivercon was a bit of an odd duck, being effectively the intersection of the Midwestern and Southern con circuits. I can’t say anything about the consuite situation there in 1984, although I was probably there — I went to a LOT of Rivercons, and at this point they all blur into 3 groups based on hotel. But if you think that was bad, Chattacon’s idea of a non-smoking consuite for a long time was “3 tables in the corner of the consuite at which you weren’t supposed to smoke”, and it wasn’t until the city itself passed a ban on smoking in hotels and restaurants that the hotel mezzanine (thru which you had to pass to get from pretty much any part of the con to any other part) stopped being Smoker Central. But that was because everyone on the concom smoked, so they didn’t perceive a problem. There was a longish period when I wouldn’t go to Chattacon because I was tired of having everything I took with me or got there (plus my hair) reeking when I got home.

  12. Darren Garrison on August 29, 2016 at 6:22 am said:
    I’ve occasionally encountered amazement, surprise, and sometimes outright disbelief when I say I’m from New Orleans. “You don’t sound like it.”
    You know, it wasn’t until Katrina footage that I realized that not everyone in New Orleans sounds like the Cajun Cook. (The only person I ever knew IRL who I knew was from Louisiana was a girl in college who had a very, very Cajun accent. There was also a girl from Brooklyn who was very, very From Brooklyn.)

    When we took my father back to Mississippi to bury him, a kindly cousin was really concerned that we’d flown into New Orleans and driven up, and would have to be heading back to New Orleans
    “Those people down there, they aren’t like us, you know.
    They are really strange.”
    She was sincerely worried about us, and offering to help sort the rental car and switch things to fly out of Jackson.
    New Orleans was all of 150 miles away.

  13. I have a weird accent. People can tell I’m foreign but usually can’t pinpoint me as Italian. I wonder if people Not From London can tell where I live from my accent, but my guess is Weird Foreign overrides everything else.

    Italians can tell, when I speaking English, from which Italian region I come from. People from my region when I am speaking in Italian swear I have an English accent.

  14. @Rick Moen, I did the dialect quiz, and it placed me in a broad swath running from Texas through the South, up the mid-Atlantic and into New England. Since I was born in Japan of two missionaries from Virginia, then lived in a Boston suburb, North Georgia, piedmont North Carolina, and southern Michigan, before moving to Northeastern New Jersey and working in New York City, I’d they they picked up on quite a few of my influences. Although they think my seven years in Michigan contributed nothing to my idiolect, and I have never lived in Texas.

  15. The dialect quiz insists rather strongly that I’m from Jersey. As I’m British, I’m obviously cheating them, but it’s interesting that it put me there rather than New England.

  16. I’ve done the dialect quiz before and had it place me right, with one concentration in Michigan and the other in the Upper South. This time the Michigan influence was completely gone, and the places it thought were the closest match for me in the South are places I’ve never lived. Weird.

  17. @Nicole, I get the exact same kind of comments (also a New Orleans native now living in Seattle, oddly enough). Over the years, I’ve started to think it’s more to do with the fact that New Orleans itself just has a very different accent than the rest of Louisiana, particularly the Cajun accent that I hear all the time from my family outside the city.

  18. The dialect quiz insists rather strongly that I’m from Jersey.

    Have you been to the Bailiwick? It might have rubbed off.

  19. @Lee

    When I was living in Nashville, there was this Thing people talked about called “Southern Fandom”, which was supposed to be much better than fandom anywhere else in the country, but never seemed to be particularly well-defined at least to me.

    Now I have this song in my head:

    I hope John Scalzi will remember
    A southern fan don’t need him around anyhow

  20. @ microtherion: *snort* Well, it is true that a lot of the Old Phart Phen from that region seem to have declared Puppy sympathies. Note: these are people in my own age cohort, but at this point I have nothing in common with them besides some past history and an interest in SF.

  21. The dialect quiz says I’m from Modesto, Fresno, or Salt Lake City. The first two are at least in the right state.

  22. The dialect quiz gives a different subset of questions each time, so it might well give different answers. It usually places me in the Midwest, and sometimes places me 20 miles from where I live. (Note: the 20 miles thing is just because that’s the location they’ve chosen to name for a particular few hundred square mile area).

  23. @Mark:

    The dialect quiz insists rather strongly that I’m from Jersey. As I’m British, I’m obviously cheating them, but it’s interesting that it put me there rather than New England.

    Possibly it detected that you like hoagies? And cranberries (but not at the same time)?

  24. @Rick Moen: Thanks for the link! Harvard pegged me fairly well, which amuses me since I grew up half my life overseas and my parents were both sorta New England-Florida hybrids. I’m pretty sure I gave a few answers that were kinda “off” for where I grew up in the States. (Oh there, they should ask that kinda question. “Do you call it the USA, the U.S., the States, America, ‘mur’ka, or Other.”)

    @Cally: Oh don’t tempt me to take it several times. 😉

    /dialect-stalk (not at all the same as dialectic-stalk)

  25. Question 20 of 25

    What do you call it when rain falls while the sun is shining?

    In Scotland we call that Summer.

    ETA: Like @JJ I appear to have broken it.

  26. It thinks I’m from either California (Stockton or Santa Rosa) or Honolulu. Um, no?

    I know North Dakotans and Minnesotans have a couple of terms we don’t use across the border, but only a couple. In general I should get that region.

    Not going to try a second time.

    (it took a while to finish loading, but it eventually did.)

  27. The triangle formed by the three big cities in my profile had the place where I lived the first two decades of my life on its northern edge and where I’ve lived mostly ever since on its eastern edge. That’s pretty good, considering how I pick up other folks’ speech patterns and expressions.

  28. Well, I took the dialect quiz encore un fois. Now, it proclaims that I’m from New York City, Milwaukee, and Honolulu. So, aloha, youse guys. Pass dat bratwurst.

  29. I never noticed Southern Fandom having any more booze or sex than Northeastern, Midwestern, or Western. They did smoke a lot more, esp. indoors, yuck. I have always thought Midwestern room parties were the best overall.

    @Lenora Rose: I hate to tell you this, but I’ve never met a Canadian who insisted “We don’t say aboot!” who didn’t then go on to say it in casual conversation. It throws them into a temporary existential crisis. A few are then brave enough to tell their fellow Canadians “the Americans are right aboot that, even if I hated finding it oot”. And of course the random minor guest star vowels give it away when a TV show’s being made in Canada, particularly when they mean to say “been” and actually say “bean”.

    I’ve taken that Harvard Survey several times and it gets it right about 80% of the time for me; the other 20% is wildly incorrect. I kind of have a generic American accent, though my dialect is, like, hella Northern California.

    @lauowolf: Yes, my relatives in Jackson were somewhat suspicious of New Orleans, but I guess it’s mutual. They were okay with Memphis, but Atlanta was just beyond the pale. Might as well have been Yankees.

  30. I first heard it from a North Dakota transplant whose favorite expression seemed to be, “Well Jeez, don’t get a hemorrhage aboat it!” He distinctly said it like “boat,” and another friend tagged him “the boatnik” because of it.

    My sister who grew up in Colorado has lived in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula since about 1975, and she seems to use a soft, round vowel that lies between oh and ooh. Her husband, a Detroit native, seems to use the same ow sound as I do, for whatever reason.

  31. @Lenora Rose – *raises my hand* I say “aboot” sometimes, usually on purpose but sometimes by accident as well. I also call people “hoser” sometimes and say “eh” on a fairly regular basis ha ha

    Also just wanted to say toque chesterfield pamplemousse :X

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