Joe Stromberg takes up linguistic cudgels on behalf of the South:

“In the February 2003 Liberty Magazine, Mr. Timothy Sandefur, lately a Lincoln Fellow at Claremont Institute, complains that in the wake of the Trent Lott affair, too many American political leaders are “minimizing the offensiveness of a Mississippi good ol’ boy who tells his audience that things wouldabin bettah if thar hain’t bin nunna dat dee-seg-ruh-gay-shun.”1

For my part, I am more taken with the offensiveness of the words I just put in italics. The effect is hideous – sort of Joel Chandler Harris + 90-proof anti-Southern venom! Luckily for us, post-colonial analysis saves the day.

If this Fellow (a singular counterpart to General Lee’s “those people”) can dress up in Hickface, what happens to all the post-colonial literature about white folks, minstrel shows, and all that? Will new theories arise? If Br’er Strauss and Br’er Jaffa ask to be thrown in the hermetic briar patch, is it all a big trick?

Mind you, the Fellow’s sally is not very funny, but perhaps he did not mean to be funny. I expect he meant to be insulting. He knows that Southerners don’t enjoy being insulted. There is a whole literature on this, including a very tedious book by Professor Bertram Wyatt-Brown, who studied under the even more tedious C. Vann Woodward.

There is an implicit syllogism here: 1. People who don’t sign on for full-bore Lincolnianism, rightly understood (= mercantilism), are bad people; and (1. B.) bad people should be insulted, and as often as possible. 2. Southerners don’t sign on for full-bore Lincolnian mercantilism. 3. Therefore, Southerners should be insulted daily, partly because they dislike it so much. It’s good for them, builds character, you know.

As Nietzsche might have said, that which doesn’t torch Atlanta or Columbia, once a week, strengthens us.

And now I read the sentence: “Things wouldabin,” etc., again. “Well, shut my mouth,” I cry, slapping myself on the knee; indeed I slap my knee a mite hard, but am somehow able to keep time with the high lonesome fiddle music that runs through the soundtrack of my post-Hillbilly mind. “How do,” I say, in the general direction of the imagined “good ol’ boy” conjured up for our contemptuous contemplation by the Fellow. How do these Northern gentry (and scalawags) find so much time to worry about little old us, when, left to our own devices, we would seldom pay any heed to them whatsoever? It is a mystery.

Perhaps Southerners’ general lack of interest in what “those people” do and say is the greatest crime of all…….

…

THE ONE-ROOM SCHOOLHOUSE OF HISTORY

What sociological or ideological conclusions may we draw from the above?

The Fellow has no ear for “dialect” writing. If he really wanted to present a Mississippi accent, he could sample the oeuvre of the late Jerry Clower. There he would find one variety of Mississippi speech along with ample evidence for Celtic substratum sentence-structure traceable to Ulster. My guess is he will not find this project very fetching.

It is more likely that the Fellow is just following the set “national” media rule (in place since the 1960s) whereby white Southerners’ speech must be rendered pseudo-phonetically so as to display the speakers’ boundless depravity, while all other persons will be written up as conforming in every way with the strictures of Mr. Fowler, no matter what they sound like.

George Wallace always got the Yankee pseudo-phonetic write-up, but can you imagine Ed Koch, the Rev. Al Sharpton, or Larry King written up the way they sound? Ha!

For a couple of centuries, northern interest groups and their allies have badgered and defamed Southerners. Poor old critics, I worry about them: If they finally succeed in abolishing the South, whatever will they do with themselves? Abolish the World, I suppose.

For two centuries, Yankees of a certain type were in the habit of denouncing Southerners for talking like Blacks, for eating the same food, and more of the same. They didn’t much care how this reflected on the Blacks.

Things have changed. And here’s the rub, if white Southerners are stupid for clinging to certain colonial expressions, where does that leave African-Americans who also use just as many – perhaps more – of them? If you sneer at one set of linguistic Southerners, how do you immunize another set of them from this assault?

I’m glad enough it isn’t my problem. Anyway, if the Fellow wants to hear some funny dialect material, he should listen to tapes of the late Lewis Grizzard. Old Lewis could do a good imitation of a flat, washed-out Midwestern accent. He found that regional accent amusing, I guess, but there wasn’t much venom in his depiction of it.

For venom mixed with the wisdom of the serpent you must betake yourself to New England, where fanatics grow out of the rocky soil. Maybe the Fellow will go up there sometime. Maybe he will render their speech phonetically for our edification.

Notes:

1. Timothy Sandefur, “One Cheer for Al Sharpton,” Liberty, 17, 2 (February 2003), p. 14 (my italics).
2.
John Samuel Kenyon, American Pronunciation (Ann Arbor, MI: George Wair Publishing, 1966), p. 106 (my emphasis).
3. C. T. Onions, ed., The Oxford Universal Dictionary on Historical Principles (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1955 (1933): “ain’t” (p. 38), “an’t” (p. 72), and “hain’t, haint” (p. 854).
4. H. W. Fowler, A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1965), p. 52.
5. Cf. Cleanth Brooks, The Relation of the Alabama-Georgia Dialect to the Provincial Dialects of Great Britain (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1935).
6. David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 256–264.