Talk:Boston Brahmin accent

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NYC/Boston[edit]

Basically, I find it hard to believe that the upper-class Boston Brahmin accent and the upper-class New York accent are more closely related to each other than to the working-class accents of the same cities; this is contrary to what sociolinguists know about upper-class speech in American English. It reads like it was written by someone who is unaware of the differences between New York and Boston accents and just grouped them together because they share one salient upperclass feature (non-rhoticity). For instance, New York has never had the cot-caught merger and even educated Eastern Massachusetts speakers have possessed the merger for many decades. It is also notable that none of the individuals mentioned in the article as exemplars of the "Boston Brahmin" accent are from Boston. Moreover "clipped manner of speaking" and "drawling of both vowels and consonants" are both hopelessly vague as attempted descriptions of an accent. AJD 06:58, 19 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Question re: Link for Locust Valley Lockjaw[edit]

I notice that the internal link in this article for "Locust Valley Lockjaw" leads right back to this same article -- is that intentional?

--Skb8721 02:29, 24 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Cited in a novel[edit]

"Locust Valley Lockjaw" is mentioned in The Gold Coast by Nelson DeMille on page 32 of 634; that was how I found this article. I don't know whether such a citation belongs in here because it's not a scholarly work of linguistics, but perhaps that's not a good criterion; it is a novel (atypical for DeMille) that has been explicitly compared to Tom Wolfe's work exactly because of its quality as reportage, and much of the best psychology and sociology is found in literature. I'm not sure how to insert such a citation into the main article; it should not be positioned as one would position an academic reference, because people use those for research to which this reference would not contribute. But this kind of reference is essential in an article whose content is threatened by the Wikipedian deletomaniacs whose activities remind me most of PKing; so putting it in Discussion seems like a reasonable strategy.

76.28.193.251 20:11, 27 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Hey Buffy, let's go play tennis[edit]

I never realized there was a name for this accent! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.186.232.27 (talk) 02:18, 23 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Stewie Griffin[edit]

If Stewie Griffin (a Family Guy character voiced by Seth MacFarlane) indeed has a Boston Brahmin accent, then surely by now he has outstripped Mr. Feeny in pop culture significance. Cromulent Kwyjibo (talk) 15:59, 23 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

  • Stewie Griffin does not have a Brahmin accent, his accent is clearly (faux) British. I'm removing him from the page. Augur (talk) 20:24, 30 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

What about Frasier Crane? It might not be the textbook definition, but it's closer to how contemporary Brahmins actually speak. After all, he is a Bostonian/Cantabridgian transplanted in Seattle. — Preceding unsigned comment added by MP808 (talk • contribs) 06:13, 5 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Yankee accent[edit]

If we're including the NYC-area upper crust in this discussion -- and we should be -- this article should be changed to "Yankee accent" or something similar. - House of Scandal (talk) 17:12, 4 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

  • Oppose - Maybe one or the other of us has a tin ear, but I believe the historical Boston Brahmin accent is distinctly different from any New York accent. Nowadays, the regional distinctions have been blurred, but this article is not about the way people talk in 2008. (Please note: I am not a native of Tennessee. Wink...) --Orlady (talk) 18:03, 5 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose The Cabots spoke a variety of New England; New Yorkers do not. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 18:46, 5 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment: In case there's any confusion, I'll explain that it's my belief that the accents of very old monied Upper East Side NYC'ers and very old monied Beacon Hill, Bostoners are so similar as to discuss together. FDR and Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., for example, had the same "Thurston Howell" thing going on. I am not suggesting that the other 99.9 percent of NYC and Boston accents are similar. - House of Scandal (talk) 00:25, 6 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Note also that MORE than half the text of the article is devoted not to the Boston Brahmin accent, but rather to "Locust Valley Lockjaw". - House of Scandal (talk) 00:26, 6 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    • And where did you hear Lodge's voice? Dividing the article might be a reasonable solution, although some sources for Locust Valley Lockjaw would be nice; calling FDR a Yankee is not helpful. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 21:22, 6 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • I didn't call FDR a Yankee. I said "this article should be changed to 'Yankee accent' or something similar" and used FDR as a non-New England example. Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. died in 1985 and his monied accent was a source of comments during his career. Please concentrate your comments on the discussion, not on myself or other editors. That is not helpful. - House of Scandal (talk)
    • Rephrasing: Do you have a sample of Lodge's voice, so we may judge the similarity? Like Orlady, I do not regard the monied accents of Boston and New York as interchangeable. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 21:53, 6 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • This discussion doesn't hinge on the accent of any individual. The Boston Brahmin Accent Sample attached to the article is representative of the accent of Lodge and his ilk. However, we (myself very much included!) should turn outwards for information that can be cited rather than opining further about similarities and differences. - House of Scandal (talk) 22:31, 6 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • The word "Yankee" is slang and ambiguous. I have heard it to mean any USA citizen; I have heard it used to mean any citizen of the north of the USA. (I am British.) Anthony Appleyard (talk) 19:56, 7 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
      • To a foreigner, Yankee means an American. To a Southerner, it means a Northerner. To a Northener, it means a New Englander. To a New Englander, it means a Vermonter. In Vermont, a Yankee is someone who eats pie for breakfast. If such a multifarious word were to be used, it would require persistent and overbearing clarifications and modifiers in order to have a clear meaning. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 4.154.228.182 (talk) 03:14, 9 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose - 3 ghits for "Upper-class Yankee accent"; 688 for "boston brahmin accent". Per WP:NC; our job is to use the common name, not one that we believe is correct. The Evil Spartan (talk) 04:31, 11 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • The amount of hits one term or the other gets is really beside the point of what's being discussed. - House of Scandal (talk) 04:53, 11 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
It may be beside the point of what you’re talking about, but it should certainly be factored into the article name. Names are often not strictly accurate, but they come from somewhere, and being as the accent is from Boston as well, I see no problem with it. —Wiki Wikardo 10:14, 12 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • The discussion was really about whether we were including rich NYC accents in the same article. Discussion of them was more than half the content. If we were to keep it as such, "Boston Brahmin Accent" is patently the wrong title. As were discussing how to make the content of the article match up with it's title, I would respectfully suggest that the number of hits a given phrases gets was really besides the point or was, at best, a discussion for later. - House of Scandal (talk) 11:16, 12 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Problem solved[edit]

Both the non-Boston related material and the move request have been removed. - House of Scandal (talk) 05:48, 11 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thurston Howell III[edit]

Speaking as a native of New England, I have to say that the character on Gilligan's Island is a "lockjaw" candidate, from NYC environs (LI or CT, most likely), rather than Brahmin. He is listed as a resident of Newport RI in the TV series (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thurston_Howell,_III), but Newport is the haven of the top .2% richest from all over the northeast. M*A*S*H did a great job of nailing the regional/class sound of Boston, but a sensitive ear will contrast them. Howell is snooty NY-ish. Note: NY is not New England. Shava23 (talk) 05:46, 10 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Winchester[edit]

Citing the M*A*S*H character Charles Winchester's accent as an example of the Boston Brahmin accent is like citing Inspector Clouseau for a French accent or Manuel of "Fawlty Towers" for a Spanish accent. Grossly innacurate caricatures, all of them. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 4.154.228.182 (talk) 03:07, 9 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Real-world examples[edit]

Most of the examples in this article (including past revisions) contain wildly inappropriate examples. Almost all of them have been fictional characters, with accents that are grossly inaccurate caricatures of the accent (e.g. television's Winchester on M*A*S*H or Quimby on The Simpsons), fictional characters with some completely different accent (e.g. Stewie Griffin on Family Guy), or examples of other similiar but distinct accents, like the "Long Island Lockjaw" or "North Atlantic" accents, or various accents from England.

We need actual examples of the Boston Brahmin accent, not other accents (e.g. not Franklin Roosevelt), not exaggerated fictional characters. Not Katherine Hepburn. (She may be an unsuitable example for any accent, because her spastic dysphonia could be mistaken for her accent). Maybe George Plimpton, who was born in New York but studied at Harvard. Maybe 1970's John Kerry (his accent has changed quite a but since he testified before Congress). Definitely John F. Kennedy, or perhaps Ted Kennedy. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 139.68.134.1 (talk) 14:54, 30 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Is the Boston Brahmin accent the same as what is informally referred to as the "Kennedy accent"? If it is, searching "Kennedy accent" through Wikipedia should redirect to this article, and perhaps a brief comment should be made about it. Right now searching for "Kennedy accent" does not direct anywhere, and this article does not show up in the search results. I think part of the difficulty of using real-world examples of this accent are that most of the Boston Brahmin are a small bunch of people who seem to stay away from the public life nowadays, unlike in the past. Except for the Kennedys of course. Midtempo-abg (talk) 19:12, 26 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]
The Kennedy accent is a failed attempt at a Brahmin. The family is Boston Irish, and used to have a distinct southie accent. The patriarch decided to hire a prominent British speech coach to teach the clan to speak like Brahmins, but it ended up sounding like southie unable to decide between doing an impression of Brahmin or British English. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 129.64.148.19 (talk) 03:28, 23 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]
How about Julia Child as a good example? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 63.117.250.164 (talk) 23:42, 7 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

T. S. Eliot[edit]

I've to object to the inclusion of T. S. Eliot. Eliot was born in Missouri, not New England and his accent (as heard in T. S. Eliot reading "The Waste Land", for example) is clearly early-20th RP. 130.225.244.206 (talk) 17:46, 24 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I'm removing Eliot from the list. Here is an Eliot quote: "My family were New Englanders, who had been settled... for two generations in the South West—which was, in my own time, rapidly becoming merely the Middle West. The family guarded jealously its connexions with New England; but it was not until years of maturity that I perceived that I myself had always been a New Englander in the South West, and a South Westerner in New England; when I went to school in New England I lost my southern accent without ever acquiring the accent of the native Bostonian." WikiParker (talk) 14:13, 11 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Buckley[edit]

William F. Buckley Jr. was neither born, bred, nor educated in Boston, and the article cited as so-called evidence that he spoke with a Brahmin accent notes as much. I am therefore deleting him from the list. 98.14.84.183 (talk) 22:32, 12 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The accent a person uses has nothing to do with where they were born, bred or educated. A man could be born and raised on Mars and still speak with a Boston Brahmin accent if the only speech he heard as an infant was Boston Brahmin. A person learns to speak the way others around him speak, or he learns to speak with a particular accent through self-application and study, as many actors do. Your removal of Buckley from the list is poorly reasoned. If Buckley spoke with what an expert would call a Boston Brahmin accent, however he acquired it, he should be left in the list. Therefore, I've put him back in. — QuicksilverT @ 14:23, 11 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Note that John Thompson was the first Constable and Magistrate of Plymouth Co. and founded other townships in the southern New England area, such as Halifax, Middleborough (Middleboro) and Plymton, Massachusetts. Note that John Thompson was the first Constable and Magistrate of Plymouth Co. and founded other townships in the southern New England area, such as Halifax, Middleborough (Middleboro) and Plymton, Massachusetts.

"Diamond" Joe Quimby[edit]

The mayor from the Simpsons should be on this list. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 65.51.58.33 (talk) 14:41, 18 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

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