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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2011-01-20, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, JANUARY 20, 2011. PAGE 5. I t is an ugly city, a dirty city. Its climate is a scandal. Its politics are used to frighten children. Its traffic is madness. Its competition is murderous. But…once you have lived in New York and it has become your home, no other place is good enough. – John Steinbeck Ah, yes…Noo Yawk, Noo Yawk. Back in the ‘80’s, Toronto Star columnist Michele Landsberg spent a few years living in New York while her husband Stephen Lewis served as Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations. She got her Big Apple baptism on Fifth Avenue one afternoon after hailing a taxi. Landsberg was about to climb in the back seat when a stout, mink-coated matron blindsided her, body checked her out of the way and commandeered the cab. “B-b-b-but this is MY taxi,” Landsberg stammered. The matron snarled “This is Noo Yawk, honey!” and slammed the door. Yep, New Yorkers have brass dangly bits, no doubt about it. As George Segal said, “In New York there’s no room for amateurs, even in crossing the streets.” And as far as New York taxis go, Johnny Carson said it best: “Any time four New Yorkers get into a cab together without arguing, a bank robbery has just taken place.” New Yorkers are world famous, and nothing says ‘New Yorker’ like the accent. ‘Water’ becomes ‘wawtuh’, ‘doctor’ becomes ‘dawktuh’. A New Yorker doesn’t park his car, he ‘pahks’ his ‘cah’. And an inquiry as to whether or not one has dined becomes a masterpiece of minimalism: “Jeet?” “No – Jew?” There is probably no better-known accent in the world. Think Edith Bunker: “Awww c’man, Awwwchie”. Think Tony Soprano: “Whaddyagonnadoo?” The accent – like just about everything else in New York – is defiant, up front and in your face. And some New Yorkers spend thousands of bucks to get rid of it. Really. According to a story in the New York Times there are more than a dozen businesses in Manhattan dedicated to teaching their customers not to sound like they come from New York. Why would a Gothamite want to lose the most recognized accent in the world? Because they think it’s ‘unrefined’. It sounds, as a Brit might say, ‘common’. Lynn Singer, a speech therapist with several New York clients is blunter. “A New York accent makes you sound ignorant,” she told the New York Times reporter. Presumably, therapists like Ms. Singer can take the rough edges off a person’s speaking style, sand it down, backfill the glottal potholes, tighten up the diphthongs and all in all, make a New Yorker sound like he or she comes from….well, nowhere, actually. Don’t laugh, it’s a trend. I have actor friends in Vancouver and Toronto who are paying good money to voice coaches in order to ‘lose’ their Canadian accent. They think a homogenized, unrecognizable speech pattern will help get them work in American television and theatre. Perhaps it will – but it sucks. I appreciate hearing Prairie twang or West Coast mellow in a person’s voice. I enjoy figuring out whether I’m talking to a Yukoner or a Bluenoser; a James Bay Cree from Ontario or a Plains Cree from Calgary. Canada is a tossed salad of regional accents – staccato bursts of Québécois, the Gaelic lilt of Cape Bretoners, the Dickensian cadences of the Newfoundland outports to name just a few. There is a drive to flatten out all that glorious diversity, to make us all sound like Lloyd Robertson and I hope it fails. Ah, but do accents really matter? New Yorker Mary Ellen Orchard thinks so. She explained why her accent is important in a Letter to the Editor. “As a person who grew up in Manhattan, then moved to Queens, then moved to Long Island, by the second sentence of our introduction you will know that I am decisive, direct, funny, warm, don’t tolerate fools and will feed you a fabulous meal and welcome you into my home at a moment’s notice for as long as you need. “And what is your accent telling me? Your accent is telling me nothing at all.” Think Mary Ellen Orchard will be attending an “accent eradication” course anytime soon? Fuggeddaboudit. Arthur Black Other Views Foist, we take Manhattan The size of Huron County Council has been a topic that has been hotly debated over the past few months. Some like council’s size and some don’t, but it seems everyone has something to say on the topic. After hours of debate at the Jan. 12 meeting of Huron County Council, several opinions were expressed and many different sides of the story were given. Some felt council should remain at 20 members and other felt that the number of representatives should be reduced in conjunction with “decreased” population. A common phrase heard in Huron County is that bigger isn’t always better. This often comes in response to the hand of “Big Brother” in Toronto coming down from the sky to meddle with rural Ontario, trying to tell rural Ontario that it knows more about rural Ontario than rural Ontario does. However, in the case of Huron County Council, the many different viewpoints and opinions from the various regions of Huron County were part of what made the debate so thorough. Problems with the voter list numbers provided by the Municipal Property Assessment Corporation (MPAC) were expressed by those representing several municipalities around the council table. It’s been said by some that due to a new practice by MPAC that asks for voters to “confirm” their citizenship, thousands of voters were lost in the system, leading to “decreased population” with municipalities like Central Huron or Huron East “losing” nearly 1,000 voters each. While concern over the size of a political body getting out of hand is certainly warranted, for a region the size of Huron County, the current size of 20 members certainly doesn’t seem excessive, at least to me, when taking into account the magnitude of the issues facing Huron County going forward. In an area such as Huron County, councillors aren’t permitted the luxury of being a career politician. Nearly every municipal politician is employed, owns his own business or is retired. This leads to both positive and negative aspects of representing a municipality while living and working in that same municipality. Given that diversity, areas of knowledge are vast, and yet conflicts of interest are bound to happen. In the previous terms of council, looking at councils from Central Huron and Ashfield- Colborne-Wawanosh, for example, literally half of those councillors had to declare a conflict of interest when it came to discussion at the lower tiers pertaining to industrial wind turbines, leaving just a skeleton council to make decisions on one of the biggest issues to face rural Ontario in decades. However, at Huron East Council, like many other bodies, there are experts in several fields. There are members who are experts in the fields of plumbing, renewable energy, farming, insurance and education, to name just a few, enriching the discussion around the table, no matter the issue. Without as many faces around the council table, councillors may have to throw their hands up and declare ignorance on several subjects, despite their best efforts and research. While councillors are expected to be a “jack of all trades” to a certain degree, citizens simply can’t expect the world from them all the time. The diversity of our small municipal councils is one of their greatest assets. To eliminate council members to “simplify” contentious issues and perhaps limit discussion could be viewed as cutting off your nose to spite your face. Big man on campus Thank goodness for proofreaders and editors. I won’t deny it, I have some Achilles’ heels when it comes to writing, some things that, try as I might, I can’t seem to overcome. I won’t say what they are, because then people will be looking for them What I will say that one of the biggest issues many people have since the inception of computers, and the implementation of American spellings as the norm, is national spellings. It’s no surprise that American spellings of words are thick in Canada. The books we read, the magazines we subscribe to, the news feeds we have, the video games we buy and the television we watch are more American content than anything else (unless you’re like me and watch mostly British import shows). I sometimes run into these problems, as anyone does, but I do try to be aware of the differences. For example, I don’t flub on the well known ones, like colour, doughnut (Yes, that is how the British, and therefore Canadian, spell it) or annexe. But sometimes I have to double check the rarer ones (and don’t get me started on kilometre versus kilometer). One that I will (hopefully) never mistake though is plough. In the winter, that large vehicle you simultaneously love and hate being behind is not a plow. In Canada, we rely on snow ploughs, not snow plows (or snowplows), to clear our roads despite what some media outlets may state. At the beginning of the snowy season, when we were literally buried under snow, there were talks about urban centres being unprepared for the dumping we received. There were reports that stated that their “snow plows” were unprepared for the time necessary to bring the city back to an operational status. Unfortunately, I can’t find any good examples of people using the correct vernacular because search engines automatically replace the term plough with plow. Even as I write this piece, the spell check program, obviously of American design, is telling me plough doesn’t exist. The problem with using terms like plow instead of plough, draft instead of draught, donut instead of doughnut, color instead of colour and wrack instead of rack is that it is part of a slippery slope that first-world nations are on. It is, plain and simple, lazy. My disdain of this laziness is definitely aggravated by internet lingo. Unless I’m extremely ill, you will seldom find me removing vowels from letters (although I have been known to spout an LOL on the internet). People find it interesting that I usually try to use full sentence structure when commenting on Facebook, or have trouble understanding why Twitter, with its 140 character limit, feels very confined to someone like myself. My penchant for proper grammar and punctuation has even come to define me among my friends and peers. Some years ago I changed my cellular phone number and sent a text message to my friends to that effect. Unfortunately, my phone had an autocorrect feature that didn’t recognize my name as a correct spelling, so it was an unsigned text message. Despite the lack of identification, several people knew it was me because I’m the only one of our friends who capitalizes text messages and uses punctuation. I remember my Grade 2 teacher explaining the problem with using the word ’cause instead of because, even in passing conversation. I shudder to think how she would react to people further abbreviating the word to “cuz” or “becuz”. I guess the true root of my fear and disdain of this laziness can be tracked back to Orwell’s 1984 and Newspeak. For those of you who are aware of it, I apologize for the brief primer. Newspeak is a language that was designed to replace English and diminish crime by the totalitarian regime The Party in 1984. Through getting rid of dissenting language, and boiling all terms down to a dichotomy (eliminating words like great, fantastic, amazing and only having good to represent them, with only ungood as its antithesis), The Party hoped to ensure their power. In my mind, I would have thought that this next generation would be the most literate yet, given the amount of time they spend on computers and not in the outside world. In my youth, I read. I could most often be found with my nose in a book, and more often than not, those books used created languages to better tell their story. Be it Tolkien’s tomes pilfered from my mother’s bookshelf, Stephen King’s most notable foray into fantasy The Dark Tower or Robert Jordan’s mammoth Wheel of Time series, my mind was usually awash with languages that didn’t actually exist, and, in trying to understand these languages, I gathered a greater appreciation for my own. Unfortunately, languages aren’t respected or appreciated anymore, be they mundane or fanciful. The more words, syllables, vowels, consonants and verbs we eliminate, the closer we come to a society that can be easily swayed by those with a handle on true English, and the less intelligent we appear on the world stage. Parents, students, do your part and save the endangered species of the Canadian dialect. Shawn Loughlin Shawn’s Sense Canadian dialect on its last legs Denny Scott Denny’s Den