This seems vitally important:
“During her tenure in politics, Hillary Clinton has shifted between several distinct versions of American English. This is not terribly unusual. President Obama has been known to change his pronunciation according to region and audience. But the thing about Clinton is that she’s been in the game for so long, and has had so many different jobs and lived in so many different places, that her various accents wind up mapping her career,” Bloomberg reports.
“During the 2008 campaign, Clinton called herself ‘multilingual,’ because she’s spent so much time in the South, the East Coast, and the Midwest. But the different accents don’t seem to appear randomly—they seem to come out based on where Clinton is, what role she has, or what office she’s running for.”
Is this newsworthy? Does it feed the narrative that Clinton is so ambitious that she’ll try to be all things to all people?
I’d note here that the article is careful to mention that politicians often shift their pronunciation depending on what part of the country they are addressing, so it’s hard to see how this is groundbreaking reporting.
This is going to be a very, very, very long year and a half. Sigh.
Yeah, most folks call that being human.
Proceed, Bloomberg.
When I used to travel and perform training I would do the same thing. I would also adjust my terminology to match the expertise of the audience. Shockingly this is just part of public speaking.
Pretty much every living human being changes their speech patterns depending on where they are and who they’re talking to.
So the report does at least establish that Hillary Clinton is a human being. Which is something, I guess, because I’m not sure you can say the same about any of her Republican rivals.
Lazy reporting while the earth burns.
Must be a very,very, very,ssslllooowwwww political news day.
Beyond moronic. In Missouri, there are 2 ways to say the name of the state:
For some reason, 1) is effete, libral, ‘n’ Democrat. 2) is authentic, rural, and republican. Listen to ANY MO politician say the name of the state, and you know immediately if they are in St Louis, KC, or Columbia (#1) or anywhere else in MO (#2).
Same with Nevada. And Cairo IL for that matter.
In my neck of the woods, it’s “Cah-lie-nuh” in the rurs and “Cah-roh-lie-nuh” in the urbs. And in the suburbs you get your choice whether to talk “proper” or talk “country”.
And you better know the difference between your Coastal, Piedmont, Mountain, and Ausland (Georgia, Alabama, Charleston, Misssippi, Louisiana, Texas, Tennessee, Kentucky, Arkansas, Ozarks, and Oklahoma) accents. Otherwise you get “Y’all not from round cheer, er ya?” or “They er Yank-ees”.
Wanever Ah’m ‘n Cahlina, Ah do revert to ma Cahlina axcent. Not always deliberately, either.
LOL. a good friend of mine is from Massachusetts, and although 30 years living in norcal has taken the edge off her native accent, let her run into tourists from New England and the sound of Bahstin is back strong!
Frankly, my spouse jokes with me about how my Balmorese accent begins to resurface whenever we go down to visit relatives in MD. If you’ve spoken the accent for years and hear it all around you when you’re visiting, you find yourself drifting back into that speech pattern. Articles like this are just propaganda for the rubes.
Or Miami, in far northeastern Oklahoma. If you say Miamee, you have announced to the world that you ain’t Okie.
Also the capital of SD. It is “Pierre” pronounced “Peer”. One syllable.
Environment causes changes in spoken dialect. Amazing discovery. Maybe we should stop telling the underclass to do that if that’s a big problem. Of course she speaks to relate to the people she’s dealing with. People who get sinecures in one profession and one place never have to grapple with that. People who refuse to adapt rarely succeed. Might as well write off the media now as having anything at all newsworthy to say about the election. The media has spoken: no third Democratic Presidential term. Even the well-heeled Clinton campaign is going to have to end-run the media and… Read more »
This is exactly the verbal connection Mitt was unable to make with potential voters.
Here let me translate form the PukeFunnel for you:
“Is there nothing that that evil bitch will do to feed her unholy twisted ambition to be President?? How dare she think she’s
allowed to do that???”
Because, of course, [insert male Republican candidate’s name] is a selfless, humble man who is just putting himself out there due to the acclamation of the crowds…
Is it newsworthy? Well, of course not. But the media behemoth that is now in the pipeline will be built one small story at a time. One must develop a wide range of stories across a diverse range of media outlets. There will most certainly be a range of themes that will be floated. Some will die on the vine, some will be sent back for further refinement and some will be “winners” right out of the gate. This process will continue, unabated, until enough momentum has been gained that everything can be brought together and synopsized into a nice,… Read more »
Why dread them? Mrs. Clinton probably will relish them right up to the very end. That’s who she is. Very amazing, in fact. A small bunch of people have a lock on power in the US (around the world) and the Clintons are definitely insiders. That’s a fact to dread.
I don’t get how this is either lame or a gotcha. It points out this is SOP for most, and its interesting in and of itself at least to me. I have said in the past that this bothers me sometimes. Ive grumbled about Obama doing t iin the past. It often seems so fake! And pandering! Plus personally I try not to change my speech much. For instance despite growing up in ‘pop’ country I trained myself to say soda because I think pop is dumb. I want to point out I don’t think it necessarily IS fake and… Read more »
My sense, and perhaps I’m wrong, is that when Obama does it, he also communicates that it’s all in respectful good fun, and he and the audience know that he’s not trying to pull a fast one over anyone.
Yeah, I don’t doubt he’s speaking to them honestly but it just doesn’t sound normal to me when a guy like Obama drops his ‘g’s.
In fact a friend and I used to tease each other about this since she did the same thing.
More common these days among pols. I recall in 2000 Gore getting some flak for sounding more southern than he usually did went he went down home. Of course this was interpreted as merely his insincere elitist self trying to bamboozle the rubes. At least Hillary has the excuse that she did spend 18 yrs or whatever it was in Arkansas. That’s a fair stretch of time, and so not unreasonable to hear her in those old clips occasionally dropping her g’s and invoking Tammy Wynette. But I’m not sure it happened so often back before the modern political era… Read more »
I’m so looking forward to 18 months of political process stories, especially trivial ones, instead of coverage of actual policies and issues. (Not.)
To be fair, it’s not like coverage of policy issues matter for us. It is extremely rare to non-existent for policy to be made in this county that doesn’t have majority elite support.