The comments about my post yesterday have become truly
bizarre. Nothing I wrote had anything at all to do with how people in Queens
talk as opposed to how people in Manhattan talk. I cannot even begin to imagine
where that comes from. What was I referring to? Well, I have read (obviously I
have no idea whether this is true or not) that Fred Trump, Donald’s father,
wanted to be accepted by the big socially well-established real estate
developers who operated in Manhattan and felt shunned by them. Donald Trump, I
imagine, picked up that attitude from his father. Trump’s sycophantic attitude
toward those whom he perceives as strong is well known. I was simply suggesting
that it extended to Bob Woodward and that that explained both why he agreed to
an extended series of taped interviews and also why he tried in those
interviews to sound knowledgeable, failing to do so because of his misuse of “big”
words. I should have thought this was obvious from what I wrote.
My comment about the Columbia University Board of Trustees
was based on something I heard half a century ago when I was still at Columbia.
According to the story I heard, Columbia owned the land on which Rockefeller
Center is built, obviously an enormously valuable property. They were charging
something like $3 million a year in rent which was ridiculously below what they
should have been getting. The Columbia board in those days had a heavy
representation of high dollar Manhattan real estate developers who certainly
should have known what that property was worth. In 1969, the year after the
student uprising, we were told that Columbia was in terrible economic shape and
as I heard the story, it took the next president a decade to repair the damage
to Columbia’s finances.
What on earth does this have to do with whether it is all
right to make fun of the way people in Queens talk but not all right to make
fun of the way African-Americans talk? I don’t even know how one would go about
making fun of the way people in Queens talk. I guess since I come from Queens I
don’t think I have a Queens accent, I just talk. And at least when I was a boy
there was certainly nothing that could be called a Manhattan accent although
there was something that could be called a Brooklyn accent. I leave it to the
linguists among my readership to decide whether there was something that could
be called a Bronx accent or a Staten Island accent.
I grew up in upstate NY and didn't, and don't, have an accent. Just about everyone else, who didn't come from upstate NY, did and does.
ReplyDeleteExactly!
ReplyDeleteYes, precisely. I grew up in western Mass and the people from New York City and Boston talked funny but my family and friends just talked normal. No accent at. We sound like the guy on TV. I don't know why everyone keeps telling me that I have an accent. Interestingly though, when I tell Italians that I moved to Italy from San Francisco, many will say, "I could tell by your accent."
ReplyDelete@David Palmeter: Exactly what do you mean by upstate? Rockland County? Several decades ago, my sister reported a conversation with a professor at her midwestern university:
ReplyDeleteProf: What are you doing for Xmas vacation?
Sister: Going back home?
Prof: Where's that?
Sister: Upstate NY.
Prof: [who it turns out, grew up in Buffalo] What do you mean by upstate NY?
Sister: Syracuse [home of the upstate medical center]
Prof: OK then.
For the record, natives (which we were not) often pronounced Sarahcuse. They sounded funny.
Marcel
ReplyDeleteI was born and grew up in Elmira. My parents were both from Syracuse, and I went to college in Syracuse. Went to law school in Chicago, where everyone spoke "upstate."
Harummph. Elmira is NOT upstate. Definitely southern tier. In the mental geography I grew up with, upstate NY was roughly regions 2, 4, 5 & 6 in this map
ReplyDeleteBTW, I mangled the anecdote in my previous comment. My sister's professor was testy about the use of "upstate" by people from NYC and environs to refer to anywhere north of Westchester county. Syracuse was acceptable in his view.
Thanks for the info on the Columbia endowment. On its face, at least, it sounds like simple negligence or incompetence, as opposed to the malfeasance in the Penn case, but it would be interesting to know more details. (Not that you should know them, just in general.)
ReplyDelete'What on earth does this have to do with whether it is all right to make fun of the way people in Queens talk but not all right to make fun of the way African-Americans talk?'
ReplyDeleteEdgy or over the edge? ;)
'I don’t even know how one would go about making fun of the way people in Queens talk.'
Like this: 'I don’t even know how one would go about making fun of the way people in Queens talk.'