In the 7-part crime drama, Mare of Easttown, Kate Winslet plays a flannel-clad cop with a thirst for Rolling Rock, an appetite for hoagies and a tendency to pronounce water more like wooder. John McWhorter — who also, it turns out, grew up in Philly — discusses his hometown’s enigmatic accent and Winslet’s courageous attempt at imitating those impossibly difficult vowels. Most actors don’t even bother.
*FULL TRANSCRIPT*
JOHN McWHORTER: From Booksmart Studios, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language. I'm John McWhorter and I want you to listen to this.
MARE: I doubt the thing’s gonna live very long.STORE OWNER: Well, you'd be surprised. I mean, my mother turtle? Outlived her.MARE: If it’s taken care of, sure. If you feed it and give it clean water and make sure it's not swimming in its own filth. It’s for my grandson, he's four and has trouble focusing on tasks.
That was from the newish series Mare of Easttown. That was Kate Winslet as the Mare protagonist talking. And, you know, if you want to be picky — and of course we don't, except just for this episode we do — there was something a little bit off about that line in terms of the pronunciation. And the reason we're going to be picky about that on this show is because finally, I want to do an episode devoted to the famous Philly accent, the Philadelphia accent. Finally, a Philadelphia show or movie actually takes the trouble to have people talking the way people actually talk in that city. Generally, if something's in Philadelphia, people either, you know, sound like they're from Los Angeles or there's this idea that people in Philadelphia must talk like New Yorkers because New York is close and, you know, you figure, well, Rocky must have sounded kind of like he was from New York because Sylvester Stallone looked like he was a refugee from a Scorsese movie. But no, there is a very distinct Philadelphia accent. And how do I know? Well, as many of you know, I grew up in Philadelphia. I grew up in Philadelphia in the 1970s and 80s. And the accent, the grand old accent is actually fading now. But I'm old enough to have been raised within it in its prime. And, you know, I have a fondness. I remember as late as the 90s, I’d call my mother's work and I'd get one of the the secretaries there on the phone, not the phone, but the phone. And one of them might say, oh, Shelly's out. My mother's name was Shelley. It would be Shelly's out. To me, that's warmth. That to me is a blueberry muffin. That to me is how people are supposed to talk. And to the extent that the white and the Black Philadelphia accent overlapped — and of course, they were different — but even now, I just love hearing either a white or a Black Philadelphian say now instead of now. Now we're going to do it now. That means that this is going to be a show about sounds, what linguists call phonology. And I don't usually go there partly because I'm not a phonologist, but mostly because it can be hard to make phonology fun without a whole lot of preparation. But this is about Philly and Philly is fun. And so I'm going to get this across to you. Mare of Easttown is in the news and it should be people, keep asking me how accurate it is, so let's do it.
FIRST, FORGET EVERYTHING YOU KNOW ABOUT VOWELS
And in order to do this, what we need to do, we've got to forget the alphabet. We're going to do vowels. I'm going to talk about Philly vowels. They're more interesting than the consonants. But we cannot have this idea that our vowels are a e i o u. Just forget that, that has nothing to do with the way those vowels are organized in your mouth, not even if you think about long a, short a whatever those are. It's not that. Here's how we do it. I want you to try something in your own mouth. Listen to me doing this: ēēē āāā aaa. Run them together: ēēēāāāaaa. Now, first of all, notice that when you go ēēēāāāaaa, you're going from up to middle to down. You're going downward: ēēēāāāaaa. Now, these things are both going from top to bottom, but they're also in the front. And you're thinking on the front of what. Because you know we're thinking of a e i o u, and we think well that's how vowels work. No, ēēēāāāaaa is front, because do this: oohōōōaah. Notice that not only are you going from top to bottom again, but they're further back: ēēēāāāaaa, up front; oohōōōaah, in the back. So that's how the vowels that we're going to talk about are actually arranged. So notice that āāā ōōō, they're both in the middle; ēēē ooh, they’re up at the top; aaa aah, that's not short a, long a or whatever. I was actually never taught what those were but they are on the bottom: aaa is the front version of aah. So, ēēēāāāaaa, oohōōōaah. Just remember that. Now what is the Philly accent? Often you read about it and it's considered so, you know, vague and strange and difficult and chaotic. Not really. You can think of it as something you do to a person. This is how I've often thought about it.
THE PHILLY ACCENT: IT’S ALL ABOUT THE BELLY
You are working with somebody — I don't know, you're trying to teach them how to breathe for singing or something like that — and you're trying to change their breathing patterns. People often say that in order to sing well, you have to think about your diaphragm. I don't know what that means. LAAAA. I am not thinking about my diaphragm, but suppose you tell somebody, OK, sweetie, now breathe deeply, breathe deeply. And instead of inflating their chest, they inflate their belly. So they go and they push their stomach out. And you say, no, no, no, not, not in the belly from the chest, come on, shoulders up. And you tell them to put their shoulders up and so their shirt rises in the back, but then it falls in the front. So it's like [mouth effect] like that. So you tell somebody, OK, breathe deep and they do it with their belly, so their bellies poking out in the middle. And then you say, no, no, no, no, no, no, shoulders up. And then they go up [mouth effect], but then the shirt goes down in the front like in a cartoon [mouth effect], like that. That is the Philly accent, because that's what happens to the vowels. And so if you think of the ēēēāāāaaa, that's the front; āāāis the belly, that's in the middle. So the person goes [mouth effect], instead of doing with their chest, and then you say up, your shoulders up. That's the back, that's the oohōōōaah ones. But then the shirt falls in the front [mouth effect], like that. OK, what the hell am I talking about? This. If you think about that person — to me it's this the hairy guy, you know, because I'm thinking about Rocky and the trainer, he's in a sleeveless shirt and the belly in the front. What do I mean by that? I mean this, let's stick with the Rocky. Rocky was made into a musical not too very long ago and, yep, I don't even need to tell you what that was like. But there was one thing, they made one salute to actually doing a Philadelphia accent. At one point somewhere in the late middle, they had some attendant tell somebody that something was closed and the person says it's closed. It's closed. That's the one time anybody used a Philadelphia accent and it was meant for a laugh. If you were from Philly, you got it immediately that that's how that person would actually have talked. Now, what he was doing was he was poking the belly out. And what I mean by that is this. Close, ōōō, remember our back sounds and so oohōōōaah, well, close gets pushed up front, ēēēāāāaaa. So the ōōō becomes more like āāā. Closed, closed, closed. You're pushing it up front. And so in Philadelphia, often you don't go, you go, you go. It's not just weird, it's that the ōōō … āāā is being pushed up front. The belly's going out and so [mouth effect], and so closed. You go. There's a lot of that belly in the Philadelphia accent. And by belly I mean that you have the vowels being attracted to that front middle. It's sticking its belly out. And so, for example, let's go back to ēēēāāāaaa; aaa is up front. Well, in the Philly accent the aaa often comes up a little bit. It comes towards the āāā, so ēēēāāāaaa … and so the aaa is more like an ehh. Just like closed becomes closed, aaa is more like ehh. And that's the same thing. It's just that there's this attraction to the belly. And so, for example, you don't take a bath, you take a bath, you take a bath. It's not half of an apple, it's half of an apple. You have a lousy house. Oh, it's a lousy house. That's pure Philadelphia. What that is, is not quote unquote nasal or strange. It's that laaa … ousy goes to lehh … ousy, because it's closer up to the āāā of the belly. Now, what's interesting about Philly, this shows you how random these things are, is that aaa, that cat sound, goes up to an ehh in that way before a lot of consonants, but not all of them. It only does it before the noisy ones, the ones that hiss like fffsss, and then the ones that are nasal, like mmm and nnn. So you have bath, half. It's a lousssy houssse. It's a mannn, OK. But, it means that not before the consonants that aren't noisy, not before just d, p, t, k. So you have somebody who is taking a bath and they're sad about it. Not sad. Somebody’s taking a bath, and if you do that you have to take off your cap, not your cap, your cap. You have a cat, you use a thumb tack. This is how things work. And so the Philly accent is that you have this lousy house, but you have a sad cat and one just internalizes this. And then there are these like crazy exceptions. Phonology has ridiculous kick you in the butt exceptions just like grammar does. And so before your d, p, t, k, the easy consonants that aren't hissy, that aren't nasal, the ones that just kind of mind their business? Well, you don't have the aaa going belly except in exactly three words, bad, mad and glad. If I were a real Philadelphian, I'd say bad, mad
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