In The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe describes the diffusion of the type of speech used by airline pilots. “Anyone who travels very much on airplanes in the United States soon gets to know the voice of the airline pilot…coming over the intercom…with a particular drawl, a particular folksiness, a particular down-home calmness that is so exaggerated it begins to parody itself. Now, folks, uh…this is the captain…ummm… We’ve got a little ol’ red light up here on the control panel that’s trying to tell us that the landin’ gears’re not…uh…lockin’ into position when we lower ‘em…” Tom Wolfe directly attributes the origin of this drawl to Appalachia, the home of Chuck Yeager, the man who broke the sound barrier or as Wolfe puts it, “It was the drawl of the most righteous of all possessors of the right stuff.” Chuck Yeager was a man to admire and emulate, thus his lingo influenced every aspiring and active pilot and is still used today. I find this passage in The Right Stuff intriguing as it highlights how a particular dialect becomes popular in a specific culture.
Today, there is a different type of patois stemming from Southern California and used throughout the United States, particularly by youth in their early 20s. I’m referring to what many call “Valley Girl” talk, which was something mimicked in the states ten years ago whenever anyone referenced a girl from SoCal (at least in my East Coast experience). The film Clueless helped popularize this stereotype, however it was not a normal dialect for anyone outside of the SoCal region. Today, however, you can recognize this patois spoken by young adults from all over the United States. I directly attribute this diffusion to enormously popular MTV reality TV shows, such as The Hills. A patois that was once specific to a region is now widespread due to the media. This lingo is extremely popular for young adults specifically because they have not yet entered the professional world and also because they were likely impressionable teenagers while The Hills aired, from 2006 to 2009. Laguna Beach aired from 2004 to 2006, featuring some of the same cast.
Clueless
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFR9TNsByLk
The Hills
No comments:
Post a Comment