SLSL "TSR" You've - got - to - accentuate the positive...

[John Bailey]

>From: "Dave Meury" <dmeury at lioninc.com>
>Date: Mon, 2 Dec 2002 06:19:22 -0800
>
>On the matter of the Virginian pronunciation of "out," I think it does
>not ring true with most readers, even if it is accurate (I do not know).
>

I agree that it does constitute a weakness (thanks to TRP for pointing it 
out, though). But what troubles me is how the Intro comments seem to imply 
that TRP got over this Bad Ear, eventually. Is that true?

Because there are two ways of getting over it, that I can see. One is to 
correct the Bad Ear, learn the 'proper' dialects and accents of various 
regions etc, and render them in the later writings. So 'oot' is not correct. 
Is it? But whatever the situation of TRP's ear, where's his tongue? Is 'oot' 
wrong in a universal sense, or wrong for someone who grew up in Oyster Bay, 
went to Cornell, etc? How would a Virginian pronounce 'oot'? To go with the 
Canadian similarity (because I'm very familiar with that accent at least), 
'oat' is only right to a non-Canadian, right? I'm mostly thinking about this 
because I'm keenly aware in TRP's writing that my accent is very different 
to the 'zero point' which he is using. A Canadian reading 'oat' wouldn't 
pronounce it the way I'd pronounce 'oat'.

So...is the remedy to a Bad Ear some sort of Standardised American English? 
Or a keen grounding in linguistics using characters which hotmail won't let 
me employ here, and which don't appear in TRP's novels? Or some sort of 
acceptance that readers will read words differently, and that maybe even a 
Virginian will be reading these words, so don't try to write about 
Virginians from the outside but give them a measure of integrity, write the 
word 'out' as 'out' and let us add the accents?

This is complicated, because we get plenty of (attempts at) accents in later 
works (cf. esp. Takeshi, Dixon, etc). But, at least in Takeshi's example 
(and the faux French examples, too) the rendition of speech is taken to a 
ludicrous level, so that Takeshi's dialogue (all those sentences cut in two, 
with exclamation marks at the end) come out reading more like comic book 
speech bubbles, or lame movie caricatures, or something.

Any Geordies out theah? What would this mean to you?

I'm just wondering, as I can't work out whether it's a major flaw in all of 
TRP's writing or a very intelligent (maybe even...pomo...) play with the 
inability to escape one's own language limitations, to find a way of writing 
which will communicate the same thing to every reader.

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