Border States and South-Midlandisms

[Gordon, Matthew J.]

Larry's post reminded me of an article on saw recently in, I think, Missouri Historical Revew about Dizzy Dean's broadcasting career after his playing days. Apparently, there was a campaign organized by St. Louis schoolteachers to ban Dean from the air b/c he was seen as a corrupting influence on young people's language. He was not allowed to broadcast a Cardinals World Series b/c the commissioner thought his usage was not presentable for a national audience. He was a native of Arkansas, the son of a sharecropper if memory serves.


-----Original Message-----
From:   Laurence Horn [mailto:laurence.horn at YALE.EDU]
Sent:   Fri 10/11/2002 12:48 PM
To:     ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Cc:
Subject:             Re: Border States and South-Midlandisms

More on Tim McCarver:

Those broadcasts (of the Giants-Cards playoff series on Fox) have
been entertaining from a dialectological perspective.  There was an
interesting exchange between McCarver and his partner--an argument,
really--that began when McCarver read a commercial promo for a movie
that would be opening in various "theAters" (second syllable stress,
with tense /ey/ vowel) and his partner (was that Joe Buck, who should
know better, or someone else?) immediately jumped on him for the
presumable yokelism just committed.  McCarver, in his own defense,
pointed out that a lot of people in the states surrounding where they
were doing the game from (St. Louis) pronounce it in exactly that
way, a point which his partner was willing to concede (while probably
muttering under his breath about what THAT tells us).

larry