Another "$100 Misunderstanding" (1)

[Wilson Gray]

On Aug 13, 2004, at 3:30 PM, Bethany K. Dumas wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Bethany K. Dumas" <dumasb at UTKUX.UTCC.UTK.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Another "$100 Misunderstanding" (1)
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>> is clearly the preferred - by me, any way - pronunciation.;-) BTW, my
>> late stepfather, a native of Saint louis, though of Arkansas ancestry,
>> made this odd distinction in his speech: noun = "IN veh lup"; verb =
>> "in VEH lup." Of course, there's nothing of interest in his verb form.
>> But I've always felt that he was the only English-speaker on earth or
>> in Saint Louis, at least, to use that peculiar pronunciation of the
>> noun. And it's also odd that he was able to resist all his life the
>> pressure to switch to one or the other of the "correct"
>> pronunciations.
>
> Is joke?
>
> Bethany
>

I don't think so. My stepdad *was* the only person that I've ever known
who pronounced the noun "envelope" as IN veh lup. Or are you referring
to his ability to stand alone, unique in his IN veh lup-ness? In Saint
Louis, people made me feel like I was Cletus the Buck-Toothed Yokel
till I was able to dump my East-Texas accent. Likewise, on visits back
to Texas, the locals literally laughed at my Saint Louis accent. After
I moved to L.A., Angelenos, black as well as white, continually asked
me to repeat myself. They said that I didn't enunciate clearly and that
they had a problem with my "mumbling" style of speech. So, I know from
personal experience that people who don't meet local norms are
pressured to conform.

FWIW, even St. Louisans are aware of the "mumbling" phenomenon. The St.
Louis Post-Dispatch once referred to it as a "river-bottom throb."
Clark Terry, jazz musician and St, Louisan, once made a record called
"Mumblin,'" which was inspired by the phenomenon of the same name.

Since I doubt that you could find either of these assertions
remarkable, I guess that my answer has to be, "Say what?"

-Wilson