rhythmic blends

[Jonathan Lighter]

Hilton Als (b. 1961) writes in the current _New Yorker_ of Al Pacino's
speech in the current _Merchant of Venice_:

"Pacino...brings to Shylock that appealing New York City diction, a
combination of black, Jewish, and Puerto Rican rhythms."

What, no Italian?  (Dutch used to be invoked, but now everybody knows that's
a stretch.)  I didn't notice any particular rhythmic substrates in Pacino's
film Shylock, except for "Jewish" - I guess Als means "Yiddish" (after all,
it *is* Shylock) - and I marvel at anyone's ability to isolate the others,
not just in Pacino's case but in NYC diction generally.

Pop journalists like to mention "speech rhythms."  That seems to be the
preferred idiom for all dialectal and idiolectical elements that really
are too complex for pop-media discussion.

It wasn't long ago - certainly in the '50s and '60s - that working-class
diction like Pacino's was usually considered "unappealing."  So some things
do change for the better.

JL

--
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

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