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And it doesn’t bother me that the future mayor of New York prefers the Red
Sox to our hometown ballclubs. After eight years of watching a mayor turn
City Hall into the Yankees’ downtown satellite office, it’ll be refreshing
to remove baseball from the list of duties demanding the mayor’s immediate
attention (such as kicking Arafat out of operas, ticketing illegally
parked diplomats’ cars and arresting police brutality
protestors).
And I’m not even suggesting
that Bloomberg hasn’t fulfilled the residency requirement. Sure, he grew
up in Medford, Massachusetts and went to college at a moderately renowned
school in nearby Cambridge, but Bloomberg has been living in New York City
since the early 1970s. If I want an example of interloping, I need only
recall Hillary Clinton’s pin-the-tail-on-the-open-Senate-seat opportunism
that made mere carpet-bagging seem benign by comparison.
So buying elections, improper baseball partisanship and
non-native status doesn’t bother me in a mayor. But I draw the line at the
Boston accent. If some rich Red Sox fan wants to buy himself an office, be
my guest, but he’d better at least sound like a New
Yorker.
Now, before you start sending me
angry letters (and, as an aside, why are they always so angry? Do I
threaten you with physical violence?), I love the Boston
accent. Although the rest of the country seems content to adopt the
homogenized Midwestern “standard English,” I have always cherished the
Boston accent as one of the north’s last great regional dialects. From
David Ogden Stiers’ Brahmin brogue in “M*A*S*H” to Matt Damon’s slurred
Southie in “Good Will Hunting,” it’s all music to my ears.
I just don’t want it in a mayor of New
York.
I first encountered Bloomberg’s
accent early this year when he fired his first salvo of commercials, a
60-second biographical ad designed to introduce him to the public as a
regular guy who just happened to have $4 billion in assets.
In the commercial, Bloomberg’s Boston accent had been
focus-group refined into something of a generic “I-95 accent”—but it was
unmistakably Bostonian when he said words like “fahtha,” as in the father
who was a “hard-working accountant for a local dairy” who died when he was
in college, or when he said “thirty-five dahlars,” as in the weekly salary
he earned parking cars while he attended Harvard. (Listen for yourself at
http://www.mikeformayor.org/multimedia.asp)
I couldn’t put my finger on what was going on, so I called sound expert
Ben Rubin, who, like Bloomberg, is a native of the Boston suburbs. Today,
Rubin lives in New York and runs a sound design and “audible interface”
firm called EAR Studio. If Elle Macpherson is “the body” and Cindy
Crawford is “the face,” Ben Rubin is “the ears.” And he told me I was onto
something.
“Bloomberg sounds a little like
Spalding Gray, who is from Rhode Island,” Rubin told me. “It’s a subtle
accent, but it’s definitely foreign to New York. It’s jarring.”
I was willing to ignore Bloomberg’s accent until he
went and won last week’s election. Now, I can’t disregard it. Wanting to
give the mayor-elect another chance, I rushed to one of his first
post-victory press conferences in hopes that his strong, commanding voice
would change my mind.
But it only made
things worse. Every time he departed from his script, the Boston brogue
rose to the surface.
I rushed a tape of the
news conference over to College of Staten Island linguistics professor
George Jochnowitz. If Elle Macpherson is “the body” and Ben Rubin is “the
ears,” George Jochnowitz is “the larynx.” This is a guy who first
identified the increasing use of the letter “r” in New York speech and
discovered that New York city kids had added a subtle “h” sound after the
“s” in “street.”
This guy knows accents.
And he heard what I heard, too.
“The way
Bloomberg said ‘chairman’ was the classic Bostonian three-syllable
pronunciation,” said Jochnowitz, deconstructing Bloomberg’s articulation
of the word as “cha-uh-man” rather than the New York
“cha-e-man.”
Jochnowitz was also appalled
by the manner in which Bloomberg said the word “lifelong,” which he
pronounced as “life-lahng,” not “lifelawng” as a New Yorker
would.
“New Yorkers make a much stronger
distinction between the words ‘cot’ and ‘caught.’ Bostonians pronounce the
word almost the same.”
Jochnowitz cautioned
that he did not believe that Bloomberg’s accent offered any indication of
how he would govern.
I’d go further. I
think he’s going to be a great mayor (although there will certainly be
grumbling if he refuses to just write a check the first time the Parks
Department reports a $1-million revenue shortfall). Already, in his first
week as Mayor-elect, the Republican Bloomberg has met with more Democrats
and union leaders than Rudy Giuliani did in eight years in
office.
But someone (that’s me) has to be
on record as saying that the Bloomberg accent is a bombshell that will
explode at the first sign of disarray in his young administration. Mark
these words (which, in this day and age, means “bookmark this Web site”):
the minute that crime, unemployment or the price of obscure Portuguese
cheeses at Zabar’s goes up, New Yorkers will seize on Bloomberg’s accent
as evidence that he is not one of us.
Former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld thinks I’m out of my mind (and now
he’ll probably think twice before returning my calls). I called Weld, who
now works as a lawyer in New York as he supposedly bides his time for a
New York gubernatorial bid (yeah, like that will happen), because
as a guy with an out-of-state accent, he knows exactly what Bloomberg is
going through.
But Weld dismissed my theory
on the basis that New York chauvinism is ultimately a “myth.”
“New York is probably the least provincial city on
the face of the earth,” Weld said. “No one is going to care about his
accent. If there was ever a city without a chip on its shoulder, it’s New
York.”
What city is this guy tawking
about?
Gersh Kuntzman is also a columnist for The New York Post. His website
is at http://www.gersh.tv
© 2001 Newsweek, Inc.
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