Those "ugly" accents

[ritaxis]

Gawker's done some tripe of a tournament to give a prize to the "ugliest" American accent, and of course the accents in the running are working class ones. One of the linguists whose work they've appropriated to illustrate their trash is calling bullshit.

I want a campaign to record literature read passionately aloud by people from all the accents people call ugly. 

Comments

[harvey-rrit.livejournal.com]

Having endured accents from all over the country, and having literally none myself (everybody thinks I'm from somewhere else), I feel an obligation to say:

The ugliest accent in the United States is Harvard Midlantic.

The late Donald Westlake described it brilliantly: it sounds like the speaker learned English from a machine on Mars.

(I do not know whether he ever drew the conclusion that this is how the alien ruling class recognizes one another among the lowly humans, but he never got it into print. It falls to me to express this.)

[joycemocha.livejournal.com]

Oh ick. I shared the link on Facebook. Class discrimination is far too invisible and far too tolerated.