Sunday, February 15, 2015

Appalachian Shibboleth

A FB friend, having gotten wind of my outburst described in the last blog, and no doubt with a wicked grin on her face, posted a status about a national weather person using the dreaded "AppaLAYchian" pronunciation.

To her amazement and mine, quick as wink a corps of doughty defenders of Appalachia appeared to avenge their region's besmirched honor, castigating the "wrong" pronunciation, saying you can tell by the way they say it that they don't live here, carrying the righteous torch of the original Indian pronunciation, etc.

They quietened down a little when a brave fellow from Maine allowed as how he grew up using (of all things) the New England pronunciation, and how when he moved to Kentucky for grad school he was met with "genuine hostility."


But really this phenomenon needs a song, something channeling Tom Lehrer or Randy Newman, except solidly and southernly guitared and feathered, so here 'tis--lyrics anyway.


APPALACHIAN SHIBBOLETH

SHIBboleth
shibboLETH
SHIBboleth
shibboLETH

O traveling friends in the American South,
When mountain-bound, heed these words from my mouth:
There's one thing you can do to make the folks down there hate ya
And that's call the place where they live "Appalaychia."

SHIBboleth
shibboLETH
SHIBboleth
shibboLETH

It won't do any good if you try to explain
that the famous trail that goes from Georgia to Maine
takes its name from a geological formation
that gazetteers since forever have pronounced "Appalaychian."

I've done the REsearch
I've done the reSEARCH
I've never been to the mountaintop
But I sure have been to church.

SHIBboleth
shibboLETH
SHIBboleth
shibboLETH

One thing they say, all the Appalatchkey folk
Is they say it the way that the Indians spoke.
So, first you stole their land, and then you stole their pronunciation?
That's all the more reason to say "Appalaychian."

I'll be your Gilead
I'll be your Ephraim
I'll tell the censor twice
I got some stuff for him.

Shake it out of you
All that intolerance 
Shake it out of you
All that intolerance

SHIBboleth
shibboLETH
SHIBboleth
shibboLETH

It won't matter to them if you grew up Massachutian
and saying "Appalaychian" was the down home locution
So this warning to you, if you're Greek, Dane, or Haitian:
When in the mountain south, please don't say "Appalaychian."

SHIBboleth
shibboLETH
SHIBboleth
shibboLETH

Lollapalooza
Londonderry air
The censor cometh
with his head up his derrière

Shake it out of you
All that intolerance
Shake it out of you
All that intolerance

SHIBboleth
shibboLETH
SHIBboleth
shibboLETH






Thursday, February 12, 2015

Pronunciamento, or, The Appalachian Molehill


Fred Sauceman, the newsreader at WETS and enthusiast of such regional haute cuisine as red-dyed hot dogs, has unfriended me.

I don't know Fred that well, but in the superficial ways of Facebook we were "friends." Until I did the unmentionable. I committed an anathema.

I have been shunned. Cast into the outer darkness.

I defended Alex Trebek's pronunciation of "Appalachian."

Fred complained publicly that Jeopardy host Trebek had pronounced it Appa-LAY-shun, which, as all good denizens of the southern mountain area know, is a fightin' pronunciation. If it ain't Appa-LATCH-ian you just might get a mess o' hot soup beans thrown in your face. The post received over 100 "likes" and a number of comments basically urging Fred to invade the Jeopardy studio to set Trebek straight.

I posted a comment to the thread that I knew would be regarded as scalawag, but that I also believed to be germane to the discussion, to wit, that when it comes to the adjective "Appalachian," there are two legitimate pronunciations, because there are native New Englanders living in the Appalachian mountains who say "Appa-LAY-shun." Just like, you know, Indianans pronounce "Lafayette" La-fee-YET and Georgians pronounce it La-FAY-it.

Or, as Alex Trebek might say, vive la difference.

Now, to anyone like my real (I hope) friend Rick Martin, I hasten to say that I made an exception for the noun "Appalachia." Rick has convinced me that Appalachia is a purely southern hinterland, and that therefore the only acceptable pronunciation is the LATCH one. I concede the point.

However, I maintain that the adjective "Appalachian" has two nativist pronunciations remarked more or less by the Mason-Dixon line.

Well, anyway, Fred deleted my comment. Mine alone. Nobody else's. Censored me. What can I say--I'm a librarian. We don't do censorship very well. I had been polite and to the point--not to mention germane. Fred apparently was more interested in rustling up a howling pack of yes-people than he was in having a discussion.

I posted again that New Englanders performing sweat equity on the Appalachian Trail had every right to their pronunciation all the way to Springer Mountain.

And, yeah, I also said that the people who wanted to rain Trebek with t-shirts from the Birthplace of Country Music Alliance to school him on the pronunciation were just confirming our regional reputation for being intolerant rednecks.

Ok, so that was a little harsh. But then again, I'm a librarian and I'd been censored. If you run with the bulls at Pamplona, expect to be gored.

Fred let me know privately that my comment (my initial one--the germane, unprovoked one) had been a personal assault and he was removing the entire thread. I apologized, saying that it certainly wasn't intended as an assault, the apology was accepted … and I was cast into the outer darkness. Without so much as an auto-da-fe.

Here's a little story about pronunciation. In the Appalachian mountains.

I was hiking the Appalachian Trail with my brothers. 1971? We'd had a long day--close to 20 miles--and we were footsore and tired. We plopped our packs down by a road at what we hoped was Tesnatee Gap, unsure that we wanted to tough it on to a shelter (we had little tube tents, so we didn't have to, but sleeping in these tents got you drenched in a rainstorm of condensation).

A pickup truck came along. Three guys got out and offered us some beer. Put yourself in our boots. Not yet drinking age, I'd never had more than a swallow of beer before, nor had my younger brother Charley (as far as I know), so this was an exciting prospect to start with, not to mention that a whole day of hiking in the summer heat had made us really thirsty.

We gratefully accepted the beer and then asked the men if this was Tesnatee Gap. We pronounced it Tez-NAY-tee.

The tolerant, charitable response--given in such a way as not to embarrass our furriner ignorance--was, "I think they pronounce it TEZ-nuh-tee."

That's the way it's done. Love one another … and one another's pronunciations, however much you disagree. Prejudice begets prejudice.