Notes on the Pronunciation of American

LIKE ANY OTHER GENTLEMAN brought up south of the Mason and Dixon Line, Thomas Pyles has long expressed amusementgenerally tolerant-at the anxiety of the socially insecure to achieve a correct pronunciation, and at the equal anxiety of the fuglemen and haruspices of the educational burrocracy to impose such allegedly desirable pronunciations upon the reluctant tenants of their classrooms. He knew, viscerally-long before he became a student under Kemp Malone and others who imparted the lesson by precept as well as by example-that a child of good family acquires standard usage as a matter of course; and if this usage is at odds with statements in the grammar book or the dictionary, so much the worse for the latter. Even the most elegantly rewritten rules of the transformationalists, such a person feels, are a poor substitute for the proper family background, or-failing that-intelligent observation. Having been reared in somewhat the same tradition as Tom Pyles, I knew from childhood that my pronunciations of everyday words were socially acceptable, though not always the only acceptable ones. I knew that the less well educated members of the community might have different pronunciations at home; but I assumed-with the community-that they were capable of acquiring on their own the pronunciation habits of the educated by observing and imitating, if they felt it necessary or desirable to acquire another repertoire of speaking. Though I might joke among friends about the pronunciation of the less educated, I would never tease the latter to their faces, unless I was prepared to back up my teasing with my fists. And my contemporaries would as soon have doubted the legitimacy of their descent as that of their pronunciation. Having grown up in this tradition of mutual respect in the reactionary South, I was shocked that another attitude was common in the ostensibly liberal Midwest.1 In a course entitled Stage and Radio

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