Writes Elizabeth Spiers in "The Real Reason the Harris Twang Is Driving Republicans Crazy" (NYT)(free-access link, because she has a lot of other things to say and I'm not in the mood to summarize it).
And then there are the people who say she sounds drunk....
I don't for one moment believe Kamala Harris would go to an interview drunk. She avoids interviews generally, so she isn't going to stumble into one, and she's got a lot of people helping her. Drunk interviewing is not going to happen.My God. She’s drunk. This is so bad.
— Juanita Broaddrick (@atensnut) September 17, 2024
pic.twitter.com/ibky1ZOame
And that clip is not an example of what Spiers and McWhorter are calling "Black English" — which makes it sound as though there's only one "black" way to speak, something I'm not going to say. But I will say, because I am a woman, that I think it's a womanly voice. I think there are various womanly tones of voice — I hear it in myself — that take over under some circumstances.
It's hard to describe these tones of voice without sounding insulting or confessing to some foolish inferiority, but I think in that clip, Harris felt called upon to express empathy and instinctively backed off from the authoritative, professional voice. There's a simpering and murmuring. She's supposed to care, to be maternal. She's been socialized to do this automatically. It doesn't sound presidential. To me, it feels subordinate. I would recommend that she consciously adopt a consistent, professional voice to avoid seeming weird and inviting mockery like "My God. She’s drunk. This is so bad." I'm defending her — I'm saying she's not drunk, just as McWhorter and Spiers are saying she switches to Black English sometimes. As a candidate, and as a chief executive, she shouldn't need defending. She should defend us.
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186 comments:
Give me a break. She only speaks that way when she gets in front of an audience that speaks that way. She is pretending to be like them, when she isn't even close. She is an elite snob. She is faking it, and they are protecting her again, as usual, like the good little lapdogs they really are. They can shove their love for their party where the sun doesn't shine, because they are sick. They all need to get help.
Hamas girl comes out of her hidey hole, it sounds inauthentic because it is,
It’s not clear to me at all why we can presume that Ms Harris does not drink. There are plenty of highly intelligent people who can’t control their drinking. If you have ever tried an intervention with one, you would know that it being an inappropriate occasion for drinking doesn’t stop them AT ALL.
she grew up in tony montreal, stop with the pandering,
She isn't drunk in that interview. Just stupid. As usual. You can actually visualize a team of Pakled aliens from Star Trek TNG sitting in a circle in her head discussing what smartish thing to say next during every pause.
And hailing from St Louis, Missouri, I am supremely confident my black accent is vastly more credible than hers.
The problem is she doesn't revert to Black English, because she never spoke Black English, nor was she even raised amongst Black English, because to state the obvious Ms. Harris is Indian. When you revert to something, it sounds like that something. She's not reverting, so it sounds ridiculous. If a born and raised 3rd generation Londoner starts talking with an Urban Black American accent, it too would sound ridiculous since they aren't reverting to anything.
If she showed some genuine empathy, but she seems to be mocking us with the joy riff, what is there to be joyful about,
"One or two martinis" sounds like a low estimate.
what is this the third interaction, and she gets wrapped in semiotic yarn
"She should defend us."
God help us all -- out of the long list of things that Harris is incapable of, defending us has got to be close to the top.
And on the broader topic of Harris in the body politic, I think Orwell nails it: "It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy."
What I like about this story is the neighbor who made racist assumptions about another neighbor, having been led into it by racist propaganda from the GOP, realized she was wrong and sought help to apologize. Baby steps. Not ones Trump or Vance or their core crew are capable of.
How the Trump Campaign Ran With Rumors About Pet-Eating Migrants—After Being Told They Weren’t True
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/springfield-ohio-pet-eating-claims-haitian-migrants-04598d48
I knew a woman who grew up in mountain Kentucky, although you'd never know it from her cultured speech. Once -- once, only -- she spoke in her natural accent to me. You can't fake an accent, and if you weren't raised in that community, you shouldn't try.
I don't think she sounds drunk in that clip, but talking about how she sounds is a distraction from the fact that she is deliberately perpetrating another media hoax about Trump and fomenting hatred for his supporters. She's telling a big lie and she knows it.
Ohio Governor Mike DeWine told us all that the bomb threats came from overseas. We don't know who made the threats, but we do who didn't make them and we know who they benefitted.
This kind of thing is disgraceful and destructive. It's disgraceful slander of the people of Springfield, Ohio who have had a bomb dropped on their community by Kamala Harris and her party.
https://x.com/ClayTravis/status/1836387661025591568
"She avoids interviews generally, so she isn't going to stumble into one, and she's got a lot of people helping her. Drunk interviewing is not going to happen."
I think you're wrong to dismiss the possibility that the same anxiety that keeps her from doing a lot of interviews also nudges her to take a couple of belts of alcohol before she does the interviews that she has to do. And it would certainly help explain her changes of accents -- relaxing with a couple of drinks has been known to bring out a person's "natural" accent.
Also, nobody's suggesting she's doing interviews at a Foster Brooks level of drunkenness ("stumbling"). That doesn't mean she isn't a little tipsy.
Also -- I've said it before and I guarantee I'll say it again -- could Kamala please get intonation training, a la Singin in the Rain? She speaks with a tight, closed nasal pattern and doesn't use her resonance. Maybe she affects an accent because she hasn't found her own natural voice.
she cannot own up to what she has wrought in countless communities across the country,
From the link:
Gallup poll: Favorability Ratings (shift from August)
Donald Trump
Favorable: 46% (+5)
Unfavorable: 53% (-2)
Kamala Harris
Favorable: 44% (-3)
Unfavorable: 54% (+5)
——
Among independents (Favorable- Unfavorable)
Trump: 44-53 (net: -9)
Harris: 35-60 (-25)
She is faking the black English accent- she literally did not grow up in a black English neighborhood at any point of her life and neither of her parents did either.
I grew up in hillbilly country to hillbilly parents- I lost most of that native accent after I went graduate school and during the following 25 years of working with northerners in New England. I did slip back into the old accent when visiting family back in eastern Kentucky and still do but it is an authentic change- I don't do it consciously- it is prompted by my relatives' own speech patterns.
I'm curious as to whether the interview that Harris did with a local reporter in Pennsylvania showed up in the media that Althouse consumes.
"There’s nothing unusual about her using Black English because to state the obvious (to everyone except Donald Trump, apparently) Ms. Harris is Black...."
Oh lord. She isn't black. She's indian. WTF?
"Functioning" alcoholics would not only drink before an interview, they would be certain that they perform better after a shot or two.
It's the cadence to the speech - slow and deliberate, plus sounding as though she's talking to children or imbeciles - that makes her sound drunk. It's not the Foster Brooks style of drunk-sounding speech.
Does it always have to be "Republicans pounce?" Don't Democrats and apolitical people find Harris's switches of accent strange, or off-putting, or characteristic of someone with no real, well-defined personality? If we are becoming two countries, one reason is that reporters don't react to things as they are but are always putting on pith helmets and making long journeys into the supposed dark and alien Republican psyche.
Recall Hillary Clinton's specious argument that journalists should be "objective" in the sense of always confronting the "object." Notice that here, and in many, many other cases, the "object" -- Kamala Harris's funky accent -- is only seen in light of Republican responses, not treated as something significant in itself.
It's justified as "code switching," but isn't that problematic? If Howard, Alpha Kappa Alpha, and Willie Brown make her African-American an entitled to use the Black accent, would a white politician with similar experiences also be entitled to use it.
Poor little Bich still running rear-guard actions long after the real story of Springfield is turning out to be far worse than pet-eating.
I don't know if Harris was drunk in that clip or in other clips I've seen in the past 6 months. I do know that she acts and sounds drunk.
She has said that one of her hobbies is collecting wine.
https://www.washingtonian.com/2020/08/12/kamala-harris-knows-her-wine/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=So0Ff_m9yTA (From 2022)
https://www.sfchronicle.com/wine/article/kamala-harris-has-good-taste-in-wine-15478759.php (From 2020)
So she collects wine and enjoys drinking wine and sometimes, but not always, acts and talks like she has enjoyed it too much.
Is she really this bad on her own? I like to think her fondness for wine contributes to the badness. The alternative would be worse. You can fix drinking too much, you can't fix stupid, as a wise White man once said. (That would be Ron White)
John Henry
I don't think my ears can stand listening to her for four to eight years. She's the kazoo in the orchestra.
Obama (Kenya+white Kansas parentage, raised in Indonesia and Hawaii) did it, too.
Harris's father was from Jamaica. I've worked there, and their accent is nothing like 'hood lingo. She was a child in Berkeley, not exactly the 'hood either. She spent her youth in Westmount [wealthy Montréal neighbourhood]. The few blacks in Montréal are from places like Haiti, Senegal, or elsewhere in French Africa.
There is no time or place in her life where she would instinctively and naturally learnt American black street English, and *educated* blacks nearly all speak standard American English.
I'm not a professional linguist, but I've picked up a dozen languages by ear. That's how I learn. In my four fluent ones -- English, Spanish, French, and German -- there's a high probability I can determine successfully where people are from, by slight differences in accent.
Harris is a fraud. Exit question ... her mother was an immigrant from India, and it's not for nothing we call it the "mother tongue". She hung around with lots of Indians, for a long time, yet no trace of that accent. She identifies as "black", but in reality she's an ABCD -- American Born Confused Desi, "desi" being Indian slang for people from India, usually from the more northern parts of the country where they speak Hindi or other Indo-European variants of Sanskrit.
"I don't for one moment believe Kamala Harris would go to an interview drunk."
I think that you would be amazed how alcoholics can rationalize their drinking. They tell themselves that they just need a drink or two to get through a stressful event and are convinced that they can control it so that no one knows that they've been drinking. They need their bravery gravy.
As a candidate, and as a chief executive, she shouldn't need defending. She should defend us.
-------------
Lolol. Did you say that in your best pre-Title IX womanly voice, annie?
Lolol. "Love many, trust few, always paddle your own canoe..."
B.Netanyahu is running the show now; do you think he will "protect"" you and yours? lolol. Silly girl.
loudogblog
"I don't for one moment believe Kamala Harris would go to an interview drunk."
I think that you would be amazed how alcoholics can rationalize their drinking.
---------------
I thought that ann was pretty naive with that take too. She is always convinced she see things clearly, but has often been proven wrong with her "takes"...
I really have never seen her sober, well perhaps when she was attacking Kavanaugh or the ICE officials or the Knights of Columbus,
[My] less generous interpretation is that conservatives find her accent infuriating for one very specific reason: because they buy the negative stereotypes. They associate Southern accents with less educated, working-class people who, if they’re white, might be racist — and that’s a demographic that conservatives cynically regard as their property.
Um, no. I associate the Southern accent with Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, Lyndon Johnson, Foghorn Leghorn and Senator Claghorn. A politician talking Southern doesn't make me think of Gomer Pyle, or Jeff Foxworthy, or Larry the Cable Guy. There isn't one Southern accent. Shelby Foote may have looked like a guy who sat on the courthouse steps of some small Southern town all day, but he didn't sound uneducated.
In happy news, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson of Louisiana sounds like a real American. The Civil War is over.
Also, remember the rumors about Hillary and Pelosi being drunk?
Churchill was reportedly drunk in public a lot and so was Boris Yeltsin and general Ulysses Grant.
It's a common problem in people in very high stress environments.
Lol... if ann is counting on Kamala Harris to "protect us!!"
then I truly am hoping she sits on her hands and sits out this election as well. We need educated voters this go around, not sympathy votes for the black candidate or the woman one. Hth, vote with your brain not your lady voice, ann.
It's called code switching and is pretty automatic if you're being polite. That doesn't say Kamala isn't a gold-digging whore for other reasons.
I suspect she learned her "Black" English from that other sometimes Black politician Joe Biden who said to the NAACP that Mitt Romney was "Gonna put y'all back in chains."
I used to listen to a lot of motivational tapes as I would drive around selling machinery door to door. One I enjoyed was Zig Ziglar. I had a bunch of his.
One of his tapes talked about how Pepsi made a deal with USSR to swap Pepsi-Cola for Stolychnaya vodka in the 50s because Russia wanted to sell Pepsi but had no money to buy the concentrate.
Pepsi was faced with having to sell A) Booze nobody drank in the US B) Booze that by definition has no taste and C) came from our massive boogieman Russia.
It does not do Pepsi any good to take vodka in payment if they can't sell it.
So an advertising agency came up with the line "It leaves you breathless" and later "It takes your breath away" and similar. The unspoken line being that if you drank vodka at lunch, nobody could smell it on your breath.
Zig, who was down on alcohol generally, questioned whether that was an improvement. He thought that the person hammered on vodka would just appear stupid and did you really want the boss thinking that? Wouldn't it be better for the boss to think you had been drinking because they smelled whiskey or gin on your breath?
Kamala reminded me of this story. Is her being drunk better or worse than just being stupid for VP candidate?
John Henry
"The Real Reason the Harris Twang Is Driving Republicans Crazy"
I dunno, the real reason it bugs me, personally, is because she wasn't raised in a household where I'd expect Black English to be used, and I know from observation and my own experience that childhood speech patterns are the ones that come back unconsciously when you're exposed to them. When I visit my family, I start to talk like them again. When my mom would go back to Wisconsin, suddenly she would sound just like her sister.
If you're code-switching to a pattern not set in early life (or, maybe, through long adult exposure - I'm told, when I go to California, that a tinge of "something" is audible in my accent, and when I say I've been living in Texas for years people say, "That's it!"), it tends to be a conscious choice.
And when you are a politician who is less Black than I am Irish but who speaks with a blaccent when she's with a Black audience, yeah, it bugs me. It's no more cynical than baby-kissng, I suppose, but the credulousness of "the Black community" when it comes to Democrats appears to be unbounded.
Not a Harris fan, but I agree that it is not at all uncommon for people who've learned dialects to drop into them "when in Rome." Is it fake? Authentic? If you are well versed in different dialects, it would be natural to speak to an audience in the manner you think would best communicate what you are trying to say. All communication is to try to be understood by the audience; otherwise what's the point? Only the versatile risk claims of speech inauthenticity.
As for the drinking, though, there are plenty of high(ish) functioning alcoholics and other drug addicts. For them, they don't stop when events are important; it is easier for them to (try) to hide it than to not do it. I don't know whether Harris has a problem with this stuff, but I wouldn't rule it out merely because the stage is so big.
I only scanned the article - did they use the word 'Phoney' anywhere? Because that's what it is; it's being phoney to facilitate the pandering.
The mayor of Springfield owns properties that have been rented out to recent illegal Haitian arrivals. Don't trust anything coming from the authorities in that city.
I'm just surprised her pager hasn't taken her down, tbh.
Bob Boyd nailed it.
All the campaigning Harris has done has been in Commie-fornia where she didn't have to disguise the way she was going to administer the powers of her office. Her Presidential campaign crashed and burned because she couldn't fake moderate positions, and her staff either didn't want or wasn't capable of teaching her how to do it. She's gotten better but still can't fake them sincerely.
I quit drinking alcohol completely 40 years ago next month. I slipped once in 92, almost died of alcohol poisoning and have not touched a drop since.
I go to a couple trade shows every year. I would spend the day wandering around talking to people, usually about technical stuff. Then, in the 80s and 90s especially, I would spend the evenings going to hospitality suites where the booze flowed copiously and I stuck with Diet Pepsi.
When people have as few as 1-2 drinks, they start noticeably deteriorating. They can still function but it is noticable. By the time they get 3-5 drinks in them, not a lot for most people over an evening, a drink every half hour or so, you can really tell.
We don't notice it ourselves. I can't walk, I've puked twice but I'm still OK to drive home if I take it easy. And I'll fight anyone who tries to stop me. We usually don't notice it in others because we are in similar condition. Within a drink or 3 one way or the other, usually.
When I started going to the hospitality suites and not drinking, mingling with others who were, it was a really bizarre experience. Was I really like that in my drinking days? Probably. I'd never realized it. Watching it now, realizing it now, really scared the crap out of me. Also made me uncomfortable.
These were not people falling down drunk for the most part. Just people who had had a normal amount. They were like Kamala at the BJ interview.
John Henry
BJ Interview means Black Journalist interview. Get your minds out of the gutter.
The examples of her sounding drunk are less formal campaigning events.
Common man. She was raised Hindu in a French culture.
That means Mom taught her positions in a caste system. She wants her position honored. Or else. Try anything else and she laughs at your stupidity.
She went to Howard University, a segregated historically black college.
How do faculty and students talk at Howard? Do they speak more or less standard English? Or do they tend more to Hood accents?
Serious question, anyone know?
John Henry
She doesn't use black English as far as I can tell. She doesn't make the grammar "mistakes" that are part of the grammar of black English, nor does she use the various extra black English verb moods.
Those negatives, as Wittgenstein remarked, are like shaking your head no. If you do it twice, it's still a negative.
Also, it is just wine. Everyone knows wine is classy and a couple glasses won't hurt you. Some people claim you can't be an alcoholic if you only drink wine. Unless it is T-Bird or Ripple or the like. But those folks are winos.
It would be a piece of cake (or easy as pie?) for someone like Harris to justify a glass of wine or 2 before an interview.
How many people have gone to a job interview over dinner with the prospective boss? A cocktail or two before, a bottle or two of wine with and perhaps a brandy or drambui after.
But it doesn't affect the quality of the interview. Oh, no. Not ever.
Why do progressives think they "drive us crazy" when all we do is laugh at their stupid fake accents? IDK. A better question is why do they DO that? Why is every democrat woman in higher office such a pandering idiot when it comes to these accents?
That's why blacks didn't discover binary decision diagrams.
*groan
They associate Southern accents with less educated, working-class people who, if they’re white, might be racist
I dunno, I think that the person who switches into a Southern or Black accent that they do not naturally already have and then use that accent to talk down to the Southern or Black audience just might be the racist one.
"Greetings fellow youngsters!"
I remember Hilary talking about walking in the woods thinking. And then it turned out that she was really passed out in her living room under a potted palm.
John Henry
Happy Happy Joy Joy !!
David Brooks says the Era of Bitterness is over...
Are you guys just not feeling it??
Ann's woman voice came out there:
"Who will save me from this reality??"
No one, ma'am. Good luck.
I think in her mind she is talking to children and imbeciles. She seems to be like Hillary Clinton, very uncomfortable around everyday people.
Gabbard is perhaps the most natural candidate, and they chased her off
how about carolyn kennedy, remember that trial balloon
Try "It's a Different World" reruns...
Seriously.
My "teaching" or public lecture voice is very different from my on-air or voiceover style. Once a student at UC Davis asked me if I was from the south. Even using the very un-Southern "you-all" (not the contraction to y'all as I often write here) I guess sounded foreign to these NorCal-ers. Made me laugh though.
I understand they speak almost exclusively Black English in the nicer areas of Montreal.
Her black accent is trotted out only when she is speaking to a black audience, and it sounds no more authentic than Hillary!'s "Ah ain't no ways tahr'd" effort. As pointed out, she was not raised in a home or neighborhood where African American speech was used. Maybe she picked it up when she was hanging with Willie.
I was raised near Atlanta by a Georgia father and an Alabama mother, and my natural accent is basically Alabaman. I lived and practiced law in Georgia and never lost, nor tried to lose the accent, although I will adjust it depending upon the circumstances.
Unlike Ms. Stier, I have never been foolish enough to attribute intelligence or social or political attitudes based on a person's accent, southern or otherwise. However, when I lived a short time in Toledo, Ohio in the early seventies, a few people made the mistake of seeking me out to talk about black people. That did not work out well. As the late columnist Lewis Grizzard said, "If there's one thing I can't stand, it's an amateur bigot."
she is so 'stunning and brave' so she can't be criticized, why exactly is this, because she's a prog,
Ugh, the language.
Stick with "competent and competency" maybe...
She might or might not be a social drinker on the job; there is no question she is well credentialed and educated; the question is: does she have the track record to be the commander in chief of a world facing nuclear and world war. This ain't no silly game...
If you can vote for Harris after the past 3 years with Biden, you're a a stronger man than me. I just... can't do it. Can't "trick" myself into believing like that. She is what she is, and we all can see that, even if we differ on the minor details...
Competent enough to be our president?
or not? You make the call...
Bien sur!
Hillary Clinton had a way of talking that was consistently strong, which I like, but she was criticized for it. She was accused of being too strong, not womanly enough. Seems like a woman in politics at the highest levels are going to continue to receive mixed messages and expectations about every aspect of their being. Society, especially in today’s anti-modern woman era has not progressed as far as other modern countries.
Funny how French-Canadian inflections don't appear, eh?
I like, and know, the other class of drinkers: they can keep putting em down and you'd never know they had anything in them...
People process alcohol differently, John. Glad you see your limitations. (Why go hang around drinkers, or drunk people like that, if you don't enjoy it? Do you have to do that to get paid and take care of yourself in life? Hm. I'd stop going if I were you and felt that way... Contempt and condescension are not a good look, and aren't you worried your attitud/opinions of these people you're doing business with will leak out, Pepsi or no? Have you tried a more independent business field where you could lead and not follow the drinkers? Make that change...)
Or the twang of her Jamaican father.
However, she ain't no ways tired!
They called Grant a butcher, even though he won.
I imagine you'd have to be drunk, dull you senses, to do what he did...
Sure it turned out well, but oh my god, do not minimize what was done. High stress, indeed... think of the cannon fodder who died under his orders. Them's the one who really had it hard...
Soon Kamala will speak ebonics.
My late sister skipped a grade and went to college (University of Virginia) at 16. She said one of the most fun things to do there was to go to frat parties sober. It was like going to the zoo.
You mean Kamala Gopalan ain't like Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman presidential candidate? Dayam!
I would recommend that she consciously adopt a consistent, professional voice to avoid seeming weird and inviting mockery
She's been in politics her whole life. She got shut out of the 2020 primaries because people couldn't stand to listen to her.
With that feedback, if she was going to self-improve she's had 3.5 years to do nothing else.
I disagree with Wittgenstein. In Puerto Rico, speaking Spanish there is "no", of course. But when it is really NO! it is NO, NO, NO, NO! while shaking head vigorously multiple times and waving hands like an umpire calling an out.
Anything less means there is still room for negotiation.
John Henry
Kamala always sounds like she's leading a Book Club meeting for the mentally retarded.
Don't you mean fascist?
We are being forced to argue on the ridiculous fringes of issues. Her "twang", instead of her insipid mindless babble. We are directed to argue on whether or not babies are born alive in abortion mills instead of increases in rape, STD's, and unwanted pregnancies. We debate if cats/dogs are on the menu of Haitian refugee's, versus unfettered unlawful immigration and settlement
"It doesn't sound presidential"
No it does not....and since we're applying a consistent rule to all the candidates, speech that doesn't sound Presidential is always a valid reason to disqualif...
I would recommend that she...
...welp, so much for that...
Except wasn't he raised by her Indian mother and her father wasn't not much a part of her life. Like she would visit her Dad in Jamaica sometimes... Sort of like Obama. Where are the black candidates raised by black parents. Is that odd?
I got rid of my Philly accent 40 years ago as I didn't want it to get in the way of the jokes. I can summon it perfectly at a moment's notice. On the rare (extremely rare) occasions it comes out accidentally (due to fatigue), it only might effect one word. No one-- NO ONE-- accidentally "slips into" an old accent for anything longer than a word.
Here is a brief clip of a wonderful Southern Lady displaying a true Mississippi Delta accent (Clarksdale, home of Morgan Freeman). It still carries a bit of the flavor of the old Southern aristocracy and is very little like what Ms Spiers grew up with in central Alabama.
It can get thicker at times.
Also, if you are a Gentleman of reproductive age and a female approaches you with this accent, just surrender.
That's a cousin, by the way.
She's whomever she need to be!
I say, That's home!
The article is entirely unfair and misses the mark. Her manner of speaking is not a regional or cultural dialect, a 'twang' as they are suggesting we think of it. It is not. It's someone uncomfortable speaking in front of people, and someone who is kind of stupid. You may be okay with that but I have a problem with you...
except she's never spoken that way. She only busts out this accent to patronize a black audience. Hillary Clinton did the same thing and it was just as fake then.
Kamala could put an end to most of the speculation that she is stupid by releasing the SAT/ACT scores that got her into Howard.
But it wouldn't clear her of accusations of being an idiot since many highly intelligent people are also idiots. There's a difference.
The contrast between Trump and Harris as speakers is profound.
Trump is a billionaire but is not a snob. He can associate with anybody completely naturally. He speaks very clearly to audiences of ordinary people whom he treats as intelligent and as equals.
Harris on the other hand sounds like she’s talking to a classroom of high school students who are not the most intelligent members of their class. She’s not comfortable being on equal footing with other people, she needs to have an elevated status. But then what she says is actually quite dumb. I find her quite boring and tedious.
"Ahm not in no ways tayurd." Yeah she was sooooo authentic. I think you mean THAT is what she was criticized for being. She's the one who, as first lady and apropos of nothing, broke of a snarky "I'm not some Tammy Wynette staying home baking cookies!" Why'd she say that? Who asked for cookies? Nobody. She was just mean and snarky and inauthentic.
As I recall, Jean Kirkpatrick and Condoleeza Rice were both "[women] in politics at the highest levels" (one a Democrat and one a Republican) and yet never suffered from imposter syndrome or "mixed messages and expectations about every aspect of their being." Maybe if one is that insecure as a human being one should not go into politics. Stop trying to make it a sex discrimination thing, Inga. Your hapless Tampon Tim Walz is the same exact way. For the same exact reasons, none of which have to do with XX or XY.
For anyone who wants to know what a real Canadian Black sounds like:
https://youtu.be/3XTj9j6441E
LOL we're thinking alike again.
Hillary says First Amendment is Russian Disinformation. Inga agrees.
Do you live near Fahrdie-Fahr? :)
Kamala's rehearsed robot answers.
How dare we speak Merry Christmas. That alone... that alone.
Hillary and Inga want political opponents thrown in jail for 1st amendment protected speech and they both blame Trump for democrats trying to kill him.
Inga needs to meet Tulsi Gabbard.
Kamala-lala-ding-dong obviously has an issue with anxiety. She is likely taking benzos to manage the anxiety. That is why she laughs like a crazy woman and sometimes sounds drunk.
Larry Elder, raised by black parents, is "The black face of white supremacy" to the LA Times when he was running for Governor.
Yes, she went to Howard, but people don't pick up accents from their college years. Accents come from childhood. This is just her weird way of trying to cozy up to her audience, which seems to be a D thing (Hillary and Obama did this too). Trump speaks the same way regardless of the audience.
I grew up in Michigan and went to college in the Boston area. I thought I'd shed my Michigan accent, but hearing myself in Zoom videos I can tell it's still there (a little bit). I certainly never picked up a Boston accent, even though my mother has one. I've lived in NYC for 25+ years and don't speak like a New Yawker either.
I would like to point to Dr. Ben Carson, raised in poverty on the east side (ghetto) of Detroit. Both intelligent and eloquent English.
What are you talking about, she being an elite snob? I have heard from one source multiple times that she grew up middle class, enjoyed mowing lawns, and her working mom couldn't afford an estate until she was a teenager. Since it was told multiple times, it must be true.
Ms. Harris, who is not from the South, wasn’t using a Southern accent, though. As John McWhorter has recently pointed out, what Ms. Harris was slipping into was Black English.
Boloney. I'm a native born southern, and my schools were half-white, half-black. Harris isn't speaking "black english". Not even close. She's attempting a souther accent in an effort to pander. Doesn't drive me crazy, I'm not her target. It should bother her audience though, because she obviously thinks their stupid enough to fall for it.
GMAFB, Inga -- nobody on the right ever criticized Margaret Thatcher for speaking in a manner that conveyed strength and authority.
Dear childless cat lady,
You don’t speak for me, you idiot.
She was a conservative and British. American conservatives save that sort of criticism for liberal women in American politics.
What ev. Personally, would love to see her speak in that call center Indian we all so familiar with.
One word: Benzos
My younger brother had a speech impediment as a child, and part of his therapy involved tape recordings. When I heard myself (I was 11 or 12 IIRC) I knew immediately that I sounded like Gomer and Goober's dumbest cousin.
I successfully suppressed the accent, so much so that I was occasionally asked on campus, by people from all points, where I was from. Only a few words give me away now, unless I choose to revert for comic or dramatic effect.
My older brother returned from army boot camp with his accent largely intact, but for the word "I" which became a very short, sharp "aye!" such as his Yankee fellow recruits used.
It seems like a waste of time to speculate on the shallow nitwit Kamala's verbal tics and affectations, though.
Kamala Harris's father and mother spoke English as spoken in Tamil, in northern India and in Jamaica - not at all the American variant. Californians at Berkeley (where Kamala was child) spoke American English. Canadians, in Montreal where Kamala spent her teen-age years, speak a variant of English, influenced Scottish-English not American-English. So, what is Kamala's real accent? It might be some kind of English accent, a mish-mash combining India, Jamaica and Canada. It might be Californian-American. It isn't southern-black American-English.
And she herself genetically is 50% Tamil followed by a large amount of European (Ulster Irish/Catholic Irish) and then, finally, African. But I think the Irish predominates in her looks. If you look at Bob Marley who has the same Irish-Jamaican heritage, you can see the Irish in Kamala.
Do Americans have a favorable or unfavorable opinion of…
Donald Trump +10
Favorable-42.8
Unfavorable-52.8
Kamala Harris +0.3
Favorable-46.4
Unfavorable-46.7
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/favorability/kamala-harris/
September 18, 2024
Chi-town Hilary took the Southern accent to the max during those early Bill Clilnton campaign interviews. 2 for 1, not staying home baking cookies
She sounds like an idiot. Because she is an idiot.
“Axios asked Harris' campaign whether she was available for a five-to 10-minute interview to discuss her position on immigration. A campaign
spokesperson declined.”
—— Alex Thompson on 9/18/2024
The 2nd Trump would-be assassin is not a Trump supporter.
He gave tons of money to democrats over the years.
and this
Okay, now do the Indian - Tamil Voice..
Gem Quincyite said...
We are being forced to argue on the ridiculous fringes of issues. Her "twang", instead of her insipid mindless babble. We are directed to argue on whether or not babies are born alive in abortion mills instead of increases in rape, STD's, and unwanted pregnancies. We debate if cats/dogs are on the menu of Haitian refugee's, versus unfettered unlawful immigration and settlement
What Gem Quincyite said. Precisely.
At the risk of being accused of defending "truthiness," it really does drive me crazy that this is where we are: is she or isn't she being "authentic," is he or isn't he speaking literally... This country has real problems, problems that I believe are far more convincingly laid at the feet of Democrats and their intentional policies than being considered simply accidents of history and certainly more convincingly than being the fault of Republican policies.
Abortion rates are up despite the ready availability of very reliable birth control. Crime is up despite prosperity undreamt of in earlier eras. Immigration, always woven into our national fabric, threatens to tear that fabric to shreds because it's now decoupled from the prior expectation and requirement that immigrants become American in their embrace of Constitutional values and preexisting social norms. Those Constitutional values are now the butt of jokes, at best, among our "elites" - and at worst are evidence of our continuing psychopathy as a society. Oh, and the press, the press has been repeatedly implicated in clear election interference over the past three elections - which makes us wonder what they've been doing all along.
But geez, are some immigrants eating cats or is trump lying about that, and is Harris an alcoholic?
Achilles, you don’t speak for me either and you’re an idiot too.
Don't Democrats and apolitical people find Harris's switches of accent strange, or off-putting, or characteristic of someone with no real, well-defined personality?
Apolitical people don't care, and Democrats will do anything to keep Satan McHitler out of office.
Behold, the average Harris supporter making a compelling campaign pitch at her arraignment hearing. Yes, she's a mentally ill, but she gets to vote too. She might even vote more than once.
https://youtu.be/pJ_t2cADqPA?t=425
Swerve’s at it again…
‘She has said that one of her hobbies is “collecting” [ed: drinking] wine.
FIFY
Eat teh cat, rich)
Kamela an alcoholic?
HOW Could THAT Be? HOW could she have gotten through her RIGOROUS vetting?
I mean..
she MUST have been vetted, for her job as DA? (which she got by sucking cock)
she MUST have been vetted, for her job as AG? (which got by sucking cock)
she MUST have been vetted, for her job as Senator? (where she ran unopposed)
she MUST have been vetted, for her job as VP? (which she got by being black)
heck! she Even has Already ran for President and MUST have been vetted for THAT (before she strangely fell RIGHT OFF the map)
as Maynard says, anti anxiety meds seem likely.. Hard to keep the doseages right
Now Latina : https://x.com/Kevin__McMahon/status/1836465776569590014
The scold had no response to the the two strong American women I mentioned, because it doesn't fit her agenda. Gotta love the projection from a lefty about "saving criticism!" Lefties always claim conservatives aren't "really women" and that our black congresscritters are not black enough to join the black caucus, because to leftists only monolithic thinking is allowed no matter the race and sex.
Like Narr
My (midwestern) brother came back from the Air Force speaking with a Massachusetts/Hillbilly combo that drove us nuts. Took a couple years at local university to lose.
Certain types of northerners think that anyone with a southern accent is an idiot. Smart southerners are able to exploit this bit of stupidity to their advantage.
As I've said before, people here tune you out when you start resorting to insults. You can keep posting comments, but no one will ever take you seriously when you act like that.
I once worked with someone who was native German attached to our company's Atlanta office and he used "y'all" both in speech and emails. It seemed odd to me and just didn't fit, given he still spoke with a pronounced German accent. I think of it as specifically Southern, in the way that 'youse' is associated with New Yorkers.
Louddog, as long as you’ve put yourself in the blog comments pages monitor position, perhaps you would like to address the commenters who insult others besides just focusing on me. There are PLENTY of them, yet I’ve not heard you chastise them for their behavior yet. You lose credibility when you are so blatantly one sided.
It's interesting that someone brought up Thatcher. Her Oxbridge accent, which she used in public life, was entirely affected. She was originally from Lincolnshire and would have spoken with that accent growing up.
Don't forget the current Senator, John Kennedy.
If VP Harris will just say "I don't feel noways tired" we should be able to make a fair comparison. I wonder if Hildawg cringes when she sees that clip--I wonder if she's capable of cringing.
She speaks Ebonics in front of black audiences because she's a fu cking racist.
I had a couple of shots of schnapps before my wedding. I think it helped.
Written police reports pre-dating Trump's mention of it make you a liar, Rich.
Know who else is a liar? The city manager who provided that ridiculous "fact check" during the debate. He's on camera being told about the cat-nappers at a meeting before Trump ever brought it up.
The few blacks in Montréal are from places like Haiti, Senegal, or elsewhere in French Africa.
A handful of them are descendants of escaped American slaves, whose families have stayed in Canada for more than 150 years since the Civil War. They sure as hell don't speak Ebonics.
"As John McWhorter has recently pointed out, what Ms. Harris was slipping into was Black English."
As Thomas Sowell has observed, "Black English" is redneck speak picked up from poor Southern Whites and is traceable to parts of England. It was taken to the urban North by migration of Black to industrial jobs.
But Harris affected the upper class Southern accent.
Now if she was speaking Jive, that would be different. And we could get Mrs. June Cleaver to translate for us as she did on 'Airplane'
Darkisland: when I ended up in Atlanta, and worked as an Executive Director (ie. scut worker) on several nonprofit boards and also at the Morehouse/Spellman/Clark Atlanta campuses (when I wasn't working loading trucks at the Georgia World Congress Convention Center with guys who drank Four Roses at 6 a.m.), I met a lot of Atlanta's elite black women and men. I learned everything about 100 Black Men and 100 Black women, NACWC, NACW, Jack and Jill Societies, AKA (the mean girls), and other elite groups. And they were lovely and with the exception of AKA always made me feel underdressed but were far, far too polite to mention it.
Spellman Girls were little different from Smith Girls from Sylvia Plath's era. Sweater sets and pearls. Ivy walls and carrying their books before them with ramrod posture.
Kamela is an AKA. With a South East Asian/elite Canadian accent. And nobody who collects wine isn't also a drunk.
Then again, I don't wish a political race on anyone, not even her, not even that commie Walz. I lost 27 pounds when I ran for State House. I ate half a banana a day and threw up constantly. My doctor now says I need to lose a bunch of weight. Maybe I should just run for office again. I highly recommend it as a diet. Eight hours a day on the phone asking strangers for money. My parents didn't raise me that way. Blow jobs might have been less humiliating. At least you're doing something.
And when Harris does "Southern" she takes up the upper crust accent Dixie Carter used as Julia Sugarbaker on Designing Women, not of Jean Smart's more country accent for Charlene Stillfield
good point
Parts of Montreal have a strong Anglophone minority, and children from English speaking families are educated in English. While French classes are also mandatory for the English speaking schoolkids, their poor French skills are a running joke. Once you graduate, it's possible to live a normal life there while speaking no French at all, much as you can live and die in Tucson or El Paso without speaking a word of English from one year to another.
It would be harder to grow up speaking shitty French in Quebec City, and near impossible in the countryside of the province.
In my experience around a few decades-long heavy drinkers, they need not have any alcohol in their blood to sound drunk. Language abilities tend to decline and speech becomes slurred. This follows from pickling the brain for maybe...50% of total hours lived...the brain must adapt and be able to function in the pickled state...
For giggles watch a few beer/wine/whisky reviewer videos. You can often easily see the alcohol saturation.
are you saying - a Smart northerner is exploiting this bit of stupidity to her advantage
too small sample
Darkisland said...
I quit drinking alcohol completely 40 years ago next month.
Congrats! I just passed 35 years. You are so right about noticing behavior change after people having just a few drinks.
My wife grew up in New Mexico. Her parents did not let her speak Spanish because they did not want her to have an accent.
"It isn't southern-black American-English."
I guess it's supposed to be generic "folksy," like Barack Obama dropping his g's, saying "folks" and throwing in slang words. Not really Southern, not really Black, but definitely not authentic.
The purpose of this interview was to win back or solidify the black male vote. All the code words are there, the feminine mannerisms, all well rehearsed. Very smart, well executed interview.
McWhorter is anti-Trump, so I'm not surprised that he's defending what Harris is doing. I understand how it would be easy to fall into an accent or speech pattern if you are talking with people, it seems less likely to happen naturally if you are talking to people. It does not matter whether it is Obama, Hillary Clinton, or Kamala Harris, slipping into an accent like that when they are the only person talking seems weird and phony.
Let’s not underestimate Kamala Harris. This is the daughter of immigrants, with zero family connections or family fortune to aid her, on the cusp of becoming President of the US. Everyone points to Willie Brown but that liaison was not luck. That was Kamala Harris choosing him and then maneuvering him into appointing her to her first government position. From then on her rise was determined by her ambitions. How many girlfriends of powerful men move as quickly into powerful positions - only the very smart ones.
Hillary Clinton had a way of talking that was consistently strong, which I like, but she was criticized for it.
No. She was criticized for blatant pandering.
NYT is drunk on exercising liberal license to indulge Diversity (i.e. color judgments, class bigotry). Encore! As a matter of religious obeisance.
Give it up NYT. She's a female Zelig.
Exactly- it is also important to understand the difference between talking with vs talking to people.
She didn't sound drunk to me. What struck me was the astonishing lack of self-awareness. She talks about knowing the importance of the words you use and how being in the public eye bestows a responsibility to be careful with your words. This is from the sitting vice president who continues to describe her opponent, a former president who did not abolish democracy, as a threat to democracy even AFTER two attemps on his life.
Completely scripted. Take note of the cue issued 'see friends out there'. Immediately , from the crowd comes something like 'love you Kamala', and KH's response is again, immediate. Kamala has never shown such blazing fast response before. Hollywood!
How many times a day do you think she repeats that threat phrase?
Code switching is what my co-worker does when she talks to her family back home in deepest, easiest Kentucky - she sounds like a character on Justified x10. At work she uses the non-accented English she learned as she got her BA and MBA, because it's professional and expected of her. If she were suddenly to start sounding like a "wise Latina" just because she lives in AZ around lots of Hispanics, that would be FAKE, not code switching.
Kamala is not code switching. She is doing the fake accent thing because she thinks it makes her more relatable. It doesn't.
Congratulations to my two fellow alcoholics on their time....
Thirty years here and I will make this observation about this topic:
You do not have to be an alcoholic or,
You do not have to have a drinking problem,
...to think that a tall glass of wine might help you loosen up prior to an interview or public appearance. There is nothing wrong with that if it works for you ... or Harris.
People in all walks of life have been known to "fortify" themselves like that.
The problem is that people such as me would have more than one and think it was okay ... when other would notice.
Look, I'm no linguistic expert like John McWhorter is, but doesn't it have sort of Mid-Atlantic accent feel to it? Kind of like Gore Vidal. Wouldn't someone in her stage tilt towards that?
“Ahm not in no ways tayurd."
Clinton is mistaken. She is very much the turd she claims not to be.
"She is doing the fake accent thing because she thinks it makes her more relatable. It doesn't."
It does to people who aren't very bright.
She code-shifted to a very wealthy woman well into the second bottle of Sauvignon Blanc.
Quite pleasant and somewhat amusing late after a dinner party.
Not good as a candidate for the most powerful office on the planet.
Well said, Mike (MJB Wolf)!
I suspect many others have noticed this, but I have worked offices with women and noticed that I could tell when they were on the phone with a man, a business call, but there was always a difference in the voice of some women. On most there was no difference.
I've never heard of a white male having done this, except half-white Obama. Both Hillary and Harris have now used the Southern Black voice inflection, even though neither talk that way normally. It's insulting on a number of levels in my opinion. No one could accuse any politician of having restraint when it comes to pandering, but holy cow, have a little dignity. Too late, Harris even threw out a little Mexican homegirl inflection recently. I'm pretty sure any Republican doing this would be lambasted on social media and in the state run media.
Seems to be mostly a Democrat thing?
People who have faked accents: Hillary, Biden, Obama, Kamala
People who have not faked accents: Trump, George W, Reagan, Sarah Palin, Romney
Notable exceptions to the above rule: Carter, Bill Clinton, Tulsi
I grew up (mostly) in North Jersey. My wife is from MD. My eldest was born in SC. Then to IL. Then CA. Then SC. Then ME. Visited grandparents in MD then WV when they moved there. The other set in NJ and NY. And a large percentage of students in all his schools were also Navy dependents from literally all over the world. After I retired from active duty first day in the new HS in the capital region of NY the HS English teacher said he could tell where anyone was from by listening to them talk for a minute. Without prompting my son stood up and started talking extemporaneously. After a few minutes the exasperated teacher asked- "Where the hell are you from?" No better way to make brand new friends then embarrassing a teacher on the first day in your new school.
Having said that- Kamal was not exposed to black American English during her learning language years.
Its called pandering. But like Kommie, its better to play word salad because nobody can pin you down.
I grew up in the deep south. Louisiana. There are four semi distinct dialects within that state. The southwest close to Texas (my stomping grounds), the north part, the Cajun Triangle and New Orleans. We pretty much understood each other in that compact geographical area. But not always- lived in south central Louisiana and had an employee tell me she was going to save the hangers. (apparel retail) Huh?
Moved to NYC in 2000. Have never lost my accent. See no reason to change it. Have had a bit of fun with it.
> Inga needs to meet Tulsi Gabbard
On pay-per-view!
My mother said her grandfather played the hick lawyer when he did corporate work in NYC for a few years.
How come there’s never any “Indian English”?
There is! When it gets going if you're not listening carefully it sounds like they're speaking Hindi or another non-English Indian language. In my experience in tech world, Indian immigrants/expats will launch into it if the person on the other side is also an Indian immigrant/expat - it doesn't matter that they're both sitting in CA at the time. And I have never heard Kamala use it, which is a bit of a shame; it contains all sorts of funny phrases like "do the needful", and that would be pretty amusing coming from the VP.
As John McWhorter has recently pointed out, what Ms. Harris was slipping into was Black English. There’s nothing unusual about her using Black English because to state the obvious (to everyone except Donald Trump, apparently) Ms. Harris is Black...."
So, she speaks Jive?
Vonnegan,
In addition to the phonetic aspects, India English follows the entire rest of the world except for the core UK-US-CA-AU and diminishes the wonderful English tag question by removing all of the inflection and substituting just plain "is it?" and "isn't it?"
Geez, we might as well all be speaking German, nicht wahr?
NotABoomer, "I like, and know, the other class of drinkers: they can keep putting em down and you'd never know they had anything in them..."
I have a good friend like that. He once came to my house and downed a 12 pack he brought and it didn't seem to phase him. He had to have a liver transplant this year.
Robin, when did Harris become "black"? As if someone of her heritage and background would speak "black". ..... She's not black at all, unless you are trying to describe the color of her skin with some degree of exaggeration. I have an GF of Indian heritage (her parents are from Guyana and they do the whole dress-up, culture thing). Her skin is as brown as KH's. She would contest, vigorously, being described as "black".
And if you didn't already know, Obama was not our first "black" president. His mother was white. That makes him a mulatto. Cher would describe him as a "half breed"
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