Talk:Boston Brahmin accent

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Basically, I find it hard to believe that the upper-class Boston Brahmin accent and the upper-class New York accent are more closely related to each other than to the working-class accents of the same cities; this is contrary to what sociolinguists know about upper-class speech in American English. It reads like it was written by someone who is unaware of the differences between New York and Boston accents and just grouped them together because they share one salient upperclass feature (non-rhoticity). For instance, New York has never had the cot-caught merger and even educated Eastern Massachusetts speakers have possessed the merger for many decades. It is also notable that none of the individuals mentioned in the article as exemplars of the "Boston Brahmin" accent are from Boston. Moreover "clipped manner of speaking" and "drawling of both vowels and consonants" are both hopelessly vague as attempted descriptions of an accent. AJD 06:58, 19 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Question re: Link for Locust Valley Lockjaw

I notice that the internal link in this article for "Locust Valley Lockjaw" leads right back to this same article -- is that intentional?

--Skb8721 02:29, 24 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Cited in a novel

"Locust Valley Lockjaw" is mentioned in The Gold Coast by Nelson DeMille on page 32 of 634; that was how I found this article. I don't know whether such a citation belongs in here because it's not a scholarly work of linguistics, but perhaps that's not a good criterion; it is a novel (atypical for DeMille) that has been explicitly compared to Tom Wolfe's work exactly because of its quality as reportage, and much of the best psychology and sociology is found in literature. I'm not sure how to insert such a citation into the main article; it should not be positioned as one would position an academic reference, because people use those for research to which this reference would not contribute. But this kind of reference is essential in an article whose content is threatened by the Wikipedian deletomaniacs whose activities remind me most of PKing; so putting it in Discussion seems like a reasonable strategy.

76.28.193.251 20:11, 27 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Hey Buffy, let's go play tennis

I never realized there was a name for this accent! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.186.232.27 (talk) 02:18, 23 April 2008 (UTC)