"Encountered in Your Captious Conversations'

 I listen for choice, unself-conscious regional American speech. When I hear someone say pop instead of soda, I ask if they’re from Ohio or elsewhere in the Midwest. Pop was the standard word in Cleveland for sweet carbonated drinks. Only in college, when I had friends from New York and New Jersey, did I hear soda, which is what I call it now. 

Thanks to movies, television and the internet, language has been homogenized. It’s more difficult to identify the native regions of speakers, and distinctive words are a rare treat. When I moved to Texas in 2004, I expected everyone to speak like Slim Pickens (born in California to a Texan father), but most people here speak in what I think of as standard, uninflected American English, with little or no drawl. The exceptions are a pleasure to hear. I work with a guy who was born in Pensacola, Fla. and moved to Houston as a kid. He says not theater but THEE-a-ter. It sounds nineteenth-century, like something out of Twain.

 

I’ve noticed a growing use of y’all, a contraction I wrote about here, in conversation and emails. It’s now used by people from Pittsburgh and Seattle, and is an affectation, probably chosen for its putative folksiness and “authenticity.” It sounds silly and sometimes patronizing of native Texans, many of whom never use it.

 

Dick Davis published “Edgar” (A Trick of Sunlight, 2006), an elegy for his friend and one of our finest poets, Edgar Bowers (1924-2000), a native of Georgia:

 

“A few things that recall you to me, Edgar:

 

“A stately ’80s Buick; hearing a car

Referred to by a coaxing soubriquet--

‘Now come on, Captain, don't you let me down.’

French spoken in a conscious southern accent;

An idiom calqued and made ridiculous

(‘Eh, mettons ce spectacle sur le chemin’).

‘Silly,’ dismissive in its deep contempt,

‘Oh he’s a silly; an amiable silly,

But still a silly.’ The words I first

Encountered in your captious conversations,

‘Tad,’ ‘discombobulated,’ ‘cattywampus.’

The usage that you gave me once for ‘totaled’–

`Oh cruel fair, thy glance hath totaled me.’

 

Most recently, in Cleveland’s art museum,

The French Medieval Tapestries brought back

Your unabashed reaction to their beauty,

And how, for once, you’d stood there almost speechless,

Examining Time’s Triumph inch by inch,

Enraptured by its richness, by the young man

Proud in his paradisal place, until

You saw what his averted gaze avoided-

The old man, beaten, bent double by fate’s blows,

Driven from youth’s charmed, evanescent circle:

And how you’d wanted to be sure I’d seen him.”

 

To “calque” is to borrow a word or phrase from another language and translate it literally, without regard for idiom. Bowers’ French is a word-for-word rendering of “Let’s put this show on the road,” as he tries to start his Buick. “Captious” is carping or bitchy. “Cruel fair” is a conventional poetic phrase, as in Thomas Ford and John Dryden.

 

I remembered the poem and Bowers’ use of cattywampus while speaking with a student from Arkansas. He was describing an experiment that went awry: “It went all cattywampus.” The OED identifies it as “slang (chiefly U.S.),” and defines the word as “fierce, unsparing, destructive. Also, askew, awry. (A high-sounding word with no very definite meaning.)”