Provincial pronunciation preferred - elite language and the media

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Oct 31, 1994 | by Richard Grenier

Great oaks from little acorns grow, as Shakespeare most definitely did not say. Take Haiti. When our correspondents first arrived in the Haitian capital, they pronounced Portau-Prince as one would expect. But before long, they and their newscasters began pronouncing it Port-au-Prance, like a prancing horse. Why? Because, as they explain to me exuberantly on the basis of their instantaneous acquisition of French culture, "That's the way they pronounce it there!"

But these same superior correspondents are only too happy to take a holiday in Paris without calling that glamorous city Paree, which undoubtedly is "the way they pronounce it there." And the same correspondents now choke themselves with what they fondly imagine to be the French pronunciation of Haiti's second city, Cap Haitien, which I'm perfectly content to pronounce in English, Cape Haitian.

ABC's suave Peter Jennings has for some years now been displaying his command of Polynesian by pronouncing Hawaii with a glottal stop: Hawa (pause) ee. This is superior indeed of Jennings, as the glottal stop is not recognized as a consonant in any European tongue. And I can't wait to take him through the Arab lands, where glottal stops have strangled many an innocent traveler before Jennings.

I've a superior neighbor, the wife of a superior corporate executive, who was thrilled to tell me about her recent visit to Budapesht, Well, I said cheerfully, while in Europe, how did she like Veen (Vienna), Kerln (Cologne), Praha (Prague), Varshava (Warsaw), Moskva (Moscow), not to mention Hravatska (Croatia)? I earned, I suspect, her undying enmity.

This sort of superiority is spreading. Indeed, the desire to rise above the common herd seems quite common. In recent decades, entire professions, formerly of low social status, have been lifted and consequently have been attracting persons of the distinctly better sort.

Anyone who reads social history must realize that until quite recently journalists, and even more decidedly entertainers, were people of no great repute. In the novels of Henry James and Anthony Trollope, newspaper reporters are creepy people. In Benjamin Disraeli's last ministry, on the visit of a distinguished foreign delegation, Disraeli ordered his staff to trot out all the great ladies of the London stage. He thought they were still prostitutes. So the ascent of both journalists and entertainers has been positively dizzying.

Meanwhile, sad to report, America's high-status intellectual class has never exhibited such stultifying uniformity as it does now. No country anywhere has such rigid canons of "political correctness" as ours. So when a young television reporter makes it into the big time, his views, which were often shared widely by his mortal compatriots, undergo a startling transformation. For this acolyte must now sound the superior tone of our elite class. And he's tempted to say Port-au-Prance and Budapesht, and to honor native Hawaiians with a glottal stop whether they want it or not. He thus identifies himself as one of the right people.

A whole set of political ideas come right along with this glottal stop. It might not appear that a glottal stop has much to do with the conviction that our bombing of Hiroshima was inhuman and disgracefully unnecessary (a view quite popular in elite circles and hence conveyed by a recent segment of ABC News), but it does.

We find ourselves before what might at first glance appear to be a selfcontradictory situation. Most Americans get political news from television, so one might think that the major television networks would be close to popular sentiment. But they're not. It's like saying Barbra Streisand is a popular entertainer, so her political attitudes must be those of the common people. Barbara Streisand and television's "news readers" have come to think of themselves as superior people, and both Streisand and our news readers now behave as if they're people of moral consequence, perhaps even among the masters of modern thought.

Pundits have been wondering for months where this crazy, "right-wing" talk radio came from. This is where it came from. Network television, by and large following the so-called mainstream press, has defected to the elite. But generally, the hosts of talk radio are not elite people at all, and have remained far more in touch with popular attitudes.

The surprise must have been substantial to President Clinton, who was convinced (so thin was his skin) that the mainstream media were against him. He decided, as much as possible, to cut them out of the action and make extensive use of the "alternative media." Well, he has his alternative media now; one hopes he likes them.