Bronx, accents, Supreme Court

  And it goes to the woman who saved baseball™!  Excellent.  But I want to discuss accents.  Sonia Sotomayor is from the Bronx, you see, and will bring a third New York accent to the bench, after Antonin Scalia from Queens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg from Brooklyn.

Sotomayor has an accent of the older type, with modern elements, which many people (of all ages) in the New York region still speak.  The fellow who gives the New York speech lessons certainly does, as do I with my relatives.  But it is not a fully modern accent of the sort spoken by my younger in-laws.  See here at minute 1:52 (it is worth it) or here or here. 

What about the other two New York members of the Court?

Well, Scalia has an speech pattern common to outer-borough types who have tried hard to lose their original accent.  (I suspect that I sound a lot like him in professional situations.)  Listen to how he's talking, not what he's saying.  (What he's saying seems to be nonsense.)

Ruth Bader Ginsburg also appears to have tried hard to lose her accent, but instead of winding up with Scalia's contemporary hybrid she seems to have developed something that sounds a bit like the sort of WASP accent that went out of style in the mid-1960s.  You know, the way the rich guy on Gilligan's Island used to sound.  Unless she was trying to imitate a founder for this speech?

Anyway, I conclude from this that Sonia Sotomayor is a worthy and necessary addition to the United States Supreme Court.  Do I hear dissent?

Comments

[Peter]

Amazing ... she's Puerto Rican, looks at least partly Asian, and sounds Jewish. What a hybrid!

[Noel Maurer]

Y'know, the Supreme Court of the United States looks like it might make a pretty good ethnic representation of NYC circa 1975.

When I was a kid, it seemed like everyone was either Italian, Jewish, Puerto Rican, or black, with a growing number of Chinese and Koreans out in places like Flushing and Sunset Park. You heard that there once had been lots of these mysterious people called the Irish, but they had all gone away somewhere, leaving only police officers, some folks in Riverdale and Woodside, and that heroin addict who lived with his mom on the third floor.

But I digress.