The WashPost brought this to my attention today. But don’t go by the Vine version they posted. Go to the 14:32 point in the above video. You’ll hear not only the impression — which is not bad, coming from a Texan (not great, but not bad) — but Cruz somewhat less impressive argument that had JFK been around today, he’d be a Republican.
Also, it’s odd that he chose that particular George Bernard Shaw line, which is better identified with brother Bobby.
But I’ve got to hand it to Cruz — it takes a lot of nerve to go to Massachusetts and do that impression.
I can do some fairly decent British accents, given a little practice. (During rehearsals for “Pride and Prejudice,” our dialect coach praised me and asked where I was from when I was doing an extended reading taking the Mr. Collins part — my own role didn’t have enough lines to show off that way.) But while I was tempted to slide into one when I was in England a couple of weeks, I didn’t dare. I’d have been way too embarrassed had someone said, “Who do you think you’re fooling, Yank?”
The original guys who said that, that way…
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He went to Harvard Law School, so I bet he had plenty of opportunity to absorb the local dialect while he was pahkin his cah in Hahvahd Yahd.
He’d get a lot of brownie points if hesaid that winning the Presidency would be wicked pissah.
Senator, you are no Jack Kennedy.
Nicely played.
I may not agree with Cruz on some things but you have to give him credit for being a smart guy who can captivate an audience. Can you picture Lindsey Graham doing something like this? Lindsey is going to look like a country bumpkin when he gets on the campaign trail…
Actually, Lindsey connects pretty well with a group, face-to-face. He seemed kind of nervous delivering his speech yesterday, but he’s usually more fluent than that doing live speaking.
But no, I don’t see him doing impressions.
Some people have very malleable speech patterns. I do, and I REALLY did when I was younger. It’s probably related to all that moving around when I was a kid.
But there are people who haven’t moved around much, but don’t have a heavy local accent. And there are other people who are well educated and have traveled, but can’t seem to shake a super-thick accent that pins them to a specific spot on the globe. Or maybe they CAN shake it and don’t want to, which I find hard to imagine.
I think the ability to be flexible in one’s accent, while heavily influenced by nurture, may also to some extent be a quality you’re born with, or not…
Yes, as one who can “do” accents quite easily, I just seem to know where to place it and I notice details about dialects–my father and brother do, too. My mom and husband cannot fathom it. Steve is quite musical, but does not have an ear for accents.
Dialect coaches are great at transcribing accents to make them easier to reproduce. The New Yorker had a great story on it.
When was that? I’d like to read it.
Let me Google that for you:
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/11/09/talk-this-way
Have you seen this?
Hey, look what I found when I Googled “wiseass:” http://static2.fjcdn.com/thumbnails/comments/5158808+_c5183cb965460bb5f74e9ac0afc26525.gif
I’ll see your Nicholson and raise you.
Yes, my smartypants nephew was huge on that years ago.
Thanks, Kathryn!
And the reasons why I asked when it was, rather than Googling it, are:
— I subscribe to the mag via the iPad app, and if it were in a recent issue, I could easily call it up there — if I knew which issue.
— Since I knew little about the piece, I was slightly pessimistic about my ability to find the precise article in question.
So I wasn’t just being lazy…
Anyway, I’m especially glad to have the link, since it predates my app.
And… I think maybe I’ve read this before…
My Google search: “New Yorker dialect coach”
I do find that many persons of the male persuasion of a certain age, who would never ask me to fetch coffee, are happy to ask me a question they could Google for themselves…..or to remind them of X, etc.
I will plead guilty to being in the habit of doing that, but not because I am “a male of a certain age” but because I spent so many years as a) an editor; and b) a senior manager. Reporters’ job was to go find things out, and present me with what they found. I had my job; they had theirs.
But because I’m so accustomed to doing that, I can tell when I’m NOT doing that, and I was not doing that here.
I was aware that you had a far more precise idea of what you were talking about than I did. If I were the one who had read the piece, I would NEVER recommend the article to other people without giving them the link. Since I would be the one familiar with it, by far the most efficient thing to do would be for me to find the link myself and share it.
If I had been suggesting it to you, you wouldn’t have had to ask. You would have received it from me simultaneously with the suggestion.
And had I forgotten to provide the link, and you asked for it, I would have immediately gone to get it for you, and it wouldn’t have occurred to me for an instant to be taken aback by the request.
Even if I weren’t the blogger and you the reader. It just would have seemed completely natural in a situation in which I recommended an article to you.
Oh, and if you wanted a cup of coffee and I knew where to get it, I’d get you one. But of course that is nothing like this situation…
And I say this as an experienced coffee-fetcher.
That was part of my first newspaper job, when I was a copy clerk at The Commercial Appeal. The primary job was to keep copy moving — from the metro desk to the copy desk, from the copy desk to composing, then proofs from composing back to editors, and so forth.
But no matter what any editor or reporter wanted, when they yelled “Copy!” it was our job to come running and do whatever they commanded. Which was frequently to run get them coffee. The presumption was that whatever they were doing was more urgent than what we were doing. (Some reporters REALLY enjoyed this. A cop reporter once yelled “Copy!”, and when my friend Dave Hampton — now the editorial page editor of the Jackson Clarion-Ledger — went running over, he looked at Dave and said, “F___ you, copy clerk!” And laughed maniacally. That guy was an odd duck.)
I may have told this story before, but I like telling it: One of the senior editors at the paper — News Editor Grady Crenshaw — had an attack of egalitarianism one day. He said something about wanting a cup of coffee, and as I started to run fetch it, he said no: He wanted to get it for himself. Surprised, I started to go do something else when he stopped me, and asked me, “Where does the coffee come from?” I started giving him directions, and they were sort of complicated — you had to go to the next floor to the composing room, then make your way through all the turtles where type was being set, wind through the clanking linotype machines, all the way to the opposite wall by the windows, just outside the proofreaders’ room…
He was looking so confused, because I was speaking of a world that was alien to him. I imagined him getting lost among the machinery with no one to ask but deaf compositors who communicated amid the din by sign language.
So I broke off and said, “I think it would be easier if you’d just let me go get it.”
He agreed.
Surely you see that your fetching coffee is a lot different from a historical perspective. Surely you also see that your level of management is and has been heavily populated by white men of a certain age…..
I guess I Google everything I want to know and don’t ask others to do what I can easily do myself….but I also guess I have good Google Fu
Yes, Cruz is undoubtedly quite intelligent, though possessed of nutsy ideas, imho. He’s not going to be Sarah Palin or Rick Perry.
Lindsey is also undoubtedly quite intelligent, but perhaps not mega-Ivy Oxbridge.