Growing up in the Midwest I took a job with a Midwestern tech company that had a LOT of east coast banks as customers. Some folks would warn you that when you talked to them they're "really rude" but others would tell you that they sound harsh, but actually are really nice.
It was a curious mix of warnings, and for the most part I certainly noticed the accent and different patterns, but didn't think twice about it.
Then one day at 3am on a conference call I was frustrated and interrupted "No that's not how it works, let me tell him what to do for a minute!" I didn't try to sound rude about it but I was tired and my voice didn't sound like I expected.
Then from the silence came a voice from the VP who was listening to the chaos "Yo, Mark is that youse!?!?" oddly this VP had a very practiced non accent but in this case he let it out.
"Hey let's give Mark some time here and see what he can do."
So I gave instructions and things were fixed promptly.
Everyone on the call was happy and congratulated me and went on with their night.
What I realized after the call was that me interrupting and sounding like I did wasn't taken as rude anymore than they were rude when they did the same. It sounded like CONFIDENCE (and to a lesser extent it sent a signal I was engaged in the issue form the start) to them.
The verbal tussling involved a lot more than just folks talking over each other, we were establishing who thought what, but also how sure they were, who wanted in on the decision making and etc.
It also became clear that when they would doubt or challenge my ideas in the past, it was more of a 'challenge' to get me to respond and make it clear how confidant I was. If I withdrew verbally ... well then I was sending the signal I wasn't sure. If I changed my voice, interrupted, sounded a little annoyed, or even just made a joke... we would have more to talk about.
The real fun began when those big banks merged with some west coast operations and they'd both appeal to me with help getting through to 'those guies' ;)
My wife would be very quick to tell you that it would have gone very differently if a woman did the same thing.
I've heard numerous stories where she didn't talk like that and nobody would listen to her.
And I've heard the other stories where she did talk like that and got complaints from the other employees and ended up being talked to by her boss, even though she was correct and got stuff done.
So while it's nice to recognize that that tone can get stuff done, it doesn't work for everyone and people who don't use that tone can also get things done. You might just have to listen harder.
This is definitely an area with a fairly large gap between the reactions that men and women get. One thing that’s useful to keep in mind though is that men who talk like this probably do also receive negative feedback. Negative feedback is not the end of the story, and in my experience one of the most useful skills a person can develop is to acknowledge negative feedback and then consciously decide how and whether to integrate it into behavior change.
Some behaviors can be both correct and make people uncomfortable. Of course this mechanic is also “gendered” in the sense that women would probably be less inclined to dismiss said feedback due to a lifetime of being raised as people pleasers (obviously not all women/cultures/etc), but this may be a place where it makes sense to undo some of that training and say, “if what I say is correct and useful, their discomfort with my speaking up is a problem for them to deal with.”
What makes you discount the role of sex? Honestly curious - it’s pervasive in workplace treatment issues across the gamut, but you discount it here? Why?
People get uncomfortable when they have to think about their privilege. It chips away at the bootstraps fantasy. As a white guy in a field that's mostly male i see this all the time. Lots of people's self worth seems to hinge on the ideal self-reliancy, so to recognize the unfairly positive treatment we receive is too much to bear for many. Instead, they expend their mental energy on finding ANY other passable explanation to divert conversation to a different subtopic to escape the negative emotions caused by the contradiction.
because i worked in both cultures and also with very strong women who regurarily topped men.
its a culture thing, not a gender thing.
putting it on the sex takes responsibilty away and creates a victim role which is not necessary.
heck my last cfo was a wonder women. sharp as a knife and she pushed the company more than all other male leaders combined. and she was rude af which probably helped as everyone was alpha there
Yeah, a lot of social settings have this kind of thing where there's a minimum "buy in" level of .. aggression? Pushiness? Assertiveness? required to effectively participate. Quickly learning what the right level is is an important skill.
And if you're somebody from a very different-sounding background, or a woman, how your intended assertiveness level is read by the audience may be a problem.
Yeah, regional American accents are dying, unfortunately. I think they added a lot of color to dialog in the U.S. My own grandfather grew up in the Appalachians during the Great Depression and has to this day the thickest accent and the funniest idioms. But with each generation after him the accent has worn off more and more. When you go to NYC you kinda hope to run into these old school New Yorkers and have them turn and yell at you, "I'm walkin' here!"
Social pressure can play a role in the demise of regional accents.
As someone who grew up in Appalachia, there are certain biases that come with that accent. It's is one of the reasons some professionals from the region try very hard to "talk normally." There is even training you can undergo to lose your accent.
I learned early in my career that people make certain assumptions about you based on your accent. Over the years I have unconsciously developed a "public speaking accent" that is quite a bit different from how I normally talk. I've been told I sound generically Midwestern when traveling or giving a conference presentation (one person even said Canadian.) I didn't even realize I was doing it until one conference when someone pointed it out to me at a bar-track later in the evening.
My Cousin who worked in tech though that having a Brummie accent was a disadvantage and this is the normal Birmingham accent not the full Yam Yam (Rural Dialect)
Though I assume he didn't mention that his family had been fairly well known off course bookies (pre legalisation)
> When you go to NYC you kinda hope to run into these old school New Yorkers and have them turn and yell at you, "I'm walkin' here!"
Visiting NYC in 2018 and 2019 made me realize that that phrase is literal. There's nothing like walking down the sidewalk only to have the guy in front of you just stop to gawk at something with no warning, forcing you to stop short or swerve on a dime to avoid bumping into them. Or maybe if you're lucky they didn't just stop short, they'd already been just standing there in the dead center of the sidewalk since they came into view, but you still have to go around them.
After one afternoon of walking around the city, I already felt like shouting "Hey, I'm walkin' here!" several times.
(and being a tourist myself, I was actively self-conscious of whenever I wanted to gawk at something, so I always made sure I moved to the innermost part of the sidewalk and put my back to a wall if I ever wanted to stop and look at something or pull my phone out)
Thats interesting. I’ve heard the same about the UK. Here in Germany the regional accents go further into becoming whole dialects, people tend to keep them while learning a standard German in school. Strangely I’ve been told that in New Zealand the accents are getting stronger among young people. I dropped my Australian accent subconsciously when I moved to Europe years ago as it wasn’t practical and hard to be understood when speaking English with people, it appears sometimes after a few beers or when I’m with other Australians.
Interesting that you percieve it that way. Like, accents becoming dialects, not the other way round. I'd think "dialects" like lower german, Plattdeutsch, Bavarian etc. are older than current standard German, and what remains of them are the accents.
That being said, especially in rural areas, the dialects are well kept. In fact, being from the western regions of Germany, I have a hard time understanding villagers from the Black Forest if they talk their native dialect.
Still, in urban areas, the general trend is the same, no ? Dialects are spoken by less and less people (in fact I don't speak a single word of Plattdeutsch, even if I'm from an area where it was once common). What remains are temporary sociolects and accents. At least that's my perception of things.
Yeah I agree with you, I'm not a native German speaker but I have a hard time with regional German dialects, especially in the South. You're correct though the trend is mostly the same it's very rare to hear the Berlin dialect but it does happen from time to time.
Can’t speak to evolution, but you’ll hear the old school accent (real, not the “boids” cartoon version) anywhere that doesn’t get a lot of transplants. Bay ridge, Bensonhurst, corona, Astoria, midwood, Staten Island, etc.
In some cases as other socioeconomic and ethnic groups have moved into New York they have picked up features of traditional New York speech.
The most prominent example I can think of is Cardi B. She has a heavy Bronx accent, and will say “talk” and “walk” in the old New York manner of “tawlk” and “wawlk”.
> Yeah, regional American accents are dying, unfortunately.
I don't have the exact source but I believe research has shown the opposite. When cable television started becoming more common about 20 years ago, there was a belief that a common "source accent" would flatten out regional differences in accents. Apparently, it has made accents more distinct as people, consciously or not, were using those accents as a "tribal marker" to differentiate themselves from the rest of the country.
On a broader note, I remember reading an OpEd in the late 90's that predicted that because people were going to be getting all of their information from a common source (aka the Internet) that it would eliminate debates between regions of the US. The idea was that with shared common information, we would all have shared beliefs. Obviously, this completely missed the ball with regards to personalized streams of information (e.g. Netflix, Pandora etc).
Relevant lesson from the best teachers you could have for New York slang[1];-) It's the Beastie Boys teaching their Japanese interviewer how to say: "Lemme have a slice of pizza.". It's a funny and entertaining interview despite the interviewer being a bit cringe-worthy. In my opinion the interview is also worth watching, because it's a good lesson for how you treat a dialog partner that is nervous and overwhelmed in a respectful way.
Thinking of music and NYC also Kenny Gioia comes to mind. After having watched tons of his Reaper instructional videos I think I dreamt in a thick New York accent;-)
"Cooperative overlap" -- I didn't know that there was a term for this! I've lived in NYC for my entire life (with the exception of my undergraduate), and it's something I've always noticed about my conversations with "native" friends versus transplants and friends from out-of-state.
I am not a NY person. Yet I do this. One of my parents is from Buffalo though. I had no idea others did it! I thought I had a weird 'rude' quirk that I had to stomp down. I had to distinctly learn how to wait for the pause and how to interject at the 'just the right moment'. Instead of just getting it over with and blurting it out. I know there are all sorts of accents and customs. But today I learned about this one. Cadence is important too. I took several of those online 'where are you from' verbal tests over the years. Those can be kind of fun, I usually get 3 very different places. One somewhere I have never been and the other 2 are where I grew up and where I currently live. I talked a few dudes in another country to take the test. It thought they were from the New England area.
> In dissecting the exaggerated New York accents of Bugs Bunny
When I was a little kid in the 60s, I remember someone interviewing Mel Blanc (voice of Bugs). He couldn’t decide whether a Bronx or Brooklyn accent sounded tougher, so he chose elements of both for Bugs’ voice.
Having grown up in CT, it was the first time I realized there were different regional accents even among the different NYC boroughs.
The UK, famously, has this too. There are numerous accents present which have very small and clear boundaries.
You can hear different accents after walking only a mile or two away to the next village, or the other half of a city.
Oddly fascinating, and something I really miss now I've moved to a different country - a country which to my ears sounds very much like there are only a couple of accents.
Not only between the boroughs, but in neighborhoods within them: the part of Manhattan that my family is from pronounces “law” as “loar,” versus “looah” in the main Manhattan dialect. My friends from Brooklyn and Queens say “lah.”
My grandfather had a very thick NY accent, where 33rd & First was toity toid n foist. He raised a family in the east side then sunny side queens. I imagine the day will soon be here where no one will have the experience of asking a New Yorker for directions and not understanding parts of it due to the accent.
My Spanish wife often mixes up "on" and "in" when speaking English because there's a single word for both in Spanish - "en". As well as standing "on line" like New Yorkers, she often "bumps onto" people - because "you don't go inside the other person's body".
Prepositions is an inheritable flawed concept in all languages, like on the train, on the station, in the square. It should ideally be replaced with some transport inflection and lacking that just ignored when it is used for common phrases and not actual space positional markings.
I thought that was a Jersey thing. Never came across it until college when a Jersey person mentioned it. Sparked a nice debate around terminology and pronunciation in the group (otherwise made up of MA and CT).
From what I could tell it's a NYC and surrounding areas thing. I knew people from Westchester and Long Island that said it, so it wouldn't surprise me at all if people from NJ said it too.
If you're looking to hear a typical accent today, turn on New York sports radio (https://www.radio.com/wfan/listen ) and listen to the segments where random people call in. You might not hear the old-time accent described in this article, but you'll hear a distinctly New York-area accent.
The interaction pattern is still the same though. I'm from New Jersey and (under normal, non-COVID circumstances) work in New York, and interrupting in conversation is taken as pretty natural.
I think you can look at the success of the Jerky Boys in the mid-90s to see the power of the New York accent. You have two caricatures brought to life, the mob-boss-talking Frank Rizzo and the Woody-Allen-clone Sol Rosenberg (plus a few others) making prank calls and you get a hit series. No way would that have worked if they were from Scranton or Palm Beach.
What's slightly funny is that De Niro explicitly doesn't have a New York accent when he says that famous line. If anything he's putting on a more neutral accent than his normal one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QWL-FwX4t4
> Take one of the sounds typically associated with New York speech – the oi that’s heard when ‘bird’ is pronounced boid, ‘earl’ oil, ‘certainly’ soitanly, and so on.
My grandmudda spoke liked dat. She grew up in Brooklyn, one of 9 kids in an Irish immigrant family. Another fond pronunciation I remember was she pronounced toilet as ter-let. "Dija flush the terlet?"
I myself still maintain a "disgustingly thick" (as a co-worker once put it) NYC accent owing to growing up among many Italian Americans in a little neighborhood called Ozone Park. When traveling, upon opening my mouth, people immediatly recognize where I'm from.
I was driving through south Brooklyn a few years back and passed a few teenage boys on bikes. We heard them talking to each other and, if I didn't see their faces I would have thought we were listening to a broadcast from the early previous century. New Yawk English, in all of its glorious preservation is alive and well in some pockets of the city.
Growing up in New Jersey I've learned to subdue my own inflections after realizing most other American professionals seem to view any hint of the accent as low class.
If this interests you, and you haven't already, you might want to look up some videos of R. Feynman talking or lecturing. There are plenty on youtube. Sounded like a New Yorker to the end, despite having lived most of his life in, I guess, California.
- cooperative overlap: old school interfaces were based more on turn-taking, with the computer providing a 'prompt' when it was ready to accept more input. Nowadays we tend towards an overlapping style of UX, with the computer following the link which is now under the mouse instead of the link on which one thought one had been clicking, before the last relayout.
- dialect adoption, like software adoption, shows strong network effects and path dependence.
I sometimes would also prefer that the guidelines would be enforced with a more tech/science heavy focus but I also appreciate how big of an effort it is to moderate HN.
Nevertheless you can still go back to the old more tech heavy frontpage (AFAIK it uses a previous HN ranking algorithm?):
Top story in the classic version is currently "Love Hurts - So let’s stop infantilizing women and demonizing men". Personally I generally like the mix of intensely technical and intellectually curious articles of the default front page.
It was a curious mix of warnings, and for the most part I certainly noticed the accent and different patterns, but didn't think twice about it.
Then one day at 3am on a conference call I was frustrated and interrupted "No that's not how it works, let me tell him what to do for a minute!" I didn't try to sound rude about it but I was tired and my voice didn't sound like I expected.
Then from the silence came a voice from the VP who was listening to the chaos "Yo, Mark is that youse!?!?" oddly this VP had a very practiced non accent but in this case he let it out.
"Hey let's give Mark some time here and see what he can do."
So I gave instructions and things were fixed promptly.
Everyone on the call was happy and congratulated me and went on with their night.
What I realized after the call was that me interrupting and sounding like I did wasn't taken as rude anymore than they were rude when they did the same. It sounded like CONFIDENCE (and to a lesser extent it sent a signal I was engaged in the issue form the start) to them.
The verbal tussling involved a lot more than just folks talking over each other, we were establishing who thought what, but also how sure they were, who wanted in on the decision making and etc.
It also became clear that when they would doubt or challenge my ideas in the past, it was more of a 'challenge' to get me to respond and make it clear how confidant I was. If I withdrew verbally ... well then I was sending the signal I wasn't sure. If I changed my voice, interrupted, sounded a little annoyed, or even just made a joke... we would have more to talk about.
The real fun began when those big banks merged with some west coast operations and they'd both appeal to me with help getting through to 'those guies' ;)