Pandemonium

When I was working in Louisville (that's pronounced lou-ah-vul to the uninitiated), I had the opportunity to work with several people who had pronounced southern accents. While I generally like southern accents, not everyone does; in fact, some people find them annoying. One gentleman went so far as to say he purposely practiced with a northern accent because of the prejudices associated with his native southern speech. He claimed that every time he spoke with a southern accent, people believed he was ignorant and mentally challenged. Unfortunately, his experience was not uncommon.

How did we, as a society, travel so far down a road to nowhere? Since I can't find anyone else to blame, I'm going to blame "the media", that amorphous group that no one really seems to be a part of but is at the same time the bane of our existence.

Why would I blame the media? Because any time there's a disaster in the southern US the media finds the first slack-jawed yokel with 3 teeth who proclaims "it was pandemonium." While there are jokes about all the slack-jawed yokels and how easy it is to find them in the south, those folks are no more representative in the south than in anywhere else in the country. Reporters (and I'm using that term very loosely here) used to take the time to find people who could actually answer their questions rather than those who would make for an entertaining soundbite.

Of course it's not entirely the fault of those reporters...we who listen to them bear a share of the blame. We look at these poor folks, who are often in shock, and think that they should be as "together" as we are -- that they should know something more -- that they should be better able to cope with the events that they've described as "pandemonium". All too often our conclusion reinforces our prejudices without merit.

I've decided that I'm going to listen a little less to the dialect in which a message is delivered -- which, given the atrocious state of grammar in general use, is not going to be easy. After all, those New Yorkers are really annoying, and when a recent victim of a catastrophe in Arizona proclaimed that "it was 'pandamania'", he did so in a northern dialect and I thought "somehow I completely missed the rampaging pandas, and that makes me sad".