A book of speeches by the late Sidney Poitier

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At the Lake Hazel branch of the Ada Community Library I found a book from 2024 containing an unexpected collection of speeches. It is a posthumous collection titled Sidney Poitier: The Great Speeches of an Icon Who Moved Us Forward. There are portions from it at Google Books. On page 3 it says:

 

“Sidney Poitier had an inauspicious early life. Raised on Cat Island in the Bahamas in the 1920s and 1930s, he was – from an American perspective, and certainly from a Hollywood one – disadvantaged with the wrong childhood environment, skin color, and accent, but nevertheless he was destined to help change the world’s most powerful country and one of its most influential industries – the movies – forever.”

 

In his Saint Mark’s School Commencement speech, June 2002, he described Cat Island (page 140):

 

“I spent my twelve years on an island in the Caribbean. Cat Island was forty-six miles long and three to five miles wide. There were only about two hundred families on the whole island. The population of our village was about thirty to forty families. I had just one friend to play with, and he lived a long distance away. On the island there were no cars, no trucks, no buses, no trains, no paved roads, no electricity, no running water, no television, no ice cream, no movie houses. At night we used candlelight, firelight, or moonlight to get about to see where we were going. Night or day, everybody walked wherever they needed to go, or rode a horse or donkey if they were lucky enough to own one. In fact, there were stretches in my life when I was a kid when I would go for a whole week and never see a single soul other than my immediate family. As a result, some of my best friends were birds and lizards and frogs; some of my worst enemies were wasps, mosquitoes, sea urchins and tarantula spiders. I used to have regular conversations with all of them,”

 

And in his New York University Commencement speech in May 1995 (pages 116 to 120) he described going from a dishwasher to an actor:

 

 “….I was a dishwasher. That’s how I survived my early years in NYC. Minimal skills were required. Dishwashing provided a salary and three meals a day. I was between job assignments on the morning in question, and my pockets were nearly empty. So empty, in fact, that if no dishwashing position was available, I was ready to glom onto any kind of work that a Black kid with no education might qualify for. I purchased a copy of the Amsterdam News, one of Harlem’s leading newspapers, and started scanning the want-ad page for dishwasher openings.

 

The last page of want-ad boxes faced the theatrical page, which contained an article with a heading that read ‘actors wanted.’ The gist of which was that a theatre group called the American Negro Theatre was in need of actors for its next production. My mind got to spinning. My eyes bounced back and forth between the want-ad page and the theatrical page. ‘What the hell,’ I thought. ‘I’ve tried dishwashers wanted, porters wanted, janitors wanted. Why not try actors wanted?’ I figured I could do that. It didn’t sound any more difficult than washing dishes or parking cars. And they didn’t say they required any particular kind of training. But when I went in and was auditioned on the spot, the man in charge quickly let me know, and in no uncertain terms, that I was misguided in my assumptions. I had no training in acting. I could barely read! And to top it off I had a thick, singsong Bahamian accent. He snatched the script from my hands, spun me around, grabbed me by the scruff of my neck and the back of my pants, and marched me on tippy-toes towards the door. He was seething. ‘You just get out of here and stop wasting people’s time. Go get a job you could handle,’ he barked. ‘Get yourself a job as a dishwasher or something.’ That was the line he ended with as he threw me out and slammed the door.

 

I have to tell you, his comments stung worse than any wasp on any sapodilla tree in my childhood. I hadn’t mentioned to him that I was a dishwasher. How did he know? If he didn’t know, then what was it about me that seemed to have implied to this stranger that a dishwasher’s profession would accurately sum up my whole life’s worth?

 

Whatever it was, I knew I had to change it or life was going to be mighty grim. And so, I set out on a course of self-improvement. I worked nights, and on my evening lunch breaks I sat in a quiet area of the restaurant where I was employed – near the entrance to the kitchen – reading the newspapers, trying to sound out each syllable of each unfamiliar word. An old Jewish waiter, noticing my efforts, took pity and offered to help. He became my tutor as well as my guardian angel of the moment. Each night we sat in the same booth in that quiet area of the restaurant, and he helped me learn to read better than I was able to before.

 

My immediate objective was to prove that I could be an actor. Not that I had any real desire to go on the stage, not that I had ever given it a thought. I simply needed to prove to that stranger that Sidney Poitier had a hell of a lot more to him than washing dishes. And it worked. The second time around they let me in.

 

But it was still no slam dunk. In fact, I made the first cut only because there were so few guys and they needed some male bodies to round out the incoming class of new students. But not even that could keep me for long, given my lack of education and experience. After a couple of months they were going to flunk me out, and once again I felt that vulnerability – as if I’d fallen overboard into deep water. If I lose this, where am I? One more Black kid who can barely read, washing dishes on the island of Manhattan? ‘Not if I can help it,’ thought I. So, in desperation I conjured up a truly outrageous offer they couldn’t refuse. I would become their janitor without pay if they would let me continue to study. After some brief negotiations, it was so agreed.

 

Things began to improve, and maybe even I began to improve. As an actor, that is. But when it came time to cast the first big student production, in walked a new guy, another kid from the Caribbean. Not a member of the group, but someone to whom the director had assigned the part I had secretly hoped to get. After all my studies, busting my butt trying to learn to act, not to mention busting my butt sweeping the walk and stoking the furnace, she cast him in the lead. Well, I had to admit, he was a pretty good-looking kid, and he had a good voice. He could even sing a little.

 

I tried to find some consolation in the fact that they made me his understudy. But little did I know, on the night of the first major run through, the one night an important director was coming to watch the show, the other Caribbean kid who had been cast for the lead – a kid named Harry Belafonte – couldn’t make it. I had to go on for him and, son of a gun, the visiting director liked what I did, and he called me to audition for a play he was planning to present on Broadway.

 

‘I’m opening Lysistrata on Broadway,’ he said. ‘There might be a small part you could try out for, if you’re available.’

 

‘Are you kidding?’ I thought to myself.

 

Next thing you know, five weeks later, on opening night, I’m staring out from a Broadway stage onto a sea of white faces in a packed theater – staring back at me – scared beyond belief as I fumbled unsuccessfully for my lines.

 

The word ‘bad’ cannot begin to accommodate my wretchedness. I mean, I was bad. The stage fright had me so that I was giving the wring cues, jumbling the lines, and within an instant the audience was rolling in the aisles.

 

The moment the scene I was in came to its tortuous end, it was time for this Caribbean kid to run for cover. My career was over before it had begun, and the void was opening up once again to receive me. I didn’t even go to the cast party, which meant that I wasn’t around when the first reviews appeared.

 

The critics trashed the show. I mean, they hated it. But they liked me. I was so godawful they thought I was good. They said they admired my ‘fresh comedic gift.’

 

If you saw this in an old black-and-white movie on TV, would you believe it? Someone was looking out for me, for sure.

 

My ‘triumph’ in Lysistrata leads immediately to an understudy’s job in the touring company of Anna Lucasta. Then after a long, lean, and frustrating period I found out, quite by accident, that 20 th Century Fox was about to begin casting for a movie called No Way Out. That, as it turned out, was my first motion picture job. Fifty-years and fifty-six movies later, here I am recalling the year, the day, the words, and the resolve that forged a new and undreamed-of-beginning and launched a journey more incredible than I could have imagined – through the streets of New York, along the highways and byways of life, on to a destiny written in a time before I came, by hands other than my own.”

 

The 2009 portrait came from Wikimedia Commons.

 

 

There are many accents and dialects across the United States

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Back on January 17, 2024 there was an article by Megan Ulu-Lani Boyanton at Smithsonian Magazine titled A Brief History of the United States’ Accents and Dialects. She discussed several of them, as shown above via a map. But you can’t really learn without listening to them.

 

Her article also had a 22-minute embedded video by dialect coach Erik Singer titled Accent Expert Gives a Tour of U. S. Accents – Part 1. He also has two other videos: one is Accent Expert Gives a Tour of U. S. Accents – Part 2 (14 minutes), and the other is Accent Expert Gives a Tour of North American Accents – Part 3 (11 minutes).

 

My map was adapted from this one of U.S. States.

 

 

Pearls Before Swine cartoon about that distinctive Pittsburgh accent

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

An accent reveals where you came from. The March 1, 2024 Pearls Before Swine cartoon by Stephan Pastis has the following dialogue:

 

Policeman: Pardon me folks, but we’re looking for a bank robber. All we know about him is that he’s from Pittsburgh.

Rat: Yeah, well good luck ID’ing someone just based on where they’re from.

Bald Man: Yeah, yinz are nuts.

Goat: Pittsburghese for ‘you all.’

Rat: They have their own language?

Bald Man: Was my Franco Harris underwear showing?

 

I grew up in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh (from 1955 to 1977) and am familiar with their distinctive Western Pennsylvania English. Back on February 1, 2015 I blogged about how Last fall Pittsburgh took the prize for worst accent in the U.S. 

 

In Philadelphia they say youse, down South it’s y’all, but around Pittsburgh it’s yinz (or yunz). In Squirrel Hill the phrase: Yinz gwan up Murray? means Are you going (shopping) up on Murray Avenue?

 

The panorama came from Wikimedia Commons.

 

A humorous typo

Today is International Talk Like a Pirate Day. Cartoonist Doug Savage lead up to it by posting a week of related Savage Chickens cartoons. On September 14th he posted the one shown above, claiming The Legend of Blackbeard came from the typographical error of adding an extra D.

Humor columnist Dave Barry was responsible for making International Talk Like a Pirate Day into a holiday event. There even is a 6-1/2 minute training video on YouTube. And the Toyota Yaris is the official car for this day, which I blogged about back in July 2011.

Accents - rhoticity or rotisserie?

Your accent marks you either as belonging where you speak - or as an outsider. Rhoticity and rotisserie are words that almost sound alike (homophones).  But a rotisserie is an apparatus for roasting food (like the chicken shown above) on a spit. And rhoticity refers to an accent or dialect of English where an /r/ sound is retained before consonants and finally in a word at the end of an utterance. In a rhotic dialect you would say to ‘park the car in Harvard Yard,’ not to ‘pahk the cah in Hahvad Yahd.’ At ThoughtCo. on March 26, 2018 there is an article by Richard Nordquist giving a Definition and examples of rhotic and not-rhotic speech.

Folks in the Midwestern U.S. don’t think they have an accent, but of course they do. My parents both grew up there, so that became my accent. There was another article by Edward McClelland in the January 3, 2017 issue of Belt Magazine titled Introduction to How to Speak Midwestern. He shows a map and explains that there are three Midwestern dialect regions: Inland North, Midland, and North Central. Mr. McClelland said:

“The steel mills and auto plants drew millions of Southern and Eastern European immigrants who adopted Inland North as their dialect model. Perhaps most importantly, the nation’s leading pronunciation expert was John S. Kenyon, a philologist at Ohio’s Hiram College, which is just east of Cleveland. Kenyon was the author of two books, American Pronunciation (1924) and A Pronouncing Dictionary of American English (1944), and was pronunciation editor of Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language. In these roles, Kenyon championed rhoticity, the pronunciation of r’s wherever they appear in words: he preferred ‘war’ to the Transatlantic ‘waugh.’ Kenyon also favored pronouncing ‘not’ like ‘naht,’ instead of ‘nawt.’ These were both features of the Inland North speech he heard in northeastern Ohio.”

Dialect regions also have different idioms. After about five years of living in Ann Arbor, Michigan (Inland North), I was visiting my mother (Midland) and gave her some driving directions, that included the phrase ‘hang a right’ (meaning to make a right turn). She glared at me and asked why a change in direction had to be suspended in midair!

Last fall Pittsburgh took the prize for worst accent in the U.S

An accent identifies where you came from. Sometimes it’s best to lose one.

Today is the Super Bowl, so both the Steelers and Pittsburgh get some respect. (Those Steelers won six Super Bowls in 1975, 1976, 1979, 1980, 2006, and 2009).

Most people demean the Pittsburgh accent, which just is spoken in a relatively small geographic region.  Tim Niklas demonstrated it in his Ignite 9 Denver presentation Pittsburghese - A Dialectical Primer. Last fall it was named the worst accent in the U.S.

I grew up and lived in the Squirrel Hill section of Pittsburgh for over two decades, so I’m very familiar with it. (My English came from hearing my parents, who grew up in Cincinnati, so I don’t usually speak that way).  But I understand that:

Yunz gwan dahntahn? means Are you going downtown?

Yunz gwan up Murray? means Are you going (shopping on) Murray Avenue?

I’d like an ahrn, a chipchopped sammich ana gumban means I’d like an Iron City beer, a chipped-chopped ham sandwich, and a rubber band.

Yunz is single word version of the Irish English second-person plural “you ones.” Over in Philadelphia they say youse, and in the South they say y’all. 

The Post Gazette had newspaper articles titled A Fresh Look: Speaking Clearly in Pittsburghese and Is yunz or is yinz ain’t from Pittsburgh? There is an informal Pittsburghese web site, and a serious one, Pittsburgh Speech & Society. Barbara Johnstone even wrote a scholarly book, Speaking Pittsburghese: The Story of a Dialect.

Southern accents didn’t used to get much respect. Lenny Bruce once said that:

“As bright as any Southerner could be, if Albert Einstein ‘tawked lahk thayat, theah wouldn’t be no bomb.’ ‘Folks, ah wanna tell yew bout new-clear fishin-’...”

More recently Jeff Foxworthy joked that when some heard his accent they mentally deducted a hundred IQ points.

In November 2013, Time had an article titled Hey, Y’all: Southern Accents Voted Most Attractive. It reported results from a survey by Cupid.com:

Rank and percentages

1st Southern – 36.5% (45% male/28% female)
2nd New York –16.5% (10% male/23% female)
3rd Western – 13 % (16% male/10% female)
4th New England – 10.5% (8% male/13% female)
5th New Jersey –7% (4% male/10% female)
6th Canadian –7% (3% male/11% female)
7th Midwestern – 5.5% (8% male/3% female)
8th Mid-Atlantic – 4% (5% male/3% female)
 
So, keep that sexy and widely spoken Southern accent.

The joy of elaborate student pranks - comedian Jose Barrientos fakes an accent for an entire public speaking course

People judge us based on first impressions, like what we wear and how we speak. Those impressions may be very wrong. Yesterday ABC News had a story about how Jose told his Speech 101 class at Los Angeles City College that he was a recent immigrant, his family were piñata makers, and that he used to ride a donkey to school. For his last speech he finally revealed how he normally speaks, and got a perfect score. The video shown above tells his story. WARNING - there is lots of profane language. You can also watch him doing eight minutes of stand-up comedy without that phony accent.

How you dress also can throw people way off. Almost four decades ago, when I was in the Air Force Reserve, I was at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base for the altitude chamber course that everyone had to take before going on flying status. Three months earlier I’d come back from basic training, tech school, and on-the-job training to be a medic in an air evacuation squadron. My rank was still Airman Basic (E-1) so I still didn’t even have one stripe on the sleeves of my fatigues. The first morning was boring classroom stuff. Everyone was glad when we stopped for a coffee break.

Ahead of me in line was a man wearing an unusual blue uniform. When I asked him where he was from, he told me that he was a Wing Commander in the Royal Air Force (officer rank equivalent to a major, O-4). He was on an exchange tour, and was going to Scott Air Force Base (near St. Louis) to fly jet transport planes. I told him that I’d worked as an orderly in the hospital there for a month. Eventually our conversation turned to the topic of metal fatigue. I noticed that he was becoming very perplexed at hearing me talk like an engineer. He’d looked at my sleeves, and hadn’t seen any insignia. Then he’d looked at my collar, and cuffs, and still couldn’t find anything to identify my rank. Finally I told him that I was in the Air Force Reserve (working one weekend each month), and that during the week I was a graduate student in metallurgy at Carnegie Mellon University.