Word: diphthongs
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...bars later, the first syllables uttered in the show - a cutting "Wuh. Uh. Oh." for the song "Good Morning Baltimore" - cue the audience to the tone and intent. Winokur, with a voice that shouts High School of the Performing Arts in its "Fame" years, gives the "Oh" that diphthong that identifies anyone from Baltimore (or from Philadelphia, South Jersey or Delaware; it's a widespread contagion from which many of us are not cured...
Here is the hectoring muse of the theater, certain of every wink and diphthong. For Pygmalion, a road company Liza Doolittle is counseled on Cockney sounds: "Liar is lawyer . . . Handkerchief is Enkecher . . . Brute is not broot: it is brer-ewt. The utterance is slovenly and nasal, colds in the head being almost chronic in the gutter...
...describing locales and the means travelers use to get from one to another. His chronicle of a voyage in an umiak, an open skin-covered Eskimo craft, from Nome to a fragment of rock called King Island, is a masterpiece of terse narrative and clinical observation. Without wasting a diphthong, Roueche captures the look and feeling of the gray ice-choked sea, the pleasant bite of whisky and the new taste of muktuk, or whale fat: "The blubber looked like a block of cheese-pale pink cheese with a thick black rind. It was very tender and almost tasteless...
Joisey for Jersey. The origins of Brooklynese are controversial. It has many characteristics, but its hallmark is the pronunciation of the diphthong er as if it were oi (like Joisey for Jersey) and vice versa. Some linguists believe that Brooklynese stems from German and Yiddish. Griffith argues forcefully that it is rooted in Gaelic. He notes that the dialect appeared after a wave of Irish immigrants settled in Brooklyn in the late 19th century. Moreover, Griffith finds that the trademark Brooklyn diphthong oi also appears in many Gaelic words; taoiseach (leader) and barbaroi (barbarians), for example. He also points...
Through it all, Crowley moves like a recording angel, catching every nuance, every diphthong of homosexual patter. But the script is marked by more than an appraiser's eye and an unforgetting ear. The author well knows the men Proust called "sons without a mother." He delineates the reliance on alcohol and drugs to pull a shade over the mind; the loveless encounters that begin with need and end with arrest; the deadly message of the mirror that announces the ebbing of the physical attractiveness that is the homosexual's main solace...