On poverty and pronunciation in academia
As the first person from my blue-collar family to go to university, I feel this so much. But I hope others will learn to worry about this less. I encounter people from far wealthier families mispronouncing things all the time. I mean, for instance, can you imagine having the money to buy art and still thinking that van Gogh’s name is pronounced like “go”? But if people are worried about sounding less intelligent for mispronouncing things, please don’t hesitate to reach out to colleagues (both in real life and online.) Most of us are happy to help out!
My family are dirt-poor but also ferocious autodidacts, so I did get the advantage of “hearing” a lot of words. Still, I have a similar problem: I spent all of three days at college before I realized I would have to adopt a GA accent to be taken seriously. Trying to code-switch between school and home/social life was too exhausting, so I had to start speaking GA all the time.
I used to worry about not correctly suppressing my “hick” accent when I was too exhausted or nervous and convincing everybody in one sentence that I was a box-of-rocks redneck.* Now I find that I can hardly go back when I want to. It takes a few days of depressurizing back home before I actually remember what my own voice sounds like again.
*Which, to be fair, has happened, including on a memorable occasion at a conference social when my accent slippage prompted an Ivy League scholar to dub me “the goatfucker”(laughter all around, of course), so, you know, my anxiety on this topic are not unfounded.
I freely admit I say Van Go, because I once read someone who claimed that it’s better to use the wrong-but-recognizable pronunciation than try for the correct one and fail (what they actually said was something like “if you say Van
Goff, the Van Go people will think you’re a snob and the Dutch will think you’re
ignorant.”)
Mooncustafer 