Does anyone else do this?
My husband has different voices for the people he talks to.
You can almost always tell with whom he is on the phone by the volume of his
speech or the sudden disappearance of certain vowels and consonants that might
make him seem of one class or another.
I just laughed myself into a coughing spasm as I listened to
him make an appointment with a new barber. “Hey! Can I gettanappointment with
Pat faw tamarrah?” And he’s yelling on the phone as if the guy was across the
street on his stoop instead of on the other end of the phone. If he were
calling a new hair salon, I’m certain he would have asked for “an appointment
with Pat for tomorrow”, but the fact that this place probably charges no more
that $20 for a haircut places it in the category of working class people who,
as we who grew up in Brooklyn know, have certain restrictions on the use of
vowels, consonants and decibel levels.
I have heard it over and over throughout the years in calls
to painters, plumbers, the boilerman, the guy who cuts down our trees. The
volume goes up but the tone goes down, deep into the manly chest-voice region. It
is a verbal slippage into a blue-collared shirt, designed to make the person on
the other end of the line believe you are just a regular guy who understands
these things by virtue of the fact that you speak the lingo. Never mind if the
blue-collared pro at the receiving end of your query ever set foot in Kings
County, he will understand by the tone of your voice and the ‘dems’ and ‘does’
slipping past a suddenly paralytic tongue, that you are man of the people, not
ignorant and not to be taken advantage of.
This is a voice that never shows up when he is making an
appointment to see the doctor. If he speaks to a broker, you’d swear he was a
member of the royal family. He is an actor so these personality switches come
as easily to him as time jumping in “Jumpers”. “Now I’m smart!” “Now I’m
regular!” “Now you see me!” “Now you don’t!” But unlike the ‘jumpers’, he is
totally unaware of these speech patterns. Rather, they spring from his brain
unbidden; an unconscious call for help from one peer to another; an “I’m like
you so how do I get dis squirrel outta da chimney?” Or like today, “I don’t
want to wait three weeks for a hairstylist; I wanna get a heh-cut tamarrah.”
Posts
Oh yeah. I get you load and clear. Different alphabets for different folks. Well all until the walls come down. Then full barrage in the angry vein we are kinda all the same. Brooklineese smukaneese it all flows in one river when it is chrunch time. I love words. In words and intonation and syllables is power to the chords.
ReplyDeleteI can identify. In this vein we're all actors then. As a business owner I certainly click into my professional decorums when interfacing with clients. I grew up on what some would consider the wrong side of the tracks. It's great to relax with family and old friends and just laugh.
ReplyDeleteLol love this piece it rings true for each of us. What blessing it is to have people close to us who observer our little quirks. As I read the piece I could imagine you in the morning sipping your coffee peeking over the tip of your mug chuckling behind it observing Don in action. This reminds me of how my best friend observes me and then tells me later of the little things I do that make here laugh. Also how I notice she still pronounces some of her words as I imagined she did as a toddler. Rather than saying "I need the other shoe" says I need the udder shoe" it tickles me every time.
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