Talking the talk.

I WAS being interviewed once, and the reporter described my accent as "northeastern throat." So that's what they think we sound like. But the city has many subaccents, attached to castes, as well as ethnicities and races. Many of them have moved to a house near you.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In the coffee house down the street I hear, of a morning, the business accent. Businessmen sit on rickety chairs at small round tables, in suits as out of place as SWAT team body armor. To give redundant proof of their station in life they have laptops open at parade rest in front of them. But the spoor that marks them is the business accent. The accent is louder than normal speech; they talk as if they were on cellphones. (When they gather at night in restaurants, where they order steaks made from epoxy, their voices rise to the level of barks.) The business accent has the asyncopated rhythm of French pop music--rigid, utterly devoid of swing. It comes accompanied by business slang, which is more than product names or market lingo. Business slang revels in perverse usage. What might get you flunked in English I in Ankara or Tokyo, if your teacher knew more than you did, strikes English-speaking businessmen as lively innovations: e.g., grow as a transitive verb, not applied to crops or beards--we will grow the business; we will grow the economy. (You will, Fowler won't.) Business slang also cultivates a rhetoric of abuse, not as florid as that of gangsters or gangstas, but devoted nevertheless to contempt and control. Ripping open those suits and displaying their chest hair would be attended with difficulties--lost buttons, graying chest hairs--so businessmen talk trash instead. At a distance they sound like this: Blat blot blat blotta grow blot blatta piece of work.

Why would anyone want to talk like this? Because the business of business is business, and making money at business is a skill. Your fellows want to know that you are in the know, and your clients want to know it even more. You wouldn't want to hand your patent or your Keogh to some ninny. Hence an accent. The noise, the roughness, and the bluntness convey energy, determination, and focus. Hence the business accent.

Many years ago preppies were the subject of handbooks and jokes; their style has diffused into a fine J. Crew mist. But real preppies still walk the earth, speaking the preppie accent. You might encounter it if you deal with a design firm. The design firm will send a team to the meeting: young Asian assistants; an artist (ethnicity immaterial, so long as he wears a ponytail); and, fronting the team, a preppie. He has this role because he kind of knows business, and he kind of knows the arts, and he kind of knows how to deal with people (more about business and arts than people, actually). His accent is a drawl. It does not transform the sound of vowels, as coastal Southern accents do, it merely slows the tempo of everything; there is also a drop in pitch of about an octave. Preppie slang consists of childish locutions, attended by so many honor guards of irony and seriousness that you can never tell which is in command. That is old news; what I have noticed that may be newish (funny, you don't look newish)(see how it works?) is the indicator of quantity. This is a quick, soft repeated sound, ch-ch-ch-ch-ch, such as a small rodent makes, or a farm wife calling chickens. If you were writing, you would write etc.; if you were a young woman, you would say whatever. Preppies chirp.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Now why would anyone talk like that? The business accent is the accent of those making money. The preppie accent is the accent of those whose money has been made, ch-ch-ch years ago. The accent announces confidence and ease. The world needs both kinds of people, but I, says the preppie, am the latter.

Gay men, even now that they are marrying in Massachusetts, still disproportionately sport shaved heads and ear studs (but make sure that stud is not on a gangsta). Once again, however, the best field mark is accent. Not all gay men use the gay accent, but every man who uses it is gay. Lesbians talk like girls or truckers, and never use it. The gay accent is emphasis, based on knowingness. It implies the surprise of the straight eavesdropper, but the user is never surprised, because he knows. Evelyn Waugh made an early stab at the gay accent in his first novel Decline and Fall. Someone at a country-house party has suggested playing cards. "'Wouldn't that be rather fast?' said Miles. 'It is Sunday. I think cards are divine, particularly the kings. Such naughty old faces!'" The italics and the exclamation point are marks of Waugh's status as an explorer; they are like monsters in the new oceans of Renaissance maps. Generations of familiarity now make them unnecessary; straights just aren't surprised anymore. The gay accent continues though, code for exploded secrets.

Gay men who talk like this do so in honor of powerful women, generally their mothers, modified by diva icons--Lady Bracknell, Bette Davis, Simon Cowell (in America all Brits are women)(see how it works?). I apologize to the science heads, who know that gayness is a product of genetics and brain chemistry, and will be eliminated by embryonic selection and meds, as will we all.

I, to end with a confession, have the intellectual accent: boorish pauses, interrupted by bursts of speech, playful or pedantic. Lack of social grace + narcissism + love of words = us. Higher education has spread the intellectual accent throughout the republic. I hear myself best when I speak to someone from another world, usually rural--the retired farmer with the roadside stand in Kyserike, my trainer from Andros. They love to talk; they pause before they laugh, then laugh for a long, long time.