Accentuated prose

Posted on February 8, 2012 by Clint

It may be very presumptive to expect anyone besides me to pay this much attention to the progression of the comic, but I wonder if anyone’s noticed that folks like Suzie and Frank don’t do things like say “ya” for “you” nearly as much as they did in Episode 1?

It’s strange how that’s evolved– even though I still hear their accents in my head, I don’t feel nearly as much need to try to represent it on the page. Meanwhile the phonetic torch has been unspokenly (well, spokenly) passed to those like Brett, Lacey, and the Oklahoma gang.

The subject of conveying accents in print is something I think every writer has to wrestle with sooner or later. Some ignore it entirely. Some, like George Bernard Shaw or Zane Grey, go absolutely hog wild with the concept to the point you have to sit there and translate what certain characters are supposed to be saying. Sussing out a Shaw play was sometimes worse than figuring out Shakespeare, especially when he’d get into the “lower class” speech.

“Yew jus’ come agen me en ow’ll besh yer roody fice, yew stahk-oop pice ah tresh, see if oi dun’t!”

That’s not an exact quote, but it isn’t that far off.

Grey, meanwhile, loved to try to transliterate his Texan drawls, but how much he did so also seems to depend which story you’re reading. Crack open the right one and you’ll get enough utterances of “Wal, shore!” to make your head spin.

For my own tastes, I always felt like there was a point trying to represent people talkin’ funny would start getting in the way of the story, so even in the case of Muriel and company I try not to get so far afield as to make things incomprehensible. For that matter, here’s the thing about accents: no one believes they have one. You’re fine, it’s everyone else who talks weird. Because of that, any writer dealing in spelling out accents is making a certain call on a baseline “normal” way to talk, and when I consider that people are reading this comic in places like Australia and Poland, that gets strange to contemplate in a hurry.

So why have I kept on doing it? Well… the plain fact is it’s fun to do, and at this point I’ve just made my baseline a certain fictional place, the one occupied by the central heroes of the stories I’m paying homage to, rather than the wild and wooly character parts of the supporting cast. I especially like going nuts with the “infomercial voice-over”, which is probably more in the style of Disney’s Frontierland than any realistic mode of speech that ever was.

And besides, if I really got to be a stickler for things, my mind would bring up that most people in Texas don’t talk like cowboys anymore. Then where would I be?

Wouldn’t I rather just keep on keepin’ on in this Weird New West of my concoction?

Wal, pardners?

Shore I would.

 

 

5 thoughts on “Accentuated prose”

  1. Sarssol

    I feel that diction matters more than transliteration of accents.
    And I also feel like the last line should be “Shore I wood.” Just because.

  2. Clint

    Troo ’nuff.

    One of the reasons Shaw did what he did was that he was a big proponent of the “let’s spell it like it sounds” school of language. He absolutely hated the inconsistencies in English spelling, as in this link where it talks about how by using existing English precedents, “fish” should be able to be spelled as “ghoti”:

    http://walkinthewords.blogspot.com/2008/04/phonetics-and-george-bernard-shaw.html

  3. Poe

    LOLz is all that comes to mind about the “Texas accent” as seeing as that I was born and raised there and lived there until 18. I do have a slight accent sometimes [y’all slips in sometimes]. My husband usually knows when I have talked to family because my accent slips back in. But in no way to I sound hick like what is called a “Texan accent”. Some folks, more the backwoods type…if you get my drift, have that thick accent, but that is more of a Southern thing. The real Texas accent is a mix of the Southern and a slight tone to the voice that is subtle. And if I want, I can fake up my voice and pull an “authentic Texaz slur.” XD

    When it comes down to it, I mostly laugh at peoples ideas of “Texas accent” because it is a thing of Hollywood really. Though, as a Texan, I also find it a tadbit insulting and demeaning, but not to the point I would yell at a person or rip them a new arse. For instance, not everyone from Jersey sound like the crew from Jersey Shore, and not everyone from Boston has a Bean-town snoot to their talk. /shrug Yeah for Hollywood stereotypes! LOL

  4. BarnOwl

    Well, I spent a number of years in the south when I was in the Navy (Virginia to be specific). Alas, I found that folks down there DO speak with that southern drawl. I also found that a “southern drawl” is no one specific thing and varies (sometimes more, sometimes less) depending on the region. So, for example, if you’re in the Norfolk, VA area, you’ll hear one variation, or dialect. But if you go a ways inland, it starts to change subtly. If you go down to S. Carolina it is more different, as it is in Tennessee, or Louisiana … or Texas. Having grown up in Arizona, but with my parents being from Nebraska, these accents are noticeable to me … but now I have a touch of the south in my speech which I “picked up” from living in VA. But then, when I was in VA, the folks down there thought I spoke with a “Midwestern accent”. :LOL:

    As for trying to convey accents in print … I reckon you don’t really have any choice except to do what you’re doing to one extent or another. I think I had noticed the slight … … drift in your character’s accents, but only because I had recently gone back and read the story from the beginning over a period of a couple of days. Otherwise, I probably wouldn’t have noticed the changes in spelling. But, having followed the story all this time, the accents are still in my mind as I read the dialog.

    As for the voice-overs during the TV sequences … oddly enough, I kind of hear them with a Mike Rowe kind of voice (“Dirty Jobs” as well as voice-overs for “Deadliest Catch” and several others).

    Anyhoo … As Andy by-God Jackson once said; “It’s a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word.”

  5. Clint

    The kooky thing is that I’m honestly a huge nut for correct spelling and usage of words; seeing something like an incorrect substitution of “loose” for “lose” makes me twitch. The accented speech of my characters is my exception to the rule, because I’m trying to represent something that would be audible if we were listening. But on the occasions where I go into full, impersonal narrator mode (like the beginning of this episode), I put those final g’s right back on the end of the words.

    I’m fairly certain that in over 100 pages since this comic began, there is not one typo in spelling or colorful bit of grammatical license that I did not intentionally mean to be there for storytelling purposes. There’s occasional issues with the lettering, especially early on, but shouldn’t be any with the words themselves.

    In fact I once challenged a fellow webcomic author to find a single typo in Episode 1. Never heard the results of that, but I s’pose if’n ya count the talkin’, you could argue they’re everywhere. I just don’t count the talking.

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