It Sounds Better When You Say It In Southern

I know we’ve all got our panties in a bind about all the things, but quit fussing with that elastic for a sec and hush up, ‘cause we’re gonna talk Southern accents.

A whole lotta unsweet tea has been spilled across the interwebs lately regarding the way folks speak in the bottom right quadrant of the country, and I have some thoughts.

For sure, when Parker Posey’s pill-drunk character oozed “We fleeoooh over the North Pole-uh!” in the first episode of this season’s White Lotus, I was as suspicious as the rest of y’all.

Oh lort, I snorted into my Arnold Palmer, here comes a buncha salty hogwash tied up in a big ol’ satin bow, an expression I just made up, and how better to illustrate the ridiculous clichés served about the South on TV?

So many onscreen Southern accents are high cringe, even from Oscar winners like Daniel Craig, whose Knives Out sleuth ended up sounding like a mash-up of Foghorn Leghorn and a Dolly Parton drag queen.

I say I say, lookie here son, you best mind your p’s and q’s

From the Beverly Hillbillies to the hulking rapist in Deliverance, a nondescript twangy drawl has always been a device to convey ignorance, villainy, or—as exemplified in White Lotus—white privilege.

But the more I heard the Lilly Pulitzer-swathed Victoria Ratliff utter her signature idioms—Piper, nayoooo!, Bood-izum and my favorite, goo-roo—stretching out the syllables like a toddler torturing a piece of saltwater taffy, the more I recognized it as authentic—and highly specific.

By now plenty has been written about Victoria’s accent—and her Tarheel titan husband’s, played so convincingly by Jason Isaacs it made me forget he is Lucius Malfoy—and how it is particular to the Raleigh-Durham area of North Carolina. Much of Mark’s extended family lives there, and I’ve definitely overheard the same vowel pretzels at weddings and bar mitzvahs, especially among the older generations. (The forever marvelous Aunt Carol Guld said this when our son was born: Oh now that bah-by is a tall drink of wah-tuh, he’s gone be expensive to shod!)

But there’s more to a Southern accent than region—every utterance of these characters is layered with social standing and entitlement. These are the types who rent a bungalow in the Summerville section of Augusta for Masters week, book the fam at super luxe resorts in Thailand, and *checks script notes* add to their bazillions by insider trading (Unlike those who benefitted from last week’s tariff prank, fictional Timothy Ratliff will go to jail.)

How could she knoooown she would cause a soooo-nah-mi of fuss?

Apparently the White Lotus cast was told to watch Charleston-based Southern Charm for inspiration on how to sound like insufferable rich assholes, which was not appreciated by the reality show’s stars. (Savannah’s own version of the Bravo hit was short-lived; our kids were far too chill for that much trauma drama. As I observed recently, we just don’t have Charleston’s snooty bite.)

Southerners are provincial, right down to the semantics. The southeastern version of American English may have derived from the British and Scottish colonialists and been influenced by the languages of enslaved Africans who made life here possible, but its variants have only compounded in its evolution.

Since moving to the gnatty side of the Mason-Dixon 20-ish years ago, my ears have become attuned to myriad nuances of speech, the simplest words evoking tremendously different pronunciations. Take “fire,” for instance: Fah, fy-ruh, and holy shit man yo pants burnin’ up! are all plausible iterations.

Hollywood can keep dressing up the same hackneyed Colonel Sanders cadence in Daisy Duke shorts, but there are truly as many flavors of Southern accent as there are recipes for potato salad. (In both cases, the fake ones have raisins.)