Stephen Fried’s fond reminiscence of Jim Quinn (Philadelphia magazine, 10/19/2020) came out over five years ago, but I just discovered it, and since Quinn is one of my language heroes (first touted just a few weeks into the existence of LH, reinforced in 2004, 2007, and 2013) I wanted to share it with y’all. I’ll quote the language-related passages, but he led an interesting life in general, so I recommend the whole thing:
Jim Quinn was one of Philadelphia’s finest, funniest, and smartest writers — of longform journalism, essays about food and language, and poetry for the first four decades of his career, and later of fiction as well. He was also, arguably, the city’s longest-living, longest-haired, and most prolific link to the best things about the 1960s, maintaining throughout his 85 years a sense of wonder and humor, political commitment, righteous indignation, and shrugging indifference to authority. […]
Quinn could write the most gorgeous sentences. But much of the joy of his reportage was his amazing attention to details that told the story better than he could. “He describes everything, yes everything, in most specific terms since euphemism is a word he has never heard,” said the New York Times Book Review in 1972 of his first major book, Word of Mouth: A Completely New Kind of Guide to New York Restaurants. […]
In his late 20s, Quinn was convinced by friends to return to college. In 1963 he enrolled at Temple University, where he got involved in campus politics and anti-war protests. […] He was, at the time, working toward his PhD in English literature — writing a dissertation on the Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid, and lots of his own poetry. But editors who were fans of his food writing started reaching out with assignments. […]
That same year, Quinn published his second major book, American Tongue and Cheek: A Populist Guide to Our Language, in which he argued that English was becoming more and more democratized, and lampooned those trying to hold on to old formal usages. Critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in The New York Times Book Review called the book “outrageous and delightful.” While he found some parts infuriating, he noted “as Mr. Quinn writes, ‘If this book doesn’t make you angry, it wasn’t worth writing.’”
In an interview about the book with Terri Gross on “Fresh Air” — when the show was in its local infancy, complete with call-ins — he defended words like “hopefully” that were coming into common usage despite the horror of the grammar police. He was astonished how worked up people could get about new words being accepted by the print media. “You can confess to the most horrible kind of sexual practices,” he joked, “and people will say ‘well, we have to understand that sort of thing’ [to] … show their tolerance. But say the word ‘irregardless’ and say you have no intention of dropping it from your vocabulary and they become utterly infuriated!” He preached “new words are new tools.”
He and Gross also had a funny conversation about the Philadelphia accent, which she was just learning and he was unlearning. “I can’t say ‘att-y-tude’ any more,” he explained. “But I remember we used to say ‘grat-y-tude, what a lovely at-y-tude for a ‘prost-y-tute’ to have.” Gross burst out laughing.
Among the language police Quinn criticized was William Safire, who at the time was two years into his “On Language” column for the New York Times Magazine. He not only appreciated the book by Quinn — whom he referred to as “a poet and food columnist” — but soon after reviewing it Safire invited Quinn to write the “On Language” column when he was on vacation.
“The idea that he could jump the gap from writing for alternative weeklies to writing Safire’s column for the Times, and stand in for the nation’s grammarian — amazing,” recalled bestselling author Steven Levy, who worked with Quinn at the Drummer and Philadelphia. “Such a renaissance guy, and also the ultimate free agent, always moving publication to publication.” Quinn also later wrote a language column for The Nation.
I continue to recommend American Tongue and Cheek, and I’m delighted to learn he was a fan of Hugh MacDiarmid, one of my own poetic heroes (whom I also touted back in 2002). And if I ever knew he’d written the “On Language” column when Safire was on vacation, I’d forgotten.
I amna fou sae muckle as tired – deid dune.
Indeed, many of us are no longer as bauld as aince we were. Whose elbuck does not fankle in the course of time?
How is “att-y-tude” pronounced?
Presumably the idea is that it’s with [i] rather than [ɪ]. Unless Americans usually say it with [ə].
In that case, wouldn’t they have used <ee>?
Maybe it means [t] instead of flapped [ɾ]?
DE: Presumably the idea is that it’s with [i] rather than [ɪ].
I’d say so. I’ve heard Fleffians say “beautiful” with [i].
Y: In that case, wouldn’t they have used <ee>?
In American English, the most familiar way to write unstressed [i] at the end of a word is -y.
DE: Unless Americans usually say it with [ə].
Of course. I’ve heard a rumor that New Yorkers have an [ɨ] in “roses” etc., but the rest of us see no need for fripperies such as more than one weak vowel.
(Most of the rest of us. Someone is about to tell you about all the Americans who don’t speak “the dialect so nice they named it NYCE”* but distinguish “roses” from “Rosa’s”.)
*Stolen from Richard Fontana, a former poster in alt.usage.english.
One hyphen too many, then. “Atty-tude” would have been clearer.
Ah, the “the May 1978 standoff at the original MOVE house in Powelton Village.” Only real insiders who grew up in that area remember that one – the subsequent 1985 incident (with eleven fatalities instead of one) is the one that got national attention. Which is not to say I would have sent my zany restaurant critic to cover the first one.
And yes, I took the y’s in the eye-dialect spellings to signal FLEECE.
I suppose this is signaled by Philly for Philadelphia.
Here’s a 2002 story from the student newspaper of the university Quinn attended in the Sixties, with “atty-tude” in the hed: https://temple-news.com/ny-may-be-happening-but-phillys-got-atty-tude/
@Y: “Atty-tude” would have been clearer.
I agree.
@pp: I suppose this is signaled by Philly for Philadelphia.
I think that’s just the same nicknaming -y as in “Jerry” and “Paddy”.
John Wells would I think put “Jerry” and “Paddy” and “Philly” into his (unstressed) happY lexical set, which purportedly represents a different vowel than FLEECE and in IPA terms purportedly represents the same vowel as the KIT set. I’ve always been a bit skeptical about that, at least as a description of GenAm pronunciation. But word-final “y” does pretty consistently signal that specific vowel, whatever it is, in GenAm pronunciation. Spellings with a midword “y” tend to reflect ultimately Greek etymology (often mediated through Latin) and seem unpredictable. Compare “pyrite” (PRICE) with “pyxide” (KIT), or “hypodermic” with “Cynthia” (same contrast).
I’ve always been a bit skeptical about that, at least as a description of GenAm pronunciation
It’s certainly true of older UK RP.
I remember, from when I worked in St Andrews, a colleague from Norn Iron who was amused (he said) by the way the locals said “happee” for “happy” (and so forth.) Though I’m not sure that he was altogether right …
I believe that in Classic RP, all the vowels of “indivisibility” were identical. But I also believe that Wells recognized that “HAPPY-tensing” had occurred in GenAm and Australian. I knew an Australian who had moved to England and spoke RP, but said the one thing he hadn’t mastered was that HAPPY vowel.
“Pyxite” and “Cynthia” follow the common pattern that a vowel followed by two or more consonant phonemes, including the /ks/ represented by “x”, has the “lax” or “short” sound. (tt’s no secret that there are exceptions, especially now in April.) “Cynic” is one possible comparandum. Another contrast is between “shyster” and the possibly obsolete “clyster”.
Here in the U.S., people sometimes jocularly referred to the late Pres. Carter as “Jimmuh” Carter because of a perception that in a sufficiently rustic/cracker rural-Georgia accent “Jimmy” would come out as that rather than as “Jimmee.”
@David Eddyshaw: I recall seeing a study (possibly linked to on an old Language Log post) about how Elizabeth II’s pronunciation had shifted over time. One thing that was easy to compare over the years was her annual pronunciation of “Happy Christmas,” and I think they found that over the decades, the final vowel in “happy” had been trending toward a tenser, more Estuary* English sound.
*Can speakers of Estuary English be distinguished by their pronunciations of “estuary”?
Thinking of Jimmuh Carter, where on earth did the idea that “uh” was a good way to represent a schwa come from? If you’re non-rhotic, as I am, then “er” works fine, but I recognize that it isn’t fine for rhotic people, but still, why “uh”? It would be nice if everyone knew how to type ə, but unfortunately they don’t.
@Athel Cornish-Bowden: The OED has the spelling “uh” and “um” going back to the early seventeenth century, while “er” and “erm” are much more recent, as is the symbol “ə.’
I recall seeing a study (possibly linked to on an old Language Log post) about how Elizabeth II’s pronunciation had shifted over time
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0095447005000513
Graham Pointon wrote about the Queen’s English at Linguism, in 2021, in response to a TV show that had clips of her speaking from her entire public life, over 70 years. Graham’s take: rather than “deliberately” changing her accent, “I think it is far more likely that as a result of her exposure to a much wider range of accents, her own has, like mine, changed by imperceptible degrees, just as all accents are gradually changing. As a child, the Queen and Princess Margaret did not go to school, but had a governess. Their language models were probably restricted to a very narrow range of variation. Starting when she was allowed to join the ATS when she was eighteen, and learned to drive as her contribution to the war effort, she would begin to experience a wider variety of speech…” He mentions the TRAP vowel, but not happY tensing.