To: tejek who wrote (290701 ) 6/12/2006 3:08:06 AM From: combjelly Read Replies (1) | Respond to "I own a few TX companies and have been listening to their CCs. Is there more than one accent in TX? "In the fifties and sixties Bob Hinkle taught Hollywood how to talk Texan. On the sets of Giant and Hud, he read dialogue to Rock Hudson, James Dean, Dennis Hopper, Paul Newman, and Patricia Neal until they could mimic his pronunciation: Barbed wire became “bob wahr,” a dime was “tin cints,” the petroleum industry was the “all bidness,” His accent has its own topography, a landscape of flat a’s, dropped g’s, and rounded o’s, where syllables rise up without warning, as in “He was playin’ the gui-tar,” and vowels stretch on forever. He does not have the soft, musical drawl of East Texas or the more clipped rhythm of Central Texas, but the flat, nasal twang that is typical of his hometown of Brownfield, south of Lubbock. James Dean was the best at imitating his slow, lazy cadence, and the way Dean meandered around his consonants and lingered over his vowels until words like “bad” stretched into “bay-uhd” and “kid” became “kee-uhd” made women weak in the knees. “ I told Jimmy whut I’ll tell yew,” Hinkle said. “In Texas, yew don’t say near as many words, but yew git it said, an’ yew slow it down to where people kin understan’ it.” pbs.org
