| rdfs:comment | - Ah, New England: Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine. Cradle of The American Revolution, home of Plymouth Rock, Ben and Jerry's, Walden Pond and the Red Sox, and chock full of fish. In media, by contrast, New England gets Flanderized into...well, there's kind of a duality here. Come to think of it, fish is brain food, so maybe it all fits together after all... The phrase "Pahk my cah in Hahvad Yahd, 'cuz that's a good ideer" is a well-known shibboleth of the accent. Examples of Hollywood New England include:
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| abstract | - Ah, New England: Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine. Cradle of The American Revolution, home of Plymouth Rock, Ben and Jerry's, Walden Pond and the Red Sox, and chock full of fish. In media, by contrast, New England gets Flanderized into...well, there's kind of a duality here. On one side, we have the highbrow intellectuals who go to Ivy League universities, write books, dabble in philosophy and end up as magnificent eccentrics. Many of these are scions of the "Codfish Aristocracy," uber-exclusive old families who can trace their ancestry back to the Mayflower passenger list (none of whom were named Kennedy, incidentally; that family is famously Irish Catholic and made their money in real estate, the stock market, and Prohibition-era bootlegging). All this snootiness comes in very handy when a producer requires a Black Sheep... or just wants an excuse to film in and around Kennebunkport, Hyannisport, or Martha's Vineyard. On the other side of the coin, we have the tough immigrant laborers, folksy down-home farmers, and of course the crusty flannel-wearing fishermen who give us the seafood we so crave. All of these people will be veritable founts of down-to-earth wisdom, generally dispensed using as many goofily inscrutable metaphors as possible ("Cold enough to freeze the skin off a beanpole!") Come to think of it, fish is brain food, so maybe it all fits together after all... In reality, New England is one of the oldest regions of the United States: six separate states with a mountain range up the middle and the Gulf Stream just offshore, meaning the climate and geography are all a lot more variable than that found in most other regions of the country. (Don't like the weather? Wait five minutes.) Seacoast Massachusetts is a very different place from the Lakes Region of New Hampshire, the "Northern Plantations" of Maine or the Green Mountains of Vermont, and each region has its own variations of culture, accent and traditions. All of which is pretty much lost on Hollywood. The standard protocol is for the lowly, regardless of region, to be given a generic Down East accent. The grand get the Boston-specific version, as heavily popularized by JFK and family. The irony here is that no other person in New England actually speaks like the Kennedys. Their infamous accent actually has a touch of the Queen's English mixed in, because the founding generation spent a fair amount of time in the UK while growing up (family patriarch Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., was Ambassador to the Court of St. James's 1938-1940 and had other business there as well). Their ubiquitousness on the cultural scene, meanwhile, has resulted in 95% of Hollywood having no idea how to use a Boston accent, thus bolstering the careers of Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, and brothers Mark and Donnie Wahlberg. For that matter, non-New Englanders generally don't realize that there are in fact four versions of the "Boston" accent, only one of which is the stereotypical version -- and in real life, it's hardly as exaggerated as depicted. This trope mostly covers Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island, and eastern Massachusetts (Boston, Plymouth, Cape Cod, and the islands). When Connecticut appears, it tends to be depicted as a bunch of rich suburbs of New York City filled with insufferable geniuses who are/were educated at posh universities like Yale. Western Massachusetts ("west'a Woostah"), for all intents and purposes, does not exist (if you ask a lot of people from West Mass this is truth in television, particularly when dealing with a Bostonian). As anyone from Boston will tell you, it's a wicked good city. In addition, there's a new competitor in the cliché-stakes: "Southie", home of the Southies, which (as depicted in media) is not so much South Boston as it is a crime-ridden, extremely northerly borough of New York. Whaya they tawk funny. Rural Hollywood New England is where you usually find brilliant autumn foliage displays, and picturesque snowy winter landscapes. This is largely Truth in Television; they look like scenes from a Norman Rockwell painting because they are. Keep in mind, of course, that this is also Lovecraft Country. The phrase "Pahk my cah in Hahvad Yahd, 'cuz that's a good ideer" is a well-known shibboleth of the accent. Contrast California Valley Girl speak, which, like, migrated over to the northeast, found it wicked awesome, and stayed. Examples of Hollywood New England include:
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