City Desk: Talking the Talk

I WAS being interviewed once, and the reporter described my accent as “northeastern throat.” So that’s what they think we sound like. But the city has many subaccents, attached to castes, as well as ethnicities and races. Many of them have moved to a house near you.

In the coffee house down the street I hear, of a morning, the business accent. Businessmen sit on rickety chairs at small round tables, in suits as out of place as SWAT team body armor. To give redundant proof of their station in life they have laptops open at parade rest in front of them. But the spoor that marks them is the business accent. The accent is louder than normal speech; they talk as if they were on cellphones. (When they gather at night in restaurants, where they order steaks made from epoxy, their voices rise to the level of barks.) The business accent has the asyncopated rhythm of French pop music-rigid, utterly devoid of swing. It comes accompanied by business slang, which is more than product names or market lingo. Business slang revels in perverse usage. What might get you flunked in English I in Ankara or Tokyo, if your teacher knew more than you did, strikes English-speaking businessmen as lively innovations: e.g., grow as a transitive verb, not applied to crops or beards-we will grow the business; we will grow the economy. (You will, Fowler won’t.) Business slang also cultivates a rhetoric of abuse, not as florid as that of gangsters or gangstas, but devoted nevertheless to contempt and control. Ripping open those suits and displaying their chest hair would be attended with difficulties-lost buttons, graying chest hairs-so businessmen talk trash instead. At a distance they sound like this: Blat blot blat blotta grow blot blatta piece of work.

About the Author

Richard Brookhiser

Historian Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute.

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I WAS being interviewed once, and the reporter described my accent as “northeastern throat.” So that’s what they think we sound like. But the city has many subaccents, attached to castes, as well as ethnicities and races. Many of them have moved to a house near you.

In the coffee house down the street I hear, of a morning, the business accent. Businessmen sit on rickety chairs at small round tables, in suits as out of place as SWAT team body armor. To give redundant proof of their station in life they have laptops open at parade rest in front of them. But the spoor that marks them is the business accent. The accent is louder than normal speech; they talk as if they were on cellphones. (When they gather at night in restaurants, where they order steaks made from epoxy, their voices rise to the level of barks.) The business accent has the asyncopated rhythm of French pop music-rigid, utterly devoid of swing. It comes accompanied by business slang, which is more than product names or market lingo. Business slang revels in perverse usage. What might get you flunked in English I in Ankara or Tokyo, if your teacher knew more than you did, strikes English-speaking businessmen as lively innovations: e.g., grow as a transitive verb, not applied to crops or beards-we will grow the business; we will grow the economy. (You will, Fowler won’t.) Business slang also cultivates a rhetoric of abuse, not as florid as that of gangsters or gangstas, but devoted nevertheless to contempt and control. Ripping open those suits and displaying their chest hair would be attended with difficulties-lost buttons, graying chest hairs-so businessmen talk trash instead. At a distance they sound like this: Blat blot blat blotta grow blot blatta piece of work.