Whaddya mean it's his voice? He's upgraded the da with the by now, hasn't he? And hasn't he replaced the r's he's been dropping all these years --well, a few of them, anyway: "This is the first house we evuh owned. We have a gahden an my wife is the gahdneh..."

...here in Bayside...

The same day, in the little exotic knickknacks boutique on the ground floor of Henri Bendel, on Fifty-seventh Street just west of Fifth: a nice New York girl home from St. Timothy's, St. Tim's, the boarding school in Maryland. She and a girlfriend of hers are walking around town checking boys, among other things. It's true! They can tell just by looking at him whether a boy goes to an eastern prep school or not. Not only that, they can tell which prep school, usually St. Paul's or Hotchkiss or Groton or Exteter or Andover, or whatever; just by checking his hair and his clothes. And certainly if they can just get one sentence out of him--

--like this gorgeous boy here, a tall milk-fed stud in a Brooks yellow shirt and tasseled loafers fumbling over a Cameroons egret-skin hassock with his tweedy-thatchy Prince Charles hanging over his brow and --He's Exeter, or possibly Andover. This is obvious immediately from the tie. His tie is tied properly at the throat, but the ends are slung over his left shoulder, after the fashion. And their eyes meet, and then his eyes shift to her shoes, naturally, and then he looks into her eyes again, into her soul, as it were and says:

"Those are real Guccis, aren't they?"

Bliss! It's all there! Past, present, future! Certified! The Guccis, of course, being her loafers, bought at Gucci's, 699 Fifth Avenue, with the authentic Gucci gold chain across the tongue and not any of the countless imitations of the Gucci loafer. A shorthand! A very metonymy! For the whole Eastern boarding-school thing, but more than that --the honk! He has it, the Eastern boy's boarding-school honk, lifting every vowel -- Those are real Guccis, aren't they?-- up over the roof of his palate and sticking them into his nose and honking them out without moving his lower jaw. And there in one sentence he has said it all, announced that he belongs in the world of the New York honks, of the honks who rule and posses all and who every day sound the secret honk of New York wealth and position; the nasal knighthood of the Bobby Kennedy's, the Robert Doweling, Hunting ton Hartford's, Nelson Rockerfellers, Thomas Having, Averrell Harrimans --for in New York the world is sherry but secretly divided into the honks and the wonks* -- Dja do da chem-yet?--and this fumbling milk-fed Exteter stud will carry a C-plus straight to Wall Street or mid-Manhattan, for he is one of us, you understand--

(*Honk is a term of Eastern prep-school derivation, connoting both the nasal quality of the upper-class voice and its presumably authoritative sound, commanding obedience, like the horn of a large 1936 Packard. It is not to be confused with "honkie," the black slang word for "white man," which is apparently a variation on a still older slang word, "hunky," originally a term of opprobrium for Hungarian immigrants to the U.S. "Wonk" is an Eastern prep-school term referring to all those who do not have the "honk" voice, i.e. all who are non-aristocratic. There is some conjecture that the term is derived in the natural Anglophile bias of Eastern social life from the English adjective "wonky," meaning unsteady, shaky, feeble, awry, off. In current use, however, "wonk" is a vague, all-inclusive term, closely akin to the terms "wog" and "wop," which are sometime used at Eastern prep-schools to refer to the rest of humanity.)

Very ironic --the way New Yorkers at every class level delighted for years in My Fair Lady on stage and screen. My Fair Lady, of course, is the musical version of Shaw's Pygmalion, about a linguistics professor, Henry Higgins, turning a Cockney flower seller into a lady of Society by upgrading her accent. That silly, stuffy English class system! --whereupon we all settled back and enjoyed the Cinderella love story. It was just as well. It is probably a good thing that no Henry Higgins has come along to wake up New York to the phonetic truth about class and status in this city...

I have been talking to a man who could do it if he chose to, however --Professor Marshall D. Berger of C.C.N.Y. Berger is one of the country's leading geographical linguists, one of those extraordinary people, like Henry Lee Smith of the old radio days, who can listen to a man for thirty seconds and tell what part of the state he was raised in. Berger is a big husky man. He is fifty-five years old nd has lived in New York since he was thirteen. His family moved from Buffalo to Liberty Avenue in the East New York section of Brooklyn, where the kids all thought it was odd to the point of weird that he said things like core-respondence instead of cah-respondence and referred to the well-known game of go'f as gawlf. He wrote an honors thesis at C.C.N.Y. in 1941 on "The Sources of New York Speech," and then a doctoral dissertation at  Columbia on "American-English Pronunciation of Russian-born Immigrants". And so for the three decades he has been doomed by his own specialty to listen, day in and day out, to New Yorkers unconsciously confessing their ancestry, their status, their social yearnings, every time they open their struggling lips.

"This is a very sensitive area you're asking me about," he tells me. "The first thing you'll notice is that people in New York always invent euphemisms when they get on the subject of speech. They don't want to talk about ethnic background or class. So they invent euphemisms. They talk about a 'Brooklyn' accent or a 'Bronx' accent, when what they're talking about are working-class and lower-middle-class accents found all over the city. Years ago, when Brooklyn was still a bog farm, they talked about the 'Bowery' accent.

Berger's own voice sounds to me like Radio Announcer Rugged, if you know the sound. In any case--

"Even the newspapers, at this late date, observe the taboo. I remember the Post's biographical sketch of a local college president. 'His speech betrays his Bronx origins,' they wrote. They were talking about 'lower class' and I suppose the readers get the point, but everyone observes the taboo.

"The same goes for 'New York accent'. Nothing pleases most New Yorkers more than to be told that they 'lost their New York accent.' This is ironic, on the face of it, since New York is one of the great cosmopolitan centers of the world. But what they're thinking about, of course, is class. 'I've lost my lower-class accent,' they're thinking. Incidentally, people who tell you 'I've lost this or that accent' or 'I really don't have any accent any more' are almost invariably fooling themselves. What they've done in most cases is change a couple of obvious vowels or consonants --they may have changed their pronunciation of example from ex-EHM-ple, which is lower class or lower middle class, to ex-AM-ple, or something of the sort --but they've seldom changed their basic pattern. Even broadcasters."

The glorious New York accent!
In 'is town deh's nuh-uhn doin at da foist of da week, so I was lookin at a likka avatisement an I bought a bah-uhl an relaxed.

All this glorious dropping of r's and g's and d's and muffling of the "voiceless linguadental fricative" (turning the th sound into d)

[note from Matthews: that is an error, by the way. English has two /th/ sounds: voiced and unvoiced --or 'voiceless', as Wolfe calls it.  Here, Wolfe means "voiced," not "voiceless" --i.e. the /th/ in "these" is "voiced" and is the sound that becomes /d/. The "voiceless" /th/ in "three" usually becomes /t/ in New York speech.]

and reducing vowels until they almost disappear --the usual explanation has been the waves of immigrants to New York in the 1890's and early 1900's. New York, of course, had had waves of immigrants before. But they were chiefly northern Europeans, Irish, German, Dutch, English, and they were middle as well as lower class. The new immigrants were chiefly from Eastern and Southern Europe and they were lower class: Italians, Ukrainians, Poles, Russians, greeks, Eastern European Jews, speaking Italian, Greek, Yiddish, Russian, and other Slavic tongues. Part of the "New York accent" that developed was a blend of the new speech patterns with English words.

For example, of the new tongues, only Greek has the th sound. The result was millions of New Yorkers saying wid for with and dis for this. Or: in Yiddish a t in the middle of a word, like winter, was pronounced much more emphatically than it is in English. To this day, the New Yorker who says win-ta or fundamen-tal is usually someone from a home where Yiddish was spoken. Likewise, the heavily accented g, as in sin-ga for singer and Lon Gyland  for  Long Island. Other innovations were in rhythm. Some of the most flamboyant came from Southern Italian and Sicilian lower-class speech, with the old ... So I says to my brudd'n'law, "Awriiide, so whaddya wan me to do, I says to him, whaddya whaddya  or sump'm?"

There were all foreign flavors coming into New York English, but many of the elements of the 'New York accent" had been here for years before the 1890 wave of immigrants; notably, such things as dis for this  and foist  for first. Berger's theory hits on a far more subtle point. Namely, street masculinity. Here were millions of working-class people massed into lower Manhattan, and their sons fell into the street life. On the street, the big thing was physical competition, even if it was only stickball or, today, rock'em games of basketball on a concrete slab shooting for a basket with a metal backboard and a rim with no net on it ... In any case, the emphasis was always on the large muscles.

For a start, the street thing led to rapid speech in which words are swallowed whole, r's are dropped, vowels are reduced to the vanishing point, and even some hard consonants disappear. A three-syllable word like memory gets reduced to one and a half or less: m'm'r. Bottle becomes bah-uhl, little becomes lih-uhl.  A pronunciation like lih-uhl  is what is known as a glottal stop, in which the double t is replaced by what is in fact a miniature cough. It is common in New York City, although in England, among the lower classes, the glottal stop sometimes replaces p's and k's as well as t's. Street masculinity has also led New Yorkers to carry their tongues low in their mouths like dockworkers forearms.[??? oh, brother!] The result is some heavy handling of many consonants: t's and d's get dropped or mushed around. Most people's speech patterns are set between the ages of five and fifteen, and they are not likely to revamp them in any thorough way after that without something on the order of dramatic training. Often not even that will do it. A boy growing up on the street may unconsciously scorn the kind of delicate muscle play an upper-class boy learns in articulating words. The fancy work with the tip of the tongue in pronouncing portraiture, for example, may strike him as effete, even girlish. It seems to me that when it comes to prep-school  honks like Averell Harriman, or Thomas Hoving --well, it doesn't matter how many worlds they have conquered or how old they are. As soon as they open their mouths, a bell goes off in the brains of most local-bred New York males: sissy. Here are a coupla kids who woulda got mashed in the street life. John Lindsay (St. Paul's) suffered continually from this disability when he was mayor of New York; also Bobby kennedy (Milton Academy). Kennedy took the edge off his Bugs Bunny delicacy with public displays of masculinity of various sorts.

Women generally try much  harder than men in New York to escape from the rock-bottom working-class accents, but they are often unaware of where the true ... honk-wonk divide lies. They tug and pull on their accents, but often only get them into a form that the upper orders can laugh at in musical comedies. There is the musical-comedy working girl, for example, who is always saying, Oh, Mr. Steiiiiiiin, I had such a foiiiiin toiiiiime, pronouncing the i as if she has wrapped it around a perfume bottle. In real life, she is not a lower-class girl at all, but lower middle class.

The lower-middle-class girl who says toiiiime, may also be aware, instinctively, that the muscle-bound tongue accounts for much of the lower-class sound. So she begins using her tongue in a vigorous way in pronouncing all sorts of things --only she overdoes it. She shoves her words all over the place but doesn't hit them cleanly. This is the common phenomenon of the beautiful girl --"but she ruined it as soon as she opened her mouth." Here she is with her Twiggy eyes, Eve Nelson curly look, a wool jersey mini from Plymouth's, patent-leather pseduo-Guccis from A.S. Beck --and a huge rosy lingual blob rolling around between her orthodontic teeth.

The oi sound in toiiiime, by the way, is not to be confused with the so-called Brooklyn oi sound comedians always used to mimic: "Da oily boid gets da woim," "She read da New Yoik Woild," "She lives on Toity-toid Street." These are all examples of dropping r'sand substituting oi for the er sound. Today you are only likely to hear it from older working-class people, such as some of the older cb drivers. This is one lower-class sound that dates back well before 1890 and is not even a peculiarly New York pronunciation. The same sound --it is actually closer to ui than oi, more like fuist than foist-- can be heard today on two southern port cities, Charleston, S.C., and New Orleans, among both upper- and lower-class people. A century ago, upper-class New Yorkers used the same pronunciation, only with a slightly flutier intonation. About half a century ago upper-class New Yorkers began changing their pronunciation of first from a fluty fuist to a Boston or English fuhst.

This is all r-dropping, as I say, and it is one of ther most subtle and vital matters in phonetic social climbing in New York. This is where strivers get caught out. The New Yorker who has not risen above wid and exehmple and even toiiiime and aspires to true bourgeois status will next start to replace all the r's he or his family have been dropping all his life.

The first pahty I went to was in my senya yearr-- and so forth-- not realizing that in the upper orders he envies everybody is busy dropping r's like mad, in the ancient English mode.

Many New Yorkers have taken conscious pains to upgrade their accents socially and confidently believe that they now have the neutral accent of a "radio announcer". Three pronunciations almost invariably give them away: owies for always (lower-class l-dropping); fo'ud for forward (dropping the r and the w); frankfooters for frankfurters and footer moment for for the moment (lower-class r-dropping).

"The fact is," Berger tells me, "that a person who tries to change or or two elements in his speech pattern may wind up in worse shape than he thought he was in  to begin with. His original pattern may not be prestigious, but it may be very good in terms of its internal arrangements, and he may succeed only in upsetting the equilibrium. Frankly, I like to hear people like Vito Battista and Jimmy Breslin talk. They have working-class accents and they don't care who knows it They're very confident, that's the main thing. 'Dis is da way I tawk an dis is da way I'm gonna tawk, an you betta lissen.' A person's speech pattern is bound up with so many things, his personality, his role, his ambitions, that you can't deal with in isolation, or simply in terms of some 'ideal'."

Yes...but!... suppose your ideal is to get you daughter's picture on the first page of the Wedlock Section of the Sunday Times, and not in one of those scrimy little one-paragraphers at the bottom of the page, either --you know those little one-paragraphers, the ones hog-to-jowl up against the Arnold Constable ad with a little headlinette over the paragraph saying

Horlet-Klotkin

Suppose you're after the pole position, up at the top of the page, with a big three-column picture all downy silk with backlighting rising up behind her head like a choir of angels are back there singing and glowing, and a true headline proclaiming:

Satterthwaite-Klotkin
Betrothal Announced

One option is to do what Mrs. Bouvier did with her daughter Jacqueline. Namely, pack her off to a Virginia boarding school, whence she can return to New York bearing what the press chooses to call a "little girl voice" but which is known in the secret honk world as the "Southern 45-degree Upturn," in which your daughter turns her mouth up 45 degrees at either end, then her eyeballs, and says:

    Ah you rilly an ahkitect?
    Ah you rilly a docta?
    Ah you rilly senata?
And travel fuhst class forever after.
 

The British broad a has social cachet in New York. Quite the opposite, in fact. Unless it is being used by an Englishman, it is taken as striving for a naïve or Schrafft's Mid-Afternoon gentility. The great hangout of the American broad a used to be a vast L-shaped Schrafft's restaurant that had entrances on both Madison Avenue and East Fifty-eighth Street. The most genteel-looking matrons imaginable, dressed up in outfits such as three-piece peach wool suits with fur trim at the collars and cuffs and hats with enormous puffed up crowns of cream-colored velvet, over apricot-colored hair, used to gather in Schrafft's throughout the afternoon. Much of the conversation had to do with stock quotations.You would hear the ladies say to one another:

    "Ackshewly, I think Autoimatex is rahther pahst its peak."
    "Oh, I know. It opened higher this mawning, but ahfter hahlf an hour it was down by two."

Such a conversation indicated that they had spent the afternoon in the spectator seats of the midtown street-level offices of the brokerage houses, in the board rooms, as they are called. This does not indicate wealth and position. For one thing, the E.S.A. (Eastern Socially Attractive) way for woman to refer to her investments (if at all) is to make them seem as if they are way out there  somewhere and she hasn't the vaguest idea what happens to them. For another, the old parties who hang out in the spectator seats of the midtown brokerage houses are referred to by the brokerage employees as "board-room bums".

For still another, Schrafft's was not exactly the most prestigious place for a woman to eat. But eating at Schrafft's did have a certain secret beauty to it: the much underestimated beauty of American Comfort. The ladies' typical meal at Schrafft's was a cheeseburger, coffee, and a sundae. But such sundaes! Sundaes with towers of ice cream and nuts and sauces and fudge and maraschino cherries of a quality and buttery beauty such as the outside world has never dreamed of! And the secret art of the mid-afternoon at Schrafft's was pacing and the final shape. It was not enough merely to consume the sundae. No, the idea was to pace one's consumption along with everyone else's at the table, so that one did not finish up more than thirty seconds ahead of anyone else, and, furthermore, so that one's very last bite --the final shape-- would be a perfect miniature of the original cheeseburger or of the original sundae, with precisely the same proportions of hamburger, cheese, and bread, or of ice cream, whipped cream, sauce, nuts, and fruit dressing, as the cheeseburger or the sundae had at the outset when it was first served. And ... they were served so beautifully! The waitresses at Schrafft's, who seemed to be women who had immigrated from Europe as adults, were perhaps the most considerate and sensitive waitresses in the history of America. They understood, tacitly, from long observation, about the final shape and its importance. If a woman had eaten two thirds of her cheeseburger but had eaten it incorrectly, so that the bread and the hamburger were left in the form of a perfect final shape, as if there were a perfect mini-burger two inches in diameter on the plate, except that all the cheese was gone --she had only to ask for more cheese, and one of these waitresses, these angels, these nurses sent by Our Lady of Comfort, would take the cheeseburger, two thirds eaten, back to the kitchen and have a perfectly proportioned two-inch slab of cheese placed --but not merely placed--no! broiled! broiled onto the remains!-- and they would bring it back with a smile, as if to say, "There! We understand, you and I!"

    "Oh, I cahn't thank you enough, my dear!"

Now there, I submit, is Beauty. It is not, however, prestige.

The true social competitors among new York's older women gather earlier, about 1 p.m., for the Status Lunch, and the accents are quite different. The Status Lunch is a peculiarly New York institution in this country, although the same thing goes on in a less manic way in Paris and London. At the Status Lunch, women who have reached the upper social orders gather during the week so that they may demonstrate and celebrate their position. They be a the top through family background or marriage or other good fortune. In any case, they are mostly in their late thirties or in their forties or early fifties, starving themselves to near perfection to near perfection in order to retain ... the look... with just a few piano wires showing in their necks and forearms and the backs of their hands, owing to the deterioration of the body packing. Or perhaps they have begun to let themselves go into that glorious creamy Camembert look in which the flesh on the shoulders and the shoulders and the upper back and the backs of their arms looks like it could be shaped with a butter knife. They are Puccid and Gucci'd up to their temporal fossae, Pucci in the dress, Gucci in the shoes and handbag --the Pucci-Gucci girls!-- yes. They start pulling into Status Lunch restaurants in the East and West Fifties, such as La Grenouille, Lutèce, Orsini's, about 1 p.m. and make a great point of calling the maître d' by his first name, which at La Grenouille is Paul, then peer into that ocher golden mirrored gloom to case the important tables, which are along the walls in the front room, by way of weighing the social weight of today's gathering-- near perfection!-- and begin the entrance, looking straight ahead, as if they couldn't be more oblivious of who else is there, bu waiting, hopefully, for the voice--

    Dah-ling dah-ling dah-ling.

There it is! --the dah-ling voice, a languid weak baritone, not a man's voice, you understand, but a woman's, The New York Social Baritone, like that of a forty-eight-year-old male dwarf who just woke up after smoking three packs of Camels the day before, and then the social kisses, right out in the middle of the restaurant, with everybody locking heads,wincing slightly from the concentration on not actually pressing the lips, which would smudge the lipstick, or maybe even the poweder covering the electrolysis lines above the lips, with the Social Baritione dah-ling voices beginning to bray softly in each other's ears, like an ensemble of cellos --we are all here! This voice cannot be achieved without some ten or fifteen years of smoking cigarettes and drinking whisky or gin, which literally smoke-cures and pickles the vocal cords and changes them from soprano to the golden richness of baritone. It takes,on the average, at least 13,000 cigarettes over a ten-year period. In pronunication, the dah-ling voice seeks to set itself off from boththe urgency (what's going to hit the fan nex?) of the lower-class female voice and the usual efficiency (most pronoiunce everything correctly) of the middle-class female voice with a langour and a nasal honk, connoting ease, leisure, insouciance. Two techniques are the most vital: dropping r's, as in dahling, and pronouncing most accented vowels with a sigh thrown in, particularly the a's and o's, as in --

Dahling, I caaaaan't [but not cahnt]. I just did the Mehhhht and, you know, the sets were stunnnnnning, Myron le Poove I think he is, but it was the most booooooring-sawt-of-thing --with the vowels coming out of the nose in gasps as if she is going to run out of gas at any moment.

And yet! She has worked on this voice for ten years, producing her deep rich pre-cancerous vocal cords, but it gives off the deadly odor: parvenu. The dahling voice, heard so often at Status Lunches and country weekends and dinner parties where two wine glasses are used, is almost invariably that of the striver who has come across the upper-class honk voice too late in life. She has picked up a number of key principles: the nasality, the languor, the oiliness, the r-dropping. But she does not understand the underlying principle, which is historical. Her attention is fixed upon New York, and as a result her voice takes on a New York theatrical manner, a staginess, in the Tallulah Bankhead mode, which is show-business upper class, not honk upper class. The certified honk upper-class woman in New York has her attention fixed, phonetically although unconsciously, on Boston and the Richmond-Charleston social axis of the South.

The secret here, as among New York male honks, is the boarding school. The outstanding girls' boarding school are oriented, socially, toward the nineteenth-century upper-class traditions of Boston and the South, which, until after World War I, had far more social clout than the upper-class world of New York. Miss Hall's, Miss Porter's, Westover, and Dana hall are all girls' boarding schools where  an old Boston upper-class tradition dominates, just as Foxcroft (Jackie Kennedy's school), Madeira, Chatham Hall, Garrison Forest, and St. Catherine's are still schools where the Richmond-Charleston tradition dominates. New York girls bring back the Boston or Southern sound in a somewhat crude form, but nevertheless it is not a New York sound. It is neither street sound nor a theatrical sound nor an English sound. Its components are nasality, languor, oiliness, r-dropping --but with shorter, clearer, more open vowels than the dahling voice. If the girl has gone to a Southern school, like Jackie Kennedy, she will tend to have a soft, childish voice. If she has gone to a "Boston" school, the speech will be much brisker and yet still languid and oily, as if lubricated ball bearings were pouring out of the both nostrils.

In the nineteenth century, the New York upper classes were much more directly influenced by Boston and the South. Boston overshadowed New York in many phases of business, finance, and law and was unquestionably New York's social superior in the area of Culture and the Arts. The New York upper classes had close ties with the Southern upper classes because of the shipping trade. Southern planters came to New York continually for financing, and packet boats loaded with cotton came to New York on the way to England. About 1940, linguists at C.C.N.Y. made recordings of the voices of old New Yorkers, people in their seventies and eighties, most of them upper-middle-class, in order to get an idea of what speech patterns were like in New York in the nineteenth century. They tended to speak in a medley of Boston and Southern accents. One old party reminisced about an old structure on Twenty-third Street as "the old struk-cha on Twenty-thuid Street," with struk-cha a combination of the clipped Boston accent of struk and the Boston r-dropping of cha; and Twenty-thuid a case of Southern-style upper-class r-dropping, substituting a diphthong vowel sound, ui, for the standard er  sound in third. Socially, New York was considered an exciting but crude town, and New York's upper classes felt the sense of inferiority and preferred to sound as if they came from some better spot. Even today some honks still use the Southern upper-calss pronunciation of thuid for third, although most have shiftd over the past half century to a more Bostonian thuhd. They still drop the r in any case.

Boys as well as girls, of course, learn the honk voice in prep school, and the same principle applies: the voice should suggest a languor that will separate one from the lower orders.  The lower jaw is moved much less than in ordinary speech and the words are lifted up over the palate and secreted through the nose rather than merely blurted out of the mouth. The rigidity of the jaw may resemble an affliction to a person who has never watched someone speak this way before. In fact, the E.S.A. accent that is often heard on the north shore of Long Island in communities such as Huntington and Oyster Bay is known as Locust Valley Lockjaw. The same voice is known in River dale as Spotted Bostonian. Socially ambitious people in River dale may even try to keep their voices up by spending their summers in the select vacation communities of the Boston upper orders on the Mine shore.

Honk  voices may fall anywhere in a range from Boston-Honk to New York-Honk. Leaning toward the Boston-Honk would be the late Bobby Kennedy (Milton Academy), Averell Harriman (Gorton), the late Christian Heartier (St. Paul's), and the late John F. Kennedy (Cheat). The worst liabilities of the honk voice to a politician, quite aside from the class overtones, are the monotony and the delicacy and weakness brought about by this sort of voice's emphasis on languor and refinement. Bobby Kennedy, like his brother John, had great difficulty in conventional oratory from a rostrum. His voiced as trained in delicacy rather than strength and tended to run shrill the very moment when the heavy chord should have ben hit. He always sounded like a seventeen-year-old valedictorian with the goslings. In the case of Harridan and Herter, it was the nerve-gas monotony of the honk voice that caused them trouble as much as anything else.

The perfect New York honk voice is Huntington Hartford's (St. Paul's). Other notable New York honks: Nelson Rockerfeller and the late Robert Dowling, the real-estate and investment tycoon. Their type of voice has the nasality of the honk voice without the delicacy of the same voice as practiced by Bobby Kennedy or even former New York major John Lindsay (St. Paul's). The explanation, most likely, is that both Rockerfeller and Dowling went to prep school in the city, Rockerfeller at the Lincoln School and Dowling at Cutler. Rockerfeller has gradually coarsened his voice for his public appearances. It is a kind of honk with a knish jammed in it, although he uses much more a conventional soft honk in private conversation. One of the ironies of the 1962 race for governor was that Rockerfeller's upper-class voice with a knish in it was so much more effective among Low Rent voters in New York than that of his upper-middle-class opponent, Robert Morgenthau. As a result of his time at Deerfield Academy, Morgenthau's had taken on a kind of honk subtlety and delicacy that made him, not Rockerfeller, sound like the Fauntleroy in the plot.

Lindsay tried to come down off the honk accent somewhat by inserting r's where they would ordinarily be dropped, making his speech sound almost middle-class at points. He also referred to St. Paul's as his "high school" from time to time, as if it were nothing more than a kind of Stuyvesant or DeWitt Clinton unaccountably set out in Concord, New Hampshire. This was a laugh and a half to all old "Paulies," who are generally fond of St. Paul's reputation as the most snobbish school in America.

Even Amy Vanderbilt tried to roughen up her female honk accent by adding middle-class r's, perhaps in an unconscious rub-off from the various bourgeois commercial interests with which she was involved. In general, the public spotlight tends to make honks nervous about their voices, whether they are politicians or performers or merely celebrities. Very few have the self-assurance to just keep pouring it on, the way Roosevelt did:

    I hate wooouugggggggghawwwwwwwwwwwgggggghhhhhhhh --meaning war.

Boys today at St. Paul's, Groton, Middlesex, Hotchkiss, Deerfield, St. mark's. St. George's, Exeter, Andover, and the rest of them are strangely goosy about it themselves. They are apparently hung up on the masculinity thing, as they might put it, rather preferring to have both the social certification of the languid, delicate honk and the ruggedness and virility of various street voices. The upshot has been that they have kept the honk voice but picked up the dope argot of Greenwich Village, the Lower East Side, and other lower-middle-class bohemias, studding the most improbable conversations with the inarticulate litany of "like-I-mean-you-know-man" Bugs Bunny Bobby Kennedy honk spew of lubricated BB's:

Laiike, nyew nyeoow, man, ai mean, Fisha's Island is a groove and a gas compaaaiiihed to Deeah Island and, like, now ai mean, Wildwood, Nyew Juhsey, is prackly a mind-blowaggh...

And the whole honk world sinks, wonking, into a vast gummy Welt-smeared nostalgia for the mud.