February 9, 2006
View Comments | Post CommentThe American Scafidi Dictionary
My Property professor, Susan Scafidi (and yes, that's her website), has a really unique accent. Although she sounds fairly normal most of the time, she pronounces certain words with a very strange accent that's almost like British, and then other times that's like New England.
 |
She starts every class with, "Welcome back to Property. When lost we spoke, we were discussing..."
And no, that wasn't a typo. That's how she says "last." Here's the American Scafidi Dictionary, so far. We'll keep adding Scafidiisms as we find it necessary.
bath - "bawth"
bathroom - "bawthroom"
can't - "con't"
example - "exomple"
got - "gwot"
half - "hoff"
last - "lost"
not - "nwot"
pass - "poss"
rather - "rother"
small - "smole"
talk - "twock"
vase - "vozz"
UPDATE: I asked her where her accent came from. Apparently, she was born in DC, and grew up in Rockville, MD. She said she didn't realize she has an accent, and that perhaps it is just a result of trying to project one's voice in front of a class. It clearly is not. She said it also could be familial, since her grandparents were not native speakers. This is plausible. Either way, it's quite unique, and quite funny.
Posted at February 9, 2006 4:04 PM | Comments (8)
Comments
Post a new comment
Twok is a pretty common one for mid-Atlantic, esp Baltimore (though it's probably more like tawk but said really quickly with the "a" dropped or compressed).
I think the rest are more New England or possibly class issues. I assume those sounds are more "ah" or "aw" sounding than "oh" sounding. Bush does the rah-ther thing as well (perhaps owing to time in Maine), and some are similar to other New England shifts. I heard that this used to be pretty lower class, but about the time of FDR it became a more common affectation signaling good WASP-ish upbringing.
Posted by: Robert Saunders at February 14, 2006 3:07 PM
Uh-oh.
Posted by: student at February 14, 2006 3:40 PM
David, your blog has become pretty popular. That was pretty funny with that professor but it looked like she took it well.
Posted by: Beau at February 15, 2006 6:22 PM
Yeah, I gave her a rose in class for forgiveness, and asked her to be my Valentine. She accepted.
Posted by: David Barzelay at February 16, 2006 2:11 AM
fucking awesome.
Posted by: Beau at February 16, 2006 10:54 AM
You should really help her out with her website to make it better. I think she mentioned she was going to talk to you about it when I came in that day...
-Z-
Posted by: Zeeshan at February 16, 2006 2:23 PM
I'm in Scafidi's Property class at Fordham...she's visiting here this year. Would you or anyone else here by any chance have an outline for her class?
Thanks,
Anthony
Posted by: Anthony Mascarenhas at October 14, 2006 6:12 PM
She didn't talk that way in grade school, and Rockville sounds nothing like Baltimore.
Posted by: Della at November 6, 2007 4:02 PM
