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Crappy Boston accents

D

DrPicky

Guest
There are a few ads running now with horrible attempts at a Boston accent. One is for a Tony Bennett concert at the Conventon Center. Some guy plays Paul Revere. Obviously recorded in Chicago or somewhere where the only thing they know about Boston is Paul Revere's Midnight ride. The accent sucks.

Even worse is the Bank of America ad where a "real Bostonian" explains to some out-of-town guy that it's a green monster at Fenway, not a blue one. Besides being a stupid ad, the accent is laughbable. Who does the agency think they're fooling?

Home Depot also pulls this a lot as well. We had a Beringer Wine ad where a "Bostonian" guy told you they way to get to Napa from here is to see Pete the "butcha." They also had other spots in rotation where the same guy did a Chicago accent and a Florida accent. The guy was no Robin Williams when it came to accents and the spots were completely lame.

There was another one last year: a national job-recruitment spot they localized for boston.com that had a guy saying he was interviewing for a job ten miles east of the airport. Not only was the woman's attempt at a Kennedy-esque Brahmin Boston accent waaay off the mark, they clearly never looked at a map. A job ten miles east of the airport would be on a fishing trawler.
 
>>A job ten miles east of the airport would be on a fishing trawler.

Ha! How about these blunders: one commercial for an Ira dealership said to go to "I-28". I don't
know whether they meant State Route 128 or State Route 28...I-28 is nowhere near here.

Previous ads:
Peabody="Pih_biddy" (PEA-biddy, maybe)
Worcester= "Worrcesster" (Wiss-tah)

And for people who claim that the proper local pronunciation for Medford is Meffa, are you
sure...? I thought it was "MED-fidd"

Anyone familiar with MASH, is David Ogden Stiers' Boston accent accurate? His character name
oozes Boston: Charles Emerson Winchester....but is that accent correct?

Good point about "ten miles east of the airport"...those were done by Dick Orkin's Radio Ranch
and the same script runs in about 100 places ("HelpWantedBoston.com" becomes "HelpWantedNorthCountry.com" in Northern New England)

Inaccuracies in songs (they're from Britain and maybe unfamiliar with our territory)
Kim Wilde "Kids in America":
"New York to East California, there's a new day coming..." East California?

Paper Lace, "The Night Chicago Died":
"Daddy was a cop on the East side of Chicago"
Well, maybe there is a small bit of Chicago east of Michigan Ave, but wouldn't that be...Lake Michigan?

(and this has nothing to do with places but someone tell Bono that MLKing was shot in the evening,
not "early morning, April 4" in "In the name of Love")
 
A year or so ago there was a Home Depot ad announcing their new locations in Hanover and "Day-dum.."
 
Dublin is 6 hours ahead of us, and I am assuming it was that way on April 5 1968 at 12:02 am Dublin time, which would have been 6:02 in Memphis where and when the good Dr. King was shot.
 
true, but the song said "Early morning, April _4_..." and the full lyric is "early morning April 4,
shot rings out in the Memphis sky"...
if you go to Memphis check out the Civil Rights museum at the Lorraine motel btw...interesting and sobering.
 
THANK YOU! Was wondering why Boston accents all sound like Brooklyn or bad Sopranos rip off? It's been driving me crazy!
 
raccoonradio said:
Ha! How about these blunders:
Click to expand...

I've heard what seems like a million of 'em over the years...

raccoonradio said:
Previous ads:
Peabody="Pih_biddy" (PEA-biddy, maybe)
Worcester= "Worrcesster" (Wiss-tah)
Click to expand...

I've also heard WOR-ches-ter. There's someone running around Worcester with "WUSTA" on their license plate...probably the closest pronunciation to the way the natives say it. The owner of Diamond Chevrolet (can't recall his name at the moment) always pronounced it "WIS-ter" on his ads.

raccoonradio said:
And for people who claim that the proper local pronunciation for Medford is Meffa, are you
sure...? I thought it was "MED-fidd"
Click to expand...

Living one town to the north (excuse me, "nath"), I've heard it both ways, but "MEF-fa" seems to win out.

raccoonradio said:
Anyone familiar with MASH, is David Ogden Stiers' Boston accent accurate? His character name
oozes Boston: Charles Emerson Winchester....but is that accent correct?
Click to expand...

From what little I remember of the way some other famous Boston Brahmins talked (Leverett Saltonstall, among others), Stiers' accent was pretty damn accurate.

raccoonradio said:
Paper Lace, "The Night Chicago Died":
"Daddy was a cop on the East side of Chicago"
Well, maybe there is a small bit of Chicago east of Michigan Ave, but wouldn't that be...Lake Michigan?
Click to expand...

There is, in fact an "east side of Chicago" that not in the lake: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Side,_Chicago
 
Someone did tell Bono because I saw them on the Unforgettable Fire tour in Philadelphia in the spring of 1985 and he sang, "Early evening, April 4" when they sang Pride. I noticed because the morning/evening thing bugged me too. It was at the old Spectrum. I even saw the Rocky Balboa statue before the show.
 
Don't forget it is QUIN-C not QUINT-SEA. Also, it is HAVER-RILL not HAVER-HILL.

As to distortions that stick. The now defunct department store was always know as FILL-ENE'S not FILE-LENE'S until some New York or non Boston ad agency got a hold of the name.

The brothers that founded the store as well as the Credit Union movement in Massachusetts at the turn of the last century were known as Edward A. and Lincoln Filene [ FILL- ENE not FILE-ENE].
Some research shows that there were a German Jewish family that changed its name from the original "Katz" to the Anglo-zoological translation of the family name to "Filene" as in feline.

And so it goes....
 
A big part of the Boston accent is the accompanying bad grammar, for example, "So didn't I", "I could care less", and others. It's also characterized by the mispronunciation of words; drawer is pronunced "draw", words ending in "ing" are pronounced without the "g". Therefore Curt Schilling is pronounced Curt Schillin'. Number is pronounced "nember", Et cetera is pronounced ECK cetera.

I think "so didn't I' and its derivatives( so aren't I, so didn't they, so won't he) are the most annoying.
 
Some years ago, I recall a DJ who was brought in from Detroit saying something like: "A line of showers is expected to come through the areas of Brockton, Taunton, and other communities down in the South End of Boston..."
 
Don't remember the culprit, but there was a TV ad several years ago that mentioned a new location in the "Nattick Mall."
 
A very simple one: here pronounced he-ya. Two extremely successful people in this market do it and it is just so dumb-bastard sounding, you have to wonder why they can't hear it?
 
Maybe the stations should stop hiring "talent" with crappy Boston accents.

Back when Boston was a respected top 10 market, the top stations would never hire anyone with a Boston accent. It was unprofessional. The real WEEI (CBS O & O) and WBZ sounded great, some of the best real talent in the country. The greatest compliment was when nobody could tell where you were from by listening.

It has all gone down the crappa. Low standards have brought this market down to the point of nothing but local sounding yocals.....
 
70sdj said:
Back when Boston was a respected top 10 market, the top stations would never hire anyone with a Boston accent. It was unprofessional. The real WEEI (CBS O & O) and WBZ sounded great, some of the best real talent in the country. The greatest compliment was when nobody could tell where you were from by listening.
Click to expand...

you mean like Don Kent, who it was a pleasure to listen to the other night? "Good mawning everybody!" Or Paul Sullivan, who has a bit of a Mass Accent? Or Eddie Andelman and Jim McCarthy, who weren't regular hosts but certainly had pronounced accents. Frankly, I don't mind it.
 
>>There is, in fact an "east side of Chicago" that not in the lake

that's why I didn't say it was definite that the "east side" didn't exist, but some have said that Paper
Lace was being wrong. Maybe in the downtown area there isn't much east of Michigan Ave but there
is, further down south. And I have been on the east side if you count (I think it has since moved)
Buddy Guy's Checkboard Lounge (visited in either '97 or '98) at 423 E. 43rd St. I saw blues artist
John Primer there on a Monday night, just after attending a White Sox game.

Although the Wikipedia article defines the "East Side" as being considerably more south than 43rd st...
 
I grew up as a suburban Boston kid - so my accent was never really heavy.
In anything that goes on the air, I pay extra attention to keeping my accent neutral.
Put me in an unguarded situation, with a few drinks in me, it starts to reappear... ;D
 
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