churning each syllable around in his mouth as though he were whipping cream.
My father retreated and, for lack of a better option, put his client on the stand.
“How many beers did you have?” the state’s attorney asked.
“Nine,” my father’s client replied.
The judge banged the gavel, a woodpecker drilling bark.
“Case dismissed! That’s the only person who’s told the truth in this courtroom all day long.”
My father spun the tale beguilingly, transforming Wilmington into a low-stakes Maycomb, bandying between voices as though he were keeping rhythm for a crowd shucking corn. Now, after two decades in North Carolina, he sounded more or less like a southerner—an affectation, or an adaptation, that troubled my mother’s conscience. “Your father’s a chameleon,” she would say, upon hearing him drop a g or leave an o hanging open like a garden gate. Changing the way you spoke, or simply permitting it to be changed by circumstance, constituted, in her view, a moral failing. It was weird, like wearing someone else’s socks.
Her prejudice was an ancient one. To assume a foreign voice is to arrogate supernatural powers. In Greece, oracles prophesied fates and gastromancers channeled the dead, summoning monologues from deep within their bellies. In Hindu mythology, akashvani—“sky voices”—conducted messages from the gods. The book of Acts describes the visitation of the Holy Spirit as an effusion of chatter: “And suddenly there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. And divided tongues as of fire appeared to them and rested on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance.”
In Paul’s first letter, he tries to discourage the Corinthians from speaking in tongues, saying that it’s better to speak five intelligible words than ten thousand in a language no one can understand. (In 2006, a study of the effects of glossolalia on the brain showed decreased activity in speakers’ frontal lobes and language centers. “The amazing thing was how the images supported people’s interpretation of what was happening,” the doctor who led the study said. “The way they describe it, and what they believe, is that God is talking through them.”) Muzzling charismatics, the early church established itself as the exclusive font of marvelous voices. By the Middle Ages, the ventriloquist was considered the mouthpiece of the devil. Like my father, he inspired fears of fraudulence. A sound-shifter, speaking from the stomach, not the heart, he might forget who he was.
Still, my parents schooled us in southern etiquette as well as they could, figuring that my brother and I had to grow where they had planted us. We said “Yes, sir” and “Yes, ma’am” to adults, even the ones who’d conceived us. My mother suppressed her cringes when the hairdresser called me Miss Priss. But she was proud of her northern upbringing and her Quaker education: she wasn’t going to say that stuff herself. When my father traded “you guys” for “y’all,” she saw an impersonator—a man with a puppet on his knee.
In 1954 Alan Ross, a professor of linguistics at Birmingham University, published a paper entitled “Upper Class English Usage” in the Bulletin de la Societé Neophilologique de Helsinki—a Finnish linguistics journal, borrowing prestige from French. In it, he cataloged U (upper-class) and non-U (middle-class) vocabularies, a taxonomy that Nancy Mitford went on to popularize in her essay “The English Aristocracy,” asserting, “It is solely by their language nowadays that the upper classes are distinguished.” U speakers pronounced handkerchief so that the final syllable rhymed with “stiff”; non-U speakers rhymed it with “beed” or “weave.” The former might “bike” to someone’s “house” for “luncheon,” dining on “vegetables” and “pudding”; the latter would “cycle” to a “home” for a “dinner” of “greens” and a “sweet.” Mitford elaborated on Ross’s findings, playing expert witness to his court reporter. “Silence is the only possible U-response to many embarrassing modern situations: the ejaculation of ‘cheers’ before drinking, for example, or ‘it was so nice seeing you,’ after saying goodbye,” she wrote. “In silence, too, one must endure the use of the Christian name by comparative strangers and the horror of being introduced by Christian name and surname without any prefix. This unspeakable usage sometimes occurs in letters—Dear XX—which, in silence, are quickly torn up, by me.”
Wilmington had its own codes. Visitors were “company,” a two-syllable word. Coupon was pronounced “cuepon”; the emphases in umbrella and ambulance were “UM-brella” and “ambu-LANCE.” You “mowed the lawn,” but you didn’t “cut the grass.” On a summer night, it was inadmissible to say you were going to “barbecue” or “grill”; you had to “cook out.” A noun rather than a verb, barbecue was reserved for what most people would call—I can hardly write it now—“pulled pork.”
Scientists say that in order to speak a language like a native, you must learn it before puberty. Henry Kissinger, who arrived in America from Bavaria, via London, at the age of fifteen, has an accent that a reporter once described as “as thick as potato chowder.” His brother, two years younger, sounds like apple pie. My brother and I had spoken Southern from an early age. But as the offspring of Yankees, our peers reminded us, we existed on a sort of probation, forever obliged to prove ourselves in their ears. We endured as much teasing for the way our mother pronounced tournament—the first syllable rhyming with “whore,” not “her”—as we did when my father, in a cowboy phase, broke both arms riding an Appaloosa, generating speculation during his convalescence as to who had wiped his ass.
BEFORE I WENT TO BED, my father and I would read. A scratch-and-sniff book was one of my favorite portals to sleep. I’d run a fingernail over a blackberry and find myself in a bramble, juice trickling down my chin. Turn a page, and my bedroom was a pizzeria, reeking of oregano and grease.
One night, as we inhaled, an unusual look wafted over my father’s face. He asked me if he could take the book in to work with him the next morning. Sure, I said.
When his car rumbled into the driveway that evening, I flew down the stairs. I was waiting at the door when he came in the house with his jacket creased over his elbow, the sure sign of a win.
That afternoon, he said, he’d tried the case of a client who’d been charged with possession of marijuana. An officer had pulled him over, searched his car, and confiscated several ounces of an herbaceous green substance.
The only weakness in the prosecution’s case was that the officer had failed to send the contraband off to the state crime lab for analysis. When he testified, my father had asked him to identify a sample of the substance.
“It’s marijuana,” the officer said.
“How do you know it’s marijuana?”
“It looks like marijuana, it smells like marijuana. It’s marijuana,” the officer replied.
My father handed him my scratch-’n’-sniff book, open to a page that showed a rose in bloom.
“What does it look like?”
“A rose.”
“What does it smell like?”
“A rose.”
“Is it a rose?”
Juliet swore that a rose by another name would smell equally sweet. My father, by luring the officer into a converse fallacy—if marijuana, then herbaceous and green; herbaceous and green, therefore marijuana—was arguing that a “rose” wasn’t always a rose. Both of them were getting at something about the fallibility of language. The great design flaw of human communication is the discrepancy between things and words.
Proper names, uniquely, work. Each one corresponds to a single object, meaning that if you say “Napoleon Bonaparte Barefoot,” you’re referring to a specific man, not to a set of people who share Napoleon Bonaparte Barefoot’s characteristics. But words are basically memory aids, and if every particular thing had to have a unique name,