Word: singsong
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...with a TelePrompTer before an audience of close aides, and even took a rare afternoon nap on the day of delivery to avoid any signs of fatigue. As a result, he looked more rested and relaxed than in some weeks, and he was able carefully to moderate his singsong Southern cadence and stop stepping on his punch lines. In rehearsal the speech had taken barely 30 minutes to deliver; before national television it spun on for 47 minutes- primarily because he was interrupted with applause 43 times...
...Singsong Effect. Northerners were startled when Carter referred in his acceptance speech at New York's Madison Square Garden to "Eye-talians." Some Eye-talians might have been ruffled, but a number of Georgians and other Southerners did not even blink. Why should they, in a region where a porch is a "pye-azzuh" and the capital of Austria-as well as a Georgia town by the same name-is "Vy-anna"? Vienna, Ga., incidentally, is the home town of Carter's press secretary, Jody Powell (see THE PRESS). Campaign Director Hamilton Jordan-or, as it is pronounced...
Thus Carter routinely modulates his pitch, employing a delicate rising and falling of his voice that results in an almost singsong effect. Another Gulf coastal plain element: he drops what linguists call postvocalic rs in such words as go-phuh (gopher) and Cot-tuh. According to Pederson, however, the younger generation of Gulf coastal plains people, who have been exposed to accentless network television and modern speech courses, pronounce...
...specials. Song of Myself (CBS, Tuesday, 10 p.m. E.S.T.) offers a sketchy biography of Walt Whitman, which is really an excuse to hear a well-selected anthology of his poetry. Poetry in any form is rare on commercial television, and just hearing Whitman well read in a Carl Sandburg singsong by Rip Torn is reason enough for gratitude. But Jan Hartman's script confronts Whitman's homosexuality with good bluntness, and Torn, a gutsy actor who has long deserved better of his trade than he usually receives, plays the populist bard instead of embalming him. There is something...
...setting on Riverside Drive, and the water of the reservoir reflected a burning wick. The radiator near which I sat hissed and hummed: "Dust, dust, dust." The singsong penetrated my bones together with the warmth. It repeated a truth as old as the world, as profound as sleep...