R E C E N T L Y Men: Fair game for banal feminist office humor (12/23/98) Out with self-esteem tutorials, in with standardized tests! (12/16/98) Corporate America needs bosses, not "non-hierarchical management" (12/09/98) More darts at Foucault's scrawny haunches (12/02/98) Ken Starr's strange sexual persona (11/25/98) ___________________ Love Camille Paglia? Pick up her books at barnesandnoble.com ___________________ A L S O About Camille Paglia Ask Camille archives - - - - - - - - - - C O L U M N I S T S Sexpert Opinion By Susie Bright Bring on the full Monty! (12/11/98) The Reluctant Capitalist By Heather Chaplin Money talks (12/18/98) Left Hook By Joe Conason Why Lott and Barr hate Clinton (12/22/98) Unspun By Steve Erickson Let the culture war rage (01/06/99) Right On! By David Horowitz How "low" crimes and misdemeanors become "high" (12/21/98) Mr. Blue By Garrison Keillor Should I wait for my lovable Silicon Valley engineer who's so afraid of the M-word? (01/05/99) Word by Word By Anne Lamott The last waltz (12/23/98) Media Circus By Susan Lehman Out's liquid lunch, Lolita vs. Humbert and other marvels of media madness (12/24/98) On Television By Joyce Millman Smits walks, "Felicity" stalks, Sammo rocks (12/21/98) Under the Covers By James Poniewozik The world is ending -- let's get to know our neighbors! (01/05/99) Let's Get This Straight By Scott Rosenberg Yes, there is a better search engine. While the portal sites fiddle, Google catches fire (12/21/98) Home Movies By Charles Taylor Family matters (12/14/98) Second Thoughts By Sallie Tisdale Rolling out the years (12/17/98) Salon Columnists - - - - - - - - - -

A S K_C A M I L L E +|+ C A M I L L E+P A G L I A | PAGE 2 OF 2 --- Online advice for the culturally disgruntled --- Dear Camille: I am a 32-year-old, white, college-educated female. Whenever I happen to hear a tape recording of my speaking voice, I'm horrified by what sounds like a lazy, inarticulate, mumbling "Valley girl"-type dialect. Over the past 10 years, I have been trying to get rid of these annoying speech patterns, many of which I acquired in college. I've asked my best friend to charge me a dollar every time I use the word "like" in a context in which it means anything besides "similar to" (like, you know what I mean?). Is there anything else I can do? Speech therapy? Elocution lessons? Is there an acceptable "educated" American dialect out there, and who's speaking it? I admire the way Katie Couric speaks, for example. I've also heard that she took speech lessons to make herself sound less juvenile. With all the fussing about Ebonics and bilingual education, I think that my "Generation X" has done more to destroy and corrupt the English language than any dialect- or foreign-language speakers ever could. Lisa Moscatiello Dear Ms. Moscatiello: Thank you for raising this point, which I addressed in passing in my lecture last November on education reform at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. In the immigrant era, public schools offered speech classes to prepare working-class students for the career ladder of American life. Fascinating textbooks from that period can still be found, battered and neglected, in many public libraries. They contain wonderful hints for analyzing and correcting speech habits -- by reading aloud before a mirror, for example, with a wooden kitchen match held between one's teeth. There are ancient precedents: The great Greek orator Demosthenes cured his stutter by practicing on the shore with pebbles in his mouth. I began to explore this topic when I suddenly had to appear on radio and television after my first book was published. The speed and stridency of my natural speech border on the pathological. At an early booking on "The Dick Cavett Show," for example, I was like a wild animal -- and I'm not kidding! The situation is fairly manageable now, but I do regress when too relaxed or inattentive. An authentic affirmative action would focus on primary education: Inner-city minority youth urgently need mainstream elocution and rhetoric classes, courses in banking, investment and small-business management and skills-based programs of vocational training as an alternative to watered-down college prep. People from ethnic families often speak two forms of English: Many African-Americans revert to rural Southern dialect en famille, just as my sister and I switch to what we call "Italo-English" when conversing with older relatives -- an emphatic, syntactically blocky discourse studded with punchy concrete nouns. I lapse into it in pizzerias, Italian delis and even auto repair shops, where Italians seem to recognize each other instantly. You correctly lament the horrid slackness and blandness of current American speech. Young people have nothing but mall princesses and ersatz rap masters to model themselves on. Colorful regional accents have been bred out of Caucasian television personalities, who look and sound increasingly generic. If women hope to break through the glass ceiling, they should rethink their voices as instruments of authority. A conservative cultural commissar like William Bennett, for example, gets intellectually overestimated because of his rumbling baritone, a hormonal accident. Women, with their piping chirp, can sound merely perky. In England, social class and educational background determine one's accent and often one's fate. In the United States, homogenized by popular culture, we enjoy more possibility and wider choice. Women must decide what persona they want to project -- from a continuum that currently extends from the fey, flirty girliness of Ally McBeal to the barking bite of irascible Betty Friedan. There surely is a happy medium between those extremes, but we haven't found it yet. SALON | Jan. 6, 1999 Are you guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors? Ask Camille. Bookmark http://www.salonmagazine.com/col/pagl/ - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Become a Salon member. Click here.