Paris, of, Appalachia (or How to Bet on Two Words and Lose)
The Paris of Appalachia is the barest Appalachia, the fairest Appalachia, which is to say the whitest, the lightest, like when someone asks you a question and you can't bear to speak the answer to the question so you stop breathing and you go all light and dizzy all over, all your vision goes bright and blank, all over the answer and the question. And in between these names, the letters “f” and “t” make a switch again and again, from “of” to -est. Tif is fit, and Taf is fat. That's the small-town tittle-tattle where words get pierced and threaded by all sorts of threats and treats, entreaties and treatments. And where did the “h” go but to the end:
Pittsburg h. Breathe out.
Whenever and however the sobriquet arrived, "Paris of Appalachia" has never been said just one way. There's Paris of Appalachia, then Paris of Appalachia. And then there's Parisii, Apalachee, and the “okay” hand double-dipping in a pocket square, names here but displaced.
The P76 bus will take you to city center from the suburb of North Versailles, and it will take you there by way of local language. The computerized voice that announces upcoming stops used to pronounce "North Versailles" like "North for Sales." It's on sale. We’ve set sail; a king’s gone missing. Don't sigh. On this bus, too, the final -s of “Paris” hisses out. Even when discussing the capital of France, the -s hooks on in American English. Robert Withington writes that although Americans are more likely than their British counterparts to attempt an “accurate” pronunciation of French place names, “it would seem affectation to refer to [the French capital] as 'paree.'" “Paris” comes to us by way of “Parisii,” the name of a Gaulish tribe whose capital occupied the same site. In Gallo-Latin and Late Latin, the -s was audible about town: Lutetia Parisorum and Parisii. As the French language changed over time, the final -s went ilent. Paris as said in Pittsburgh became an exonym—a name used for a place, but only by people outside of that place.
Of course, if the P76 can take you to city center, it could also go the other way. In France, Paris rhymes with the French noun un parie, a bet, connected to the verb parier, to place a bet, which sounds like Paris et ?—Paris and? There's a call, an expectation to work here in the fine pull of the rhyme. Paris et...? and Paris de...? Paris of...? Paris de... rhyming with je parie deux... I bet two, a pair, je parie une paire et… ? In this case, I bet a pair of words, Paris and Appalachia, on something called “of.” More on this, once language changes.
There's a school of thought that says you can identify a Parisian of Appalachia by asking them to talk about a swell British sweater, a fine pull-over. These Parisians will say something close to: “a faan puww,” the vowel of “fine” being “monophthongized” and the final sound of “pool” being “vocalized,” turned into a w-like sound. It's a shibboleth situation, to know who's true and who's like me, a liar.
I lied. There's no school of thought telling you to ask for a tight pull. Instead, they tell you to ask for an iron towel, or the down of a steel goose. The monophthongized vowel found in “fine” is associated with Pittsburgh's Black speakers, but Black speech is not quite “local speech” per local linguists. In their 2015 book, Pittsburgh Speech and Pittsburghese, Barbara Johnstone, Daniel Baumgardt, Maeve Eberhardt, and Scott Kiesling describe “Pittsburgh speech” and its commodified reduction, “Pittsburghese,” at length. Through extensive charts, interview samples, and theorization, the authors produce an object of study: a local variety of English in historical flux, shaped by European immigration and American industry. It's shaped by race, too, but the question of race is isolated in a chapter entitled “African American English in Pittsburgh.” While that chapter repeatedly has to name its population of focus, Black Pittsburghers, the chapters preceding and following have no such onus. Instead, the singular chapter on the speech of Black Pittsburghers clarifies linguistics’ enduring ideological commitments:
Sociolinguists believed that African Americans and other ethnic minorities were not affected by changes underway in white speech in the surrounding geographical region, and thus did not participate in sound changes occurring locally. (emphasis mine)
From white face east to white face west, a cacophony of sounds moving, becoming a murmuration of historical language change. Passed over, like rocks, are Black people, who are not part of local changes but an everywhere-and-nowhere Blackness. Linguists trace the means by which, they say, Black Pittsburghers use language to position themselves relative to, and against, whiteness. The idea that white speech might be made and maintained in order to create racial difference is unexplored.
The twang of a people is the sound that those people have chosen to hear. That is to say, unconsciously and consciously, the city's white residents have treated their speech as the only language around. Then, we clear a map, a globe, a haphazard spatial reckoning of sound, and fill the space with things we think we've heard ourselves say. A grammar. Overdetermined, self-deluding, white Pittsburghers have come to think of our uses of language as Language. Maeve Eberhardt's research suggests that many Black Pittsburghers associate this “Pittsburgh speech” with white faces, not with a general sense of place. One of Eberhardt’s research interviewees, “Brianne,” sums up her image of a “Pittsburgh speaker” as: “a racist white Pittsburgher.” With the exception of work by Eberhardt and Shelome Gooden, there is a dearth of research on the speech of Black Pittsburghers. This paucity of research reflects a paucity of interest on the part of white Pittsburghers who flaunt pierogie-laden t-shirts filled with sounds of pale jabber. For years, researchers have known, and obliquely attested to knowledge, that “Pittsburghese” is “Whitese,” but somehow “white” never makes it into the names for the dialect. A whole word gone silent, despite all the speakers.
Did you hear what just happened there? People became speakers, devices of acoustic output forming a field called “linguistics,” and its outpost of “sociolinguistics.” In sociolinguists, speakers are understood to be slipping implicit knowledge—knowledge of who speaks which way and why—into their speech. Linguists (speakers suspended) cache and connect that knowledge; find the hidden pattern. You secretly know and repeat the origins of regional language, its inherent structures, and all the social signaling a sound can do. Your mouth opens and evidence flows out. This is not, however, the psychoanalytic dynamic of saying more than you know. In psychoanalysis, your words overflow with meaning, but that meaning is not direct evidence. Instead, it is a scuffed-up, sixth-generation copy of something ambivalent, unsteady, and unbearable that takes form in its own distortion. There are metaphors, stand-ins, reversals, and negations. The psychoanalyst works to study—with the patient—the scuffs, the infidelities of copying, and to wonder openly about how and why such marks are made. In linguistics, by contrast, it's never presumed that the speaker is, for unconscious and intolerable reasons, marking up all the evidence, saying things wrong unaware. Linguists hope, and it's a hope to unlearn, that the things we say indicate a fundamental truth about Language, capital L, big conceptual works of the star-ward primate, city center of communication.
Let’s get on another bus, a bus you’ve never heard of, and go back to the rhyme.
Were you to be from, let's say, France, you might say “Paris of Appalachia” as though it rhymes with “Larry of Appalachia.” And were you to be from, say, Asheville, you might say it as though it rhymed with “Harris of Apple-Atcha” (with “Apple-Atcha” being a very successful name for a pick-your-own-fruit orchard). This clears up none of what I'm saying, and I'm so many paragraphs in. Line break.
And break with sound, with the simplicity of sound’s primacy. In his writing on phonocentrism and Deaf Studies, H-Dirksen Bauman reconsiders a canonical text in linguistics— Ferdinand de Saussure's General Course in Linguistics. General Course posits that arbitrariness is part of what makes language Language. According to this line of thought, there is no inherent connection between the sounds of language and their meanings. For instance, the sounds which make up the word “ketchup” do not, in some transcendent way, emerge from the object itself or directly mimic it. They are abstracted from, arbitrary in relation to, the object to which they refer. This is regarded as an intellectual accomplishment—from mimicry to something floating, freed from the touch of its object. Sign languages, however, often employ mimicry, meaning they are presumed to lack the same abstraction, the arbitrariness of “real languages.” In fact, it wasn't until the 1960s that linguists could be convinced, in general, to think of signed languages as languages.
Arbitrary like arbitrate, wishing for random judgements. Also arbi- like arbe-, like arbor and arborescent growth, diverging perhaps at points of weakness, fracture, or condensed potency. Creating off-shoots, branchings, and root suckers. The tree, in emoji form, with its solitary, unbent trunk is an idealized form with little connection to clonal aspens or shrubby mulberries. Trees bust out all-over.
The idea that the Deaf and hard-of-hearing are intrinsically defective has been used as a premise for appalling cruelty, including forced sterilization. These are attempts to stop arborescence, to make a nifty, patriarchal trunk of movement: from the “concrete” communication of gesture and image, to abstract speech, to transcendent Language, to the pure respiration of plants. Climb to the tip-top of that tree, though, and no one will be home except birds who've never heard of you. Similar pruning has been done to form that thing called “Pittsburgh speech,” hacking away at Black residents, Deaf residents, residents with accents beyond the anglophone, and anyone else who makes Pittsburgh their home but moves in space and time beyond the unbent trunk.
Climb back down. Down here is writing, which holds onto archaic mumbo-jumbo and doesn't clear the way. Down here is sign, which makes no apologies for its direct referentiality. Down here is the option to speak against speakers, to absorb the shock of sound as touch and echo. Down here is gesture, beyond a strict Chomskian grammar, getting lost in tactility and space.
Martha Graham gestured towards the space of Appalachia, herself being born in Allegheny City—a town annexed by Pittsburgh in 1907. Like many of her contemporaries in art, literature, and music, Graham was intent on finding a uniquely American response to aesthetic and existential questions. Her 1944 ballet, “Appalachian Spring,” casts a bride, a husband, a pioneer woman, and a revivalist along an Isamu Noguchi horizon. The principals move towards and against longing and memory, evoking a now-cliché image of America’s westward expansion. Perhaps more famous is Aaron Copland’s score for the ballet, also titled “Appalachian Spring.” However, Copland wasn't thinking of Appalachia at all when he composed the score. Working from California, Copland based the score on correspondence with, and a personal knowledge of, Graham. Once the ballet and score were complete, Graham drew on a Hart Crane poem, “The Dance,” to title both works:
O Appalachian Spring! I gained the ledge;
Steep, inaccessible smile that eastward bends
And northward reaches in that violet wedge
Of Adirondacks! — wisped of azure wands,
YouTube users leave comments on recordings of the ballet and orchestral work, praising the composer for his ability to capture, in sonic form, a likeness of Appalachia. Some comments specify: Appalachia in springtime. Nevermind that he had neither in mind. In these understandings of the work, “Appalachian Spring” is the sound of a region, projected outward to listeners who detect its accent.
For Paris, what matters most is that its accent be heard somewhere, anywhere, everywhere. In an essay on the status of French as a lingua franca, Sue Wright offers that French became a widely-spoken language in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries not because of the language’s inherent qualities, but because of the reach of French political and colonial power. With French lineages in several European royal houses, and the French crown holding significant land on the continent, the French language came to be a language you wanted to speak because it gave you access to powerful people, and a significant general populace. Louis XIII and Louis XIV’s financial support of cultural works tied the French language to lauded literature, music, and art. In less genteel scenarios, French was the language of an invading, colonizing force in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Speaking French was necessary for survival and adaptation. At the close of World War II, however, France’s global influence, and the importance of the French language, declined in world politics and culture. Other capitals of prestige and power emerged. Modern dance and abstract expressionism made New York City and American English a desirable combination of space and sound. Since the mid-twentieth century, the French government has made several attempts, in legislation and marketing, to restore the global prominence of French. None of these efforts have panned out in the long-run. You can float a language along extant streams of power, but using language to carve channels for power is a more difficult procedure. They’re digging trenches with leaves.
The name “Appalachia” is a leaf, or maybe a photosynthetic cell, growing from a spot you may not expect. Northern Florida is the home of the Apalachee people, the namesake of this region. “Apalachee” is an exonym of Hitchiti origin, meaning “people on the other side.” “Appalachian” came into English by way of a Spanish term, Mountaynes Apaletsi, as Spanish colonial agents were the first Europeans to make contact with the Apalachee. The Apalachee people were forcibly displaced by colonizers, I say as though you did not know, as though the association between Appalachia and a white coal miner does not already imply such violence. Descendants now reside “as far as California and Virginia”—and in Florida, Louisiana, and Texas. According to many sources, the Apalachee language is no longer spoken, but the Apalachee Indians of the Talimali Band are still collecting language samples from elders. Whether or not you are considered to be speaking, signing, gesturing, making out a communication, may depend on the willingness of a listener, or your ability to force them to listen.
There are the sounds leaving Appalachia, and the sounds coming back. In an Appalachian corner of Ohio, I was waiting politely for a conference panel to disperse. Time had run out, but the chit-chat hadn't. A sixty-something woman from somewhere south of me was speculating to two linguists about her own accent and its origins. She grumbled, as many at the conference had, that non-Appalachians rhyme the region with “bramble nation,” not “ample passion.” In her estimation, it was Aaron Copland’s fault. The non-Appalachian Copland had introduced America to Appalachia in sonic art, but had done so by way of a mispronunciation. People elsewhere grabbed hold of the error, as well as its representation of the region. Real Appalachians were powerless to counter this new phonetic fashion.
There is considerable suspicion surrounding Copland’s pronunciation of “Appalachia.” As Mike Ivey puts it, those sounds index a place that “does not exist.” Per Ivey, Appalachia-like-acacia is “an idea created by politicians and reporters,” a caricature of poverty and backwardness. In his 1986 essay, “A Rose by Another Name is a Damned Brier,” Ivey tells of listening to a news broadcast as a child and hearing the Copland pronunciation. He thought it was a “dumb mistake” by a reporter, but claims the “dumb mistake” caught on among relatives and neighbors. Like the Copland hypothesis, Ivey’s story situates Appalachians at the mercy of others’ mouths, to the point that they forget how to say their own name. It’s not just a “dumb mistake,” but a critical, wounding misrecognition that rewrites the Appalachian mind, makes the mountain mouth speak like the city. If Appalachians could get others to say the name correctly, Ivey suggests, the socioeconomic problems of Appalachia might resolve themselves. Appalachia is, for him, a kind of spell.
Ivey points to his childhood experience of the name, and others point to the Apalachee origins of the name, to be decisive about a vowel: champ or chased. Matthew Ferrence, author of Appalachia North, suggests that the Copland pronunciation is perfectly serviceable above the Mason-Dixon, though he points out that authors further south take umbrage. Saying it wrong makes you an outsider. Everyone claims to speak for their point of origin, if they’re allowed to, if anyone’s listening.
And you can’t blame the French who, by the by, pronounce les Appalaches as though Steve Jobs had invented mascara.
Saying “Paris of Appalachia” just right is scooping a channel in the land with a leaf and praying for rain. The leaf will break early and often, like when sounds chime together, breaking apart into potential rhymes. The sounds of Appalachia, as Copland and Ivey say them, are a rip along the vein of the leaf, opening a gap, letting us know something has changed. Let’s read Appalachia to Appalachia, from Florida to New York, as the change of a vowel marking time across space, marking its movement from the back of the mouth towards the front, where tongues meet. Say it any old way you want and it will always find a rhyme. Clare Connors tells us that rhyme, “like the best friendships […] says […] ‘You’re other than you think.’”
I bet a pair of words—Paris and Appalachia—on "of." Je parie, I bet, but also, I pair. I pair these words together, with some risk. “Of” is a hinge, a pivot pin in a pair of scissors. “Of” allows us to move Paris and Appalachia in articulation with one another. As they move further apart, we see several sides to each word. As they get closer, the sharp troubles of each cut into the idealized, unified sound of Pittsburgh. They bifurcate it again and again. The blades come close, they pair and make space for a re-pair. As the words become proximate, we hear the minutiae of language which is too spitty and sloppy, too close to the throat and stomach, to be cleared up and made into Language.
Listen too closely. In “Paris of Appalachia,” “of” might function as an ordinary preposition, but let's not forget the should of's and could of's. These are places where sound discloses an ambivalence about its certainty. The sounds induced by the contraction 've generate at once a possessive participle and a preposition of possession.
“I should of told you.”
I should, of told you.
Like: Dani, of here.
“Should” feels like a noun now, another name for I:
“I, Should, of bought that shoe.”
Perhaps we become possessed this way when we experience a regret, particularly regarding an untaken action. What we do not do becomes the origin of our sounds.
The Paris, of Appalachia. Appalachia, however we say it, is a course untaken, a branch lobbed off the tree, maybe a term we should use for people whose language does not count as such in the linguistic reckoning of sounds. Paris, an American Paris with a sonorant -s, is possessed by the Appalachian desire to be clear and the horrific recognition that clarity in language is achieved through cowardly violence. Appalachia cannot properly haunt this Paris, however, because this Paris is a thin plastic replica of the “real” Paris elsewhere, elsewhere being where power and final consonants go missing. “Paris of Appalachia” is a mutual destabilizing of exonyms, a name a place can give itself to rhyme with all the crises of sound. And perhaps this is why the speaking of Appalachia, and the naming of Paris, are such discordant actions. Perhaps this is why you might ask how to say one or the other, to get it “right,” to snap a twig. As both names fall apart, the remainder is “of” and the problematic of possession. I bet Paris and Appalachia knowing I’d lose on “of,” on/off, signing off, a total loser in this question, from not Paris nor not Appalachia, either way you say either one.