I'd yammer in the evening

"As soon as you find yourself with different people, you will quickly revert to their way of speaking."

So true.  After every summer vacation up in the north country of Wisconsin I talked funny for a week or so.  The rich rural accent was easily absorbed by this impressionable youth, but it wasn't something I was trying to do; it came naturally.  Kids quickly pick up on these things, don'cha know.  It takes longer with adults but, sooner or later, our ears get in tune with the speech and verbiage of our peers.

I read somewhere, quite a while ago, the reason airline pilots have a sort of West Virginia drawl is because of Chuck Yeager, who inspired many a young pilot.  Another unverifiable bit I read is that all TV news folk sound like they're from the midwest, possibly from the role of Chicago in early television broadcasting.  Wasn't Dave Garroway based at NBC in the Merchndise Mart?  But now everyone sounds like everyone else, and the little pockets of regional accents are getting smaller.  I'd like it more if a reporter from New York spoke in a thick Brooklyn accent, or a guy from Boston talked like a real Southie, and a guy from Atlanta spoke in a languid southern drawl.  We sound like we're from somewhere else.

-----

That Nobel Prize to Grizzly Zimmerman got me thinking about his folkie roots.  I'd forgotten about what a big deal folk music was at the time; remember Hootenanny?  Folk singers were everywhere, but I think a lot of them were posers, a bunch of college kids in matching sports coats.  Just singing a folk song does not a folk singer make.  Pete Seeger was the real thing but he could never get on TV until, I think, the Smothers Brothers brought him on their show in '68 or so.

A bit of criticism about the Nobel Prize has surfaced, with some claiming that a prize in literature should not go to a musician.  Musician?  I can't think of any Dylan tunes sticking in my head like an earworm; his music only served as a vehicle for the words, and the words were poetry.  And a lot of modern poets agree with this (I read it on the Internet!).

-----

The great electric betrayal at Newport didn't bother me, mostly because I was only familiar with his work via cover versions by other performers.  When I finally bought one of his albums I was disappointed in his vocal chops; the guy is not a crooner.  But his stuff grew on me.  How could it not?  You don't need a weather man to know which way the wind blows.