If you say, I parked my car in Harvard Yard, you are being rhotic. Ad Choices. A graduate of Harvard University and King's College, Cambridge, Plimpton was recruited to Paris by Peter Matthiessen in 1952 and signed on to the project shortly thereafter. :rolleyes: Ive got news for you, buddy, youre not even second in line! And he told everyone that night, and for many years after, that hed diverted me from a career of filling prescriptions. When I eventually went back to be an editor at Harpers, I arrived at his flat, not having been in New York for eight years. He was stationed primarily in Italy, where he worked as a tank driver. From looking at Labovs study, I know today, as I didnt know yesterday, that linguists use the term rhotic to describe whether a person pronounces, or doesnt, the R sound before a consonant or at the end of a word. He appeared in commercials for Oldsmobile and Intellivision, and appeared. With the help of the New York Mets organization and several Mets players, Plimpton wrote a convincing account of a new unknown pitcher in the Mets spring training camp named Siddhartha Finch, who threw a baseball over 160mph, wore a heavy boot on one foot, and was a practicing Buddhist with a largely unknown background. Hear Stories By George Plimpton. Even if it had nothing else going for itsomething very far from the truth Shadow Box by George Plimpton will forever remain a bastion of boxing literature because of the image it contains of the "Near Room," a place of dreadful foreboding which Muhammad Ali once described to the famed . Was this sheer affectation? Now you know! Friends were almost always happy to see him because you knew he was bound to improve your mood. He was 76.. Several readers wrote in with specimens of Americans who had gone to England and ended up speaking in this mid-Atlantic way. (And, OK, Im not a linguist, but Im married to one!) If you say, I pahked my cah in Hahvahd Yahd, like some vaudeville version of a Boston accent, you are non-rhotic. George Plimpton: what kind of accent? - Straight Dope Message Board Even the manliest actors, such as Humphrey Bogart and Clark Gable sometimes slipped into this voice-coach mode. He had a way of putting it all together, of understanding fighters in the ring; he was a good analyst of boxing. He said, You better stay here, and I did, for a while. Aldas version was always angry or consternated, like a character in a Woody Allen film, while my dad, though he certainly faced hurdles as an amateur in the world of the professional, bore his humiliations with a comic lightness and charmmuch of which emanated from that befuddled, self-deprecating professors voice. Kaltenborn was a famous mid . He was one of her original supporters and had published an article about her work in The Paris Review. That he died in his sleep was impressive. April Fool's Day: Throwback to the time George Plimpton fooled the He has the same type of patrician upper-class New Yorker accent as Jane Wyatt. If you found him at a fancy restaurant, he was there as a guest: For his own meals he preferred cheap Chinese or bangers and mash at a local Irish pub. It is the kind of study . He was smooth. But it didnt define him, much the way he refused to be defined by the stiff, upper-crust world from which hed come. George Plimpton (1927-2003) George Plimpton was the editor of The Paris Review from its founding in 1953 until his death in 2003. Articles From This Author. But the gentleman amateur - a Harvard. Shadow Box: An Amateur In The Ring -- George Plimpton On Boxing See below!) Being, And Appreciating, George Plimpton : NPR expelled from the very expensive, very WASP-y Philips [13], Plimpton's son described him as a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant and wrote that both of Plimpton's parents were descended from Mayflower passengers.[14]. It evoked a sense of Paris from a time when Paris was still the literary capital of the world, publishing literary giants who were considered obsceneHenry Miller, D.H. Lawrence. George Plimpton Detroit Lions | The Pop History Dig At Harvard, Plimpton was a classmate and close personal friend of Robert F. Kennedy. Lionel on Twitter: "News children today have no concept of the Mid In his July 1936 obituary, the New York Times described George Arthur Plimpton (13 July 1855-1 July 1936) as an "internationally known publisher and collector, college trustee and philanthropist." As the materials in the George A. Plimpton Papers testify, those four areas of activity dominated Plimpton's public and private lives. For his grandfather, the publisher and philanthropist, see, Calvin Gay Plimpton and Priscilla G. Lewis were the parents of, He was widely reviled for years after the war by Southern whites, who gave him the nickname "Beast Butler." They all sound just like George. He once said that, in writing Paper Lion, he wanted to reveal the "humor and grace" of football. For more than fifty years, his friends made a circle whose circumference was vast and whose center was a fashionable tenement on New York's East Seventy-second street. Ive lived in Boston for 30 years and have never heard a George Plimpton accent; so I guess it must be a Larchmont accent, *Originally posted by Carnac the Magnificent! I havent heard that he is dead, but if so RIP George. He is widely known for his sports writing and for helping to found The Paris Review. (The filmmakers assembled his voice-over from recorded speeches and other archival footage.) "Hut-Two-Three . . Ugh" A writer proves to be a Paper Lion at QB Back to Plimpton I dont remember the LL affect at all. He rounded first as if he were about to go for a double, then glided back to the base, with fans waving and cheering. He got the personality totally wrong, too. I do believe his accent was decidedly Swamp Yankee. Vault. You're going to play for us-making some sort of big comeback." "That's right," Plimpton replied in his patrician accent. And here for the full interview). He watched the first pitch sail high for a ball, and then hit a rope into left field. I feel that his work on this and many other language-related matters should be far more widely known than it is. $ 3.99 - $ 27.44. *Originally posted by cuauhtemoc * The risky pleasures of Plimpton's classic of participatory sportswriting, Paper Lion. George Plimpton, the New York aristocrat and literary journalist whose career was a happy lifelong competition between scholarly pursuits and madcap attempts -- chronicled in self-deprecating. May a diseased yak squat in your hot tub. If he couldnt be taken quite seriously, that was fine with him (he took himself lightly, and relished being in on the joke). He grew up in New York City with bona fide WASP credentials; became the longtime editor of the Paris Review, working with many of the great novelists of the day; contributed to the New Journalism. In finally hearing the great storyteller tell the one story he would not tell, I could hear, too, his long, reverent silence on the subjectand it reveals his integrity as a journalist, and as a man. Interesting that the two competitors for his anchor chair were both fully vernacular speakers from the South and West: Mudd and Rather. Plimpton was a writer-raconteur and dilettante in the best sense of the word: He co-founded an important literary magazine, the Paris Review, and tried his hand at everything from quarterbacking for the Detroit Lions (which he wrote about in Paper Lion), boxing with light-heavyweight champ Archie Moore (which became Shadow Box), and becoming New Yorks unofficial official fireworks commissioner. His exploits were such that at one point, The New Yorker ran a cartoon in which a patient eyed a surgeon with misgiving and said, But how do I know youre not George Plimpton?, But perhaps foremost among his accomplishments was his elevation of the interview to a literary form, both in the Paris Review and in his two superb works of oral history, Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career, and Edie, a biography of Edie Sedgwick, which he and Jean Stein compiled. Plimpton, George 1927-2003 | Encyclopedia.com Plimpton brought the Left Bank to NYCpeople like Peter Mathiessen, William Styron, Terry Southern. . Tom Nowatzke, fullback, Detroit Lions (In the 1960s, Plimpton briefly played with the Detroit Lions asresearch for the best-selling book Paper Lion, which was later made into a film):I was the No. This was his habit. Between 2000 and 2003, Plimpton wrote the libretto to a new opera, Animal Tales, commissioned by Family Opera Initiative, with music by Kitty Brazelton directed by Grethe Barrett Holby. George Plimpton was born on March 18, 1927 in New York City, New York, USA. In Praise of Plimpton - Newsweek Now the interview is perfect!. His father co-founded the law firm Debevoise Plimpton. I always thought it sounded similar to the accent of William F. Buckley, Jr., who I believe was not reared in Boston. Mr . In that vein, here is an oral biography of George Plimpton. The 16th at Cypress Point is one of the famous golf holes of the world, certainly one of the most difficult and demanding par 3's. Final Twist of the Drama. We were going to go looking for strange birds. Was it him? Wed gone to dinner and the maitre d comes over and says, Felix, I got a call for you from Monaco., I pick up the phone, and I hear Georges Bostonian accent. Description above from the Wikipedia article George Plimpton, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of . Quite sad, as he just had a daughter not many years back. George Plimpton boxed with Archie Moore, played quarterback for the Detroit Lions, and played percussion for the New York Philharmonic. The clearest example of the Mid-Atlantic accent is the accent of the Frasier & Niles Crane characters on the TV show Frasier. It was as if some old gentlemans code prohibited us from interacting as human beings. [21] The prank was so successful that many readers believed the story, and the ensuing popularity of the joke resulted in Plimpton's writing an entire book on Finch. Typical of George to laugh about something others saw as a defining traithe never took himself all that seriously. See Inside George Plimpton's Upper East Side Duplex Plimpton played Tom Hanks's antagonistic father in Volunteers. George Ames Plimpton (March 18, 1927 - September 25, 2003) was an American journalist, writer, literary editor, actor and occasional amateur sportsman. Charles McGrath, editor of the New York Times Book Review:I dont think George had played golf in years, but he used to save up oddball tips for me and others. Except at parties. He wanted to play his own part, but they wouldnt let him. The opposing team: the Detroit Lions. He had been in the war, if briefly (stationed in Italy towards the end of it, hed missed action, but met the Pope, an early sign of the great good fortuneone of his favorite phrasesthat marked his life). I remember getting the news: It was my wife Madeleines birthday, Aug. 7. This periodical has carried great weight in the literary world, but has never been financially strong; for its first half-century, it was allegedly largely financed by its publishers and by Plimpton. I think all the editors who worked at the magazine can recount a time when they ascended to his office to argue for a particular story that had been submitted, certain that George hadnt read it or hadnt read it closely enough, only to stand gape-mouthed as he reeled off, from memory, its every deficiency. Hed have that and a scotch on the rocks, his favorite drink. Plimpton himself described it as a "New England cosmopolitan accent"[36] or "Eastern seaboard cosmopolitan" accent. Greetings From the Vortex of Unpredictability, Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career. By George Plimpton. The Wikipedia entry is indeed delightful. If you listen to Grossman (who is originally from Boston) starting about 15 seconds into the clip below, youll see that he uses a split-the-difference UK/US hybrid that is literally mid-Atlantic, in the sense of combining accents from both countries, but is different from the newsreel announcer voice: You should talk to William Labov [JF: I will try] , pioneering sociolinguist, whose landmark study into New York City speech led him to ask the same question you have. How widespread, numerically and geographically? Look out, Wilson! George Plimpton, who has died aged 76, became a best-selling author by not only writing about sporting heroes but by participating in those sports as well. Youd be on the phone with him and get to the end of the conversation, and youd say I love you, Dad, and at most, hed reply, without subject or object, Love, like he was signing a letter. Sidd Finch: A pitcher, part yogi and part recluse. - Sports Illustrated This book is the party that was George's life-and it's a big one-attended by scores of famous people, as well as. In that regard, Plimpton is the perfect candidate, and the proof is in "George, Being George," the compulsively readable oral biography edited by his friend Nelson W. Aldrich Jr. The journal, which had operated out of his home, moved downtown. [citation needed], Plimpton's studies at Harvard were interrupted by military service from 1945 to 1948, during which time he served in Italy as an Army tank driver. [citation needed]. Even the most basic conversation was often a struggle. Buckley clearly flaunts it, probably to set himself apart from the hoi polloi of his contemporaries. His high Boston accent might have been heard as an influential transitional hybrid, and its interesting how prominent parodies of the speech of Brando, Dean, and Kennedy were at the time: seems a sign that we were noticing a marked change. Update: This post is #2 in the announcer-speak series. And being good at losing was one of Georges many gifts. A similar phenomenon can be noted in the use, well into the 1980s, of the recorded sound of teletype machines in the background of newscasts, a sound still faintly evoked by the bip-bip-bip patterns of music that often introduces news broadcasts, even though teletype machines are long gone The subconscious association of this pattern of sound with news is fading fast with the passing of the years and will undoubtedly disappear entirely in the coming decade as surely as the over-enunciated style of radio speech of the 30s disappeared within a generation of its no longer being needed. So it went in late 1960 at one of George Plimpton's legendary soirees at 541 E. 72nd St., New York. Plimpton died on September 25, 2003, in his New York City apartment from a heart attack later determined to have been caused by a catecholamine surge. Slate is published by The Slate Group, a Graham Holdings Company. Plimpton was .the public face of the New York intellectual: tweedy, eclectic and with a plummy accent he himself described as "Eastern seaboard cosmopolitan." . Norman Mailer, author:George had a rare gift. #1 was Who Was the Last American to Speak This Way, #3 is Class-War Edition, and #4 is The Origin Story., Who Was the Last American to Speak This Way. We were both excitedId just come back from a weekend in Las Vegas, and hed just come back from celebrating the fortieth anniversary reunion of his Detroit Lions team at Ford Field, where the fans had given him a standing ovation, and he had raised his hatand for a moment we were no longer father and son, but just two big excited boys, each comparing adventures, and I could hear the pride in his voice, the happiness. There was one more matter I never heard my dad discuss. The title of the PBS documentary - "Plimpton! Norman Mailer said that George Plimpton was the best-loved man in New York. After her transformation, I noted that Mia sounds precisely like her mother, Maureen OSullivan, who had that patrician manner of speaking on and off screen. The point of the flipped prestige markers is that generally the fewer the Rs, the fancier the person. I remember the Lowell Thomas documentary films of the 50s where Mr. Thomas' mellifluous tones and distinct radio-style pronunciation gave him a respectability that a similar huckster could hardly hope to replicate today by the mere application of such an artifice.