Exercice de Style:
Lockjaw
On my daily round of links, I came across a reference to something called “Larchmont Lockjaw” [not at this site]. I sat up like a shot, because of course the manner of speaking referred to — best characterized as speaking through clenched teeth, so that one’s jaw remains stationary — is not called “Larchmont Lockjaw.” It is called “Locust Valley Lockjaw.” In tribute to its best known exponent, Katharine Hepburn, it probably ought to be called “Hartford Lockjaw.”
But, Larchmont! The very idea! Larchmont’s one claim to fame is that nobody knows whether it is to the North or to the South of Mamaroneck. Yes, I know — you can look it up and tell me! But you will forget! It is impossible to distinguish the Tweedledee and the Tweedledum of Westchester country living.
Locust Valley is on the other side of Long Island Sound. It is, therefore, on Long Island. (On the evidence of the Web site, however, I rather doubt that the patois is spoken there anymore.)
If you want to know what Locust Valley Lockjaw sounds like, let your Auntie Mame help out. It’s the way that young Patrick’s would-be fiancée, Gloria Upson, melds her incisors. “And then I hit the ball….”
Nancy Kulp is more familar to me than Gloria Upson but even more familiar and even, I think, more than anyone else the person I associate with the accent is William F Buckley. Thanks for leading me to a name for this accent. Prolepsis and paraleipsis, what a nice bonus they were too, interestingly your imbedded spell checker marks them as misspelled. Always something to spark my memory here, now where are those Edwin Newman books?
LXIV here:
I was brought up on it as “Long Island Lockjaw” This gives it too much scope, of course, since so much of the Island is brooklyn transplanted via the GI Bill, but it refers back to the days when Long Island was a series of grand estates (the farms did not count). Since my aged grandmother used the term, and she was born before the advent of the Twentieth century, I must stick by her terminology…
The Elocution Classes which were taught at the girls school in Manhattan where I was (briefly) on the faculty employed the classic technique of a No. 2 pencil clenched between the teeth during recitation. The exercise was believed to encourage the proper set of the jaw and cheekbones in a privileged young woman while also teaching her clear enunciation — few things being deemed more common and undesirable than the mumbling and slurring sounds made by the lower classes. A well-known graduate of the Chapin School, the celebrated actress Jane Wyatt (1910-2006) of Campgaw, NJ, and perhaps best known as Margaret Anderson on “Father Knows Best” exemplifies the sterling results of this instruction. Nancy Kulp is another, perhaps slightly harsher, model.
The reference to Locust Valley does of course hearken back to a time when the right people lived there.
Sadly, Elocution instruction was abandoned at Chapin by the time the free-wheeling 70s came along and I came on board. At this point broadened admission policies allowed girls from a wider range of socio-economic backgrounds to enroll — which is to say those whose families were not in the Social Register, the daughters of working mothers, and Catholics. An era had ended.