DeSantis is working hard on his speaking skills. Look at this video:
There’s still some nasality, especially closer to the end, and he mumbled through his punch line “the state where woke goes to die,” but it’s getting better. I’m very hopeful for this guy.
Yes, but the whole of the US won’t tolerate the Florida Miracle in which a present-day Adlai Stevenson could get elected to a prominent political office.
Orange Man Bad! Smart Man Bad! Smart Man from Orange State Bad! 🙂
It’s facetious but deep down you know it’s true.
BTW, that “high register” is in fact the Florida accent, a variant of a Mid-Atlantic States accent with a few phrasing and pronunciation idiosyncracies drawn mostly from a Deep South accent.
The one exception to this rule is the British Cracker accent of Florida, which was at one time prevalent in North Florida.
So to me DeSantis sounds completely Floridian and has never lost what he picked up in the Florida schools.
This also makes it easy to relate to him as being from a mostly working class family background … if you’re a Floridian.
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I actually have no idea what DeSantis sounds like– my bandwidth won’t support video! I wonder if I can find just the audio somewhere… I’m deeply curious now. Having grown up in the Panhandle, I never noticed that FL even has an accent. Ours seems to be just a variant of backwoods Alabama– and not the nice version they speak around Dothan, either. My poor mother had to go to speech therapy for professional advancement purposes. Nobody takes you seriously if you pronounce all your long “i” sounds as short “a” sounds. I’ve always thought of the rest of Florida as sounding like either New Jersey retirees, or that Gamble Rogers/White Springs drawl. Which I love, btw. It’s certainly different from, say, Blakely, GA where my granddaddy grew up, but… was it real or did Gamble cultivate that for stage purposes? No idea.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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