Write an analytical essay (900-1200 words) in which you analyse Justin Quarry\u2019s essay
\n\u201cThe all of \u201cy\u2019all\u201d: On finally embracing my voice, country twang and everything\u201d and
\ndiscuss the connection between identity and language.
\nPart of your essay must focus on the writer\u2019s use of personal experience. In addition your
\nessay must include an analysis of the style of writing in lines 9-23.
\nJustin Quarry
\nThe all of \u201cy\u2019all\u201d: On finally embracing my voice,
\ncountry twang and everything
\nThe summer I was 12, my mother and I moved from a tiny Arkansas farm town to a university city,
\nJonesboro \u2014 home of Arkansas State \u2014 and from the first minute of the first day of seventh grade,
\nwhen I uttered my affirmative to the roll call of homeroom, my unrefined Southern accent
\nunwittingly marked me to my new classmates as “country.” Though I had never thought of myself as
\n5 such, I\u2019d spent nearly all my life up until that August 40 miles away in Walnut Ridge, a
\nfundamentalist agrarian community my mother and I had left to escape the blowback of her divorce
\nof my father, where the vast majority of my family had worked as sharecroppers for as long as
\nanyone could remember. And so to that extent, it was true. I was country.
\nBut apparently that wasn\u2019t my only oratory fault. When I corrected teachers all morning and
\n10 afternoon on my last name \u2014 my paternal family doesn\u2019t pronounce “Quarry” the primary way, but
\nthe far less common tertiary one, rhyming with “scary” \u2014 some of my peers conspiratorially took
\nnote that it sounded not unlike the adjectival form of a homophobic epithet (a word that actually
\ndoes not exist, but one that junior high schoolers were delighted to invent for torment). This, plus
\nmy status as an outsider, convinced them I was the worst thing they, or I, could imagine: gay.
\n15 Though I had never thought of myself as that either, it, too, I would discover, was true, however not
\nuntil college, when I came to care so much for a gay classmate that I finally launched from the
\ndepths of my shame and, as I soared in my affection for him with abandon, didn\u2019t care to admit that,
\nwrong as my former persecutors had been in my treatment, they\u2019d been right in my sexual
\nidentification.
\n20 But in the ten years leading up to college, I spent much of my young and anxious life trying to flatten
\nand deepen my speech into a complete collection of sounds that to my peers \u2014 to most Americans, I
\nwas already absorbing \u2014 registered as neither deviant nor dumb. Into a steady pattern of talk that
\nread as nothing beyond the norm, that spoke only to worthiness of belonging.
\nIndeed, recent studies have discovered that Americans with Southern accents, like me, have lower
\n25 incomes and job attainment outcomes than those who speak with the Standard American English
\naccent. However, for many Southerners \u2014 for many people from any part of rural America, I daresay
\n\u2014 such statistics only confirm what we\u2019ve always known: that our regional identity is a queerness, a
\nforeignness in its own rite, conjuring for our listeners imaginings of the most garish stereotypes.
\nLong before we\u2019re employable, many rural Southerners learn, just as I did, the cost of the very
\n30 sounds of our words \u2014 forget their content \u2014 even in the South itself.
\nJustin Quarry is a writer and a teacher. In this essay, he describes his relationship with his accent
\nand how it has evolved.
\n2
\nUltimately, I failed in my decade-long efforts to remake myself for the aural approval of others. For
\none thing, the ubiquitous Standard American English accent I observed on “General Hospital” and
\n“The Young & the Restless”1 was all I could ever hear when I spoke. Also I excelled in my accelerated
\nEnglish classes. I knew my grammar was near, if not entirely, perfect. I loved rules, such as those of
\n35 syntax, and clung to them. I took pride in my practice of them, both as a means of stabilizing myself
\namidst my parents\u2019 still-frequent feuds and attracting positive attention from adults. I thrived as a
\nperennial “pleasure to have in class.” If someone had issued me specific instructions to make my
\nvocal expression, or any other aspect of myself, more palatable to people with whom I wished to
\ngain favor, or at the very least acceptance, my 12-year-old-self would have strived to master them.
\n40 Years before, as a child, I\u2019d recorded on a brown Fisher-Price tape player the most guttural and raspy
\ndeath threats I could muster, replaying them to myself as I sat alone in dark and suffocating closets,
\nin attempts to terrify myself. I had never succeeded. But one day in the fall of seventh grade, I
\nrecorded and replayed my plain voice for myself to try to detect my apparent flaws so I could correct
\nthem. I was mortified by what I heard. There it was, undeniable, like the aural equivalent of a cheese
\n45 grater or sandpaper: my rough-edged, backwoods accent, [\u2026]
\nI detested what I heard on my boombox that day. I never recorded myself again in all of my efforts
\nto renovate my speech. Puberty would deepen my voice soon enough, I prayed \u2014 and it finally did, I
\nrealized, when calling customer service representatives stopped referring to me as “ma\u2019am” or, most
\nalarming, “the lady of the house.” Until then, when I spoke in class, I squashed my tone in such a way
\n50 that must have made me sound like an android.
\nWhat I did instead was simply made certain to enunciate the -g on all my participles \u2014 I was never
\n“communicatin\u2019” and always “communicatingG” \u2014 and I rooted from my tongue the most telltale
\nword in the Southern lexicon: “y\u2019all.” In its place came “you guys,” the most stereotypically Northern
\nphrase I knew. “Y\u2019all,” as I began to understand it, put a target on my chest, identified me as outcast;
\n55 “you guys” obscured me, added a layer of armor to my heart.
\nAnd so as I ultimately made friends, it was “you guys” I asked to see “Goldeneye” and “Romeo +
\nJuliet” and “Never Been Kissed” and “Titanic”2 with me. “You guys” with whom I compared taste in
\nmusic, “you guys” whom I told I would meet at the mall in front of Sam Goody3
\n\u2019s. “You guys” with
\nwhom I condemned the mobs of rednecks, as we classified them, who trekked to Jonesboro \u2014 from
\n60 places like where I once lived \u2014 on Friday and Saturday nights to cruise one of our city\u2019s
\nthoroughfares in a creeping clog.
\nBy the time I left Arkansas as a first-generation college and then graduate student, I\u2019d internalized all
\nthe negative assumptions of people who speak with Southern accents, and in particular the coarser
\nincarnations like mine: their probable lack of education and sophistication, their poverty and their
\n65 naivet\u00e9 and their xenophobia. The same assumptions that indeed lead many managerial Americans,
\neven fellow Southerners, to pay such speakers smaller salaries, to hire them less frequently. The
\nassumptions that, in me, had festered and warped into self-loathing of my regional and sexual
\nidentities \u2014 assumptions that led me to assess anyone who reminded me of me, be they ostensibly
\ncountry or gay, as less worthy.
\n70 Once the belief that my voice might inadvertently signal my inadequacy had become second nature,
\nI policed it on high alert well into adulthood. After all, though in both my post-secondary educations
\nI remained in the South, in each case I emerged into a larger, wealthier, far more cosmopolitan city
\n1
\n“General Hospital” and “The Young & the Restless”: American soap operas
\n2
\n“Goldeneye” and “Romeo + Juliet” and “Never Been Kissed” and “Titanic”: Movies from the 1990\u2019s
\n3
\nSam Goody: Chain of now defunct stores that sold CDs and DVDs
\n3
\nthan Jonesboro, into the elite institutions of Vanderbilt and the University of Virginia, where most of
\nmy peers had no idea that sharecropping, in which a number of my family continued to labor, still
\n75 existed, believing it to have ended along with either slavery or Jim Crow.
\nSocially, I thrived among greater diversity and its unlimited buffet of accents, in which mine was but
\none of many. I took others\u2019 occasional labeling of me as “country” \u2014 if not “damn country,” if not
\n“goddamn country” \u2014 with the playfulness my designators now meant it. To some, my accent was
\neven an object of fascination. But I still overenunciated my participles \u2014 “enunciatINGGG.” And by
\n80 habit I still asked “you guys” what borough of New York City they were from, if they\u2019d seen our
\ndormmate drain his microwavable macaroni and cheese water directly onto the hallway carpet, if
\nthey\u2019d heard about the labyrinth of secret tunnels supposedly under campus. In graduate school I
\nasked: what are “you guys” writing, who are “you guys” reading?
\nFar more problematically, in the classroom, rather than continue trying to pronounce my words as
\n85 dialectically neutral as I could, most often, I chose not to speak at all. Rather than make myself
\nvulnerable in such public, cultured discourse, not only with my ideas, but also the mere sound of
\nthem, I chose the invulnerability \u2014 the intellectual and emotional isolation \u2014 of silence.
\n[\u2026]
\nNonetheless, I still never fully shook self-consciousness of my speech in what I perceived to be high\u000290 stakes settings until I switched roles from student to professor. Then, given how ultimately affirming
\nand transformative the classroom had been for my life, the sacred duty I felt to impart the best of
\nmyself to my own students [\u2026]. I strive to shake the connotations I carry of the sound of myself, of
\nthe sound of “country” \u2014 not only from my own mouth, but in the rare instance it shows up in the
\nform of one of my university students, or when I hear it with regularity just outside Nashville, where
\n95 I now live.
\nAnd yet “you guys” remains a staple of my vocabulary.
\n[\u2026]
\nMost recently, though, after 15 years of teaching \u2014 and now that I give little thought to, nor do I
\nhave little care about, how I sound \u2014 I\u2019ve come to realize the gendered way my old habit of saying
\n100 “you guys” \u2014 which, in my association of it with the North, I once glamorized as urbane, perhaps
\neven chic \u2014 in fact excludes at least half the world. And in one of the most ironic insights of my life, I
\nrealized the most obvious and inclusive solution was, in fact, to start using again the word I\u2019d once
\nbelieved to be its inferior, the one I\u2019d once identified as my most obvious, most isolating problem.
\nY\u2019all.
\n105 In the last months I\u2019ve tried to sow “y\u2019all” back into the landscape of my speech, often with the
\nawkwardness of self-correction, similar to the aftermath of having called a student or colleague or
\nfriend by the wrong pronoun or name. “Excuse me” or “sorry,” I\u2019ll say\u2014”y\u2019all.”
\nThat single word, often freighted and fraught with the worst racist horrors of a whole region when it
\ncomes out of a white Southern mouth. Its class implications, too: the highest rates of poverty and
\n110 illiteracy and obesity and teen pregnancy in the country.
\nAnd yet, “y\u2019all” is a word that in and of itself integrates rather than segregates. In this so-called New
\nSouth, in this new century, it holds the potential to acknowledge and accept the entirety of a
\npopulation, both rural and urban, in one of the most rapidly diversifying regions in the nation, and
\nbeyond.
\n4
\n115 Y\u2019all. A word that, for me, in my renewed usage of it, both honors the difficulty of my familial and
\npersonal histories, and expresses hope in the complexity of my region\u2019s present and future. [\u2026]
\nY\u2019all.
\nI don\u2019t know how to describe what I sound like anymore. I only know that no one in Arkansas thinks I
\nsound like I\u2019m from Arkansas, nor does anyone in Nashville think I sound like I\u2019m from Nashville. [\u2026]
\n120 I don\u2019t know what I sound like anymore because, still, I shiver to think of repeating my self-recording
\nexperiment of seventh grade. But I do know that, now, if I had a choice, I might well opt to sound
\nmore, not less, country, in order to elevate the sound of “country” from the pits of stereotypes to
\nthe influential fronts of elite classrooms, where I now often stand. [\u2026]
\nWhen asking my students ice-breaking questions at the beginning of each semester, I always answer
\n125 each first myself \u2014 after all, if I\u2019m asking students to make themselves vulnerable, however
\nminutely, it only seems fair for me to make myself vulnerable as well. For years, when sharing with
\nthem my single-word autobiography, I said “anxious.” In subsequent years, I admitted that while in
\ntruth my story was still probably “anxious,” I was, at least, working on revising it to “open-hearted.”
\nBut now if I ask myself what one word encapsulates me, encapsulates both of those sentiments,
\n130 what one word dramatizes my thus-far journey? “Y\u2019all,” I might well say.
\n“Y\u2019all,” I am permitting myself to say.
\n“Y\u2019all,” I am working and working to say.
\nFrom: \u201cThe all of \u201cy\u2019all\u201d: On finally embracing my voice, country twang and everything\u201d, Justin
\nQuarry. Salon.com, February 6th 2021 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Write an analytical essay (900-1200 words) in which you analyse Justin Quarry\u2019s essay \u201cThe all of \u201cy\u2019all\u201d: On finally embracing my voice, country twang and everything\u201d and discuss the connection between identity and language. Part of your essay must focus on the writer\u2019s use of personal experience. In addition your essay must include an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"disciplines":[14],"paper_types":[],"tagged":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.writemyessays.app\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/questions\/32261"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.writemyessays.app\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/questions"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.writemyessays.app\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/questions"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.writemyessays.app\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.writemyessays.app\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32261"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.writemyessays.app\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/questions\/32261\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.writemyessays.app\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32261"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"disciplines","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.writemyessays.app\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/disciplines?post=32261"},{"taxonomy":"paper_types","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.writemyessays.app\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/paper_types?post=32261"},{"taxonomy":"tagged","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.writemyessays.app\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tagged?post=32261"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}