When you live in a middling Rust Belt city in a vanilla Midwestern state with exactly average demographics, you cling to anything remotely unique about being a Cincinnatian. There’s the chili spaghetti thing — which outside of town is actually called “Cincinnati chili” — and then….
Well, CityBeat was founded on the notion that current-day Cincinnati was the intersection of a fascinating, complex history and a thriving, creative new generation — you just had to dig to find the golden nuggets, which is what this paper would do every week (and then every day once some wiseguys invented the Internet). So four years into our existence, looking to celebrate Oktoberfest, that quintessential Cincinnati experience, we held a reader contest to see what locals thought was soooo Cincinnati.
By far the No. 1 response was the use of “Please?” — our unique version of “Huh?” that’s one of the few tangible connections left to the city’s German roots, along with Oktoberfest and some German writing on Over-the-Rhine buildings. The German word bitte can be translated as both “please” and “excuse me,” and so the English versions became interchangeable over the years in Cincinnati conversations.
We ended up separating the “Please?” responses into their own category and awarded two first place prizes to readers. The overall winner: “Being so conservative you think The Cincinnati Enquirer is liberal is soooo Cincinnati.”
The first place “Please?” anecdote: “A friend of mine recently visited from New Mexico. He went out drinking one night and saw a nice-looking woman sitting alone at the bar. After buying her a few drinks, he asked if she’d like to go back to his hotel room and have sex. She said ‘Please?,’ which he took as an invitation, so he grabbed her to leave — at which point she hauled off and slapped him hard across the face. He couldn’t believe it. After all, she said, ‘Please.’ ”
The cover story package included a guide to “How to Talk Like a Cincinnatian,” poking fun at the local belief that we don’t have an accent. Or do we? It turned out we have several unique pronunciations: “woof” for “wolf,” dropping certain L sounds; “Chiviot” for “Cheviot,” turning short E’s into short I’s; “melk” for “milk,” turning short I’s into short E’s, and “drawl” for “draw,” adding an L to words that end in W.
Excerpt:
“There are two things you need to know up front about talking like a Cincinnatian. First, native Cincinnatians don’t think they have an accent. Second if they do, they take great solace in knowing that at least they don’t sound like they’re from Kentucky.
“Sorry to burst your bubble, folks, but you’re wrong on both accounts.
“ ‘Cincinnati speech is slightly corrupted by our proximity to Kentucky, possibly a bleed-over from Appalachia,’ says Rocco Dal Vera, an associate professor in CCM’s actor training program (who teaches voice and accents to student actors). ‘Northern Ohio has much less of an accent than we do.’ ”
Today:
We’d like to think that 20 years of CityBeat helped connect Cincinnatians to our collective under-the-radar uniqueness, from King Records and beer breweries to emerging music, arts and restaurant scenes to quirky neighborhoods on both sides of the river. We’ve come a long way since 1999, when there was much less confidence about what it meant to be soooo Cincinnati.
In those 15 years, though, it seems the Cincinnati “accent” has almost disappeared. We hardly ever hear “Please?” any more, nor any of the pronunciations featured in that cover story. Maybe it’s one of the downsides of Cincinnati becoming a more cosmopolitan city.
Funny side story: The Enquirer, after years of bashing CityBeat to potential advertisers as a “throwaway freebie,” was directed by its corporate bosses to start their own stand-alone free weekly newspaper, dubbed Cin Weekly. Young writers, editors and photographers were hired and given their own office on the outskirts of downtown so as to appear fresh, hip and totally unrelated to the daily paper.
Cin Weekly debuted in fall 2003 with the cover story “That’s So Cincinnati.” We had much, much fun at their expense.
This article appears in Nov 12-18, 2014.