re: #320 PT Barnum

There’s a certain accent in New Orleans that almost sounds New Yorkish if you haven’t heard it before.

There is a New Orleans city accent…associated with downtown New Orleans, particularly with the German and Irish Third Ward, that is hard to distinguish from the accent of Hoboken, Jersey City, and Astoria, Long Island, where the Al Smith inflection, extinct in Manhattan, has taken refuge. The reason, as you might expect, is that the same stocks that brought that accent to Manhattan imposed it on New Orleans.

AJ Liebling, Earl of Louisiana, epigraph to Confederacy of Dunces.