Life, Liberty and the Right to Roll Your Double Rs

G. B. Tennyson, professor emeritus of English at UCLA, has proposed a rather Orwellian way to improve the quality of speech among the American masses: Deport all foreigners who can’t master the Queen’s tongue.

No kidding. The retired teacher can’t stand hearing people mangle the language with their strange accents and gross mispronunciations. Tennyson even finds it “disturbingly dissonant” when Latino broadcasters break into Spanish to pronounce proper names, including their own.

“This they do with frightening gusto, as if they were matadors taunting the bull,” writes our cranky professor in the July/August 1999 edition of the California Political Review. “. . . The greatest offender in this line is the radio newscaster Luis Torres, who pronounces his own name with such intensity that it sounds like the signal to attack.”

Tennyson must fancy himself a modern-day Professor Higgins, the haughty speech specialist from “My Fair Lady” who turns a flower girl into a princess by teaching her to speak properly. In a dry essay with no music, however, his arrogance lacks the charm that made the Rex Harrison character so likable--and forgivable.

As one way to achieve “language decorum,” Tennyson recommends that immigrants be required to read poetry aloud as part of their citizenship tests. They pass if native speakers can understand them. If they fail, they get deported.

Harrumphs the professor: “With the initiation of speech training, plus a halt to immigration, we might well see a nationwide improvement in communication.”

Ay, caramba! Sure glad I’m not on the radio.

Poor Luis Torres, the KNX-AM newsman. He’s had to deal for years with complaints about the way he says his name, that double R rolling trippingly off the tongue. He even gets hate mail from uptight crackpots telling him to go back where he came from, which is Boyle Heights.

“I think it’s an effrontery to tell somebody how to pronounce his or her name,” Torres told me last week. “That’s chutzpah.”

Pronounced u-got-a-LOT-a-nurv.

A supervisor at the CBS affiliate says people also call the station to grumble about “why does this guy roll his Rs.”

“I don’t have much tolerance for that (kind of complaint),” said KNX Editor Greg Habell. “This is L.A. Get outta here!”

(Yeah, and this is a small world, too. Habell happens to be an old family friend and former college sweetheart of my younger sister, Guadalupe, who teaches Spanish in Fresno. Lucky she doesn’t have to Anglicize her name to please the likes of Tennyson, since it sounds silly and sacrilegious to say: Gwah-duh-LOO-pee.)

Torres has a simple rule when pronouncing names on air: “I call people what they want to be called.”

I had trouble with my name in grammar school. Despite my saintly namesake, nuns made me stand up and repeat it until the class understood, Ah-goos-TEEN. In high school, I became Gus. Eventually, I matured and changed it back, but I still Anglicize the pronunciation on my voicemail to make it easier for people who call.

Comedian Cris Franco also learned proper English in Catholic schools after moving from Mexico City to Los Angeles, which he calls “the accent reduction capital of the world.”

Recently, Franco explored the issue of accent bias on his lively English-language talk show, Cafe California, Sundays on Channel 22. Four guests debated the pros and cons, with two Americanized Latinos arguing that accents are a drawback to success. Ironically, the two guests who spoke with accents were the most articulate.

(Franco got off the best one-liner: “Accents are a handicap, but you don’t get a parking space.”)

These days, even the Voice of America speaks with an accent.

Increasingly, reporters speaking English with various foreign accents can be heard on the broadcast service of the U.S. Information Agency, which serves a worldwide audience of 100 million in 52 languages. The only rule is they must be easily understood.

“At VOA, we changed the rules since we felt that there is no one ‘American’ accent; indeed, that is one of America’s strengths,” said the agency’s former director, Geoffrey Cowan.

Cowan, who’s now dean of the USC Annenberg School for Communication, also defends the prerogative of reporters like Torres to pronounce their own names on the air as they please.

As for Tennyson’s critique, we can’t call it racist. He even sneers at the cool Liverpool accent made famous by the Beatles.

So to paraphrase John Lennon: Just give speech a chance.

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Agustin Gurza’s column appears Tuesday. Readers can reach Gurza at (714) 966-7712 or agustin.gurza@latimes.com.