Bob Ross, A Tale of Kind Words

“So now you’ve gotta make a decision. He’ll go right… there. Yeah, that’s a mighty beautiful ol’ tree.” he would say. “Oh yeah that looks real nice.”

I had been watching “The Joy of Painting,” a show from the 1980s and 90s with Bob Ross showing everyone how to paint and how to enjoy painting. He had an accent from a place that I couldn’t tell, but it was very nice to just listen to him talk. I had no interest in the actual painting; I just wanted to listen to Bob Ross.

“Tommie, we’re gonna go out now!” my mom yelled to me up the stairs. We had been planning this adventure for a couple hours. My mom, dad, and I were going to go to the Wissahickon Creek to just explore it.

After about 20 minutes, my mom pointed to one of the trees, exclaiming “That tree is huge!” Without even thinking about what I was saying, I responded.

“Hoo, boy! That’s a mighty big tree!”

“Mighty?” responded my dad, trying and failing to hold back back a snicker.

Prior to that, I don’t think I’d ever had referred to something large as “mighty”, but that was something Bob Ross would say, and while watching him I had grown fond of his accent. He sounded very homely and kind.

I’ve done this sort of thing multiple times. For example I used to watch a lot of interviews of English bands I liked. They, as expected, would speak with an English accent. If I had spent a while watching them, for the a couple of hours I would have the faintest accent. Sometimes I wouldn’t speak to anyone else in that time so I wouldn’t notice; I’d just be talking, but sometimes I would talk to someone and they would notice and mention it to me.

After learning that I did this, I tried to pay attention to whether I was just some weirdo or if other people did it too. I found that even within my family, it happens a lot. My brother and I would watch comedians on YouTube and later that day he’d quote something they said, we’d laugh, and that would be it.

However, after really noticing what I did with people’s language, I started to notice that when he quoted the jokes, he would use language that I wouldn’t usually expect him to use. It wasn’t like he’d just start cursing, but it would be easy to tell that he would change the way he spoke. One time we would just be talking and he would burst out and say “MJ BABY, LAKERS BABY, CHICAGO BULLS BAY-BEE!” and we would both laugh. He speaks similarly to how I speak, with that same boring type of speech, so it is surprising to have him say baby like that.

I’m from a part of the world most people would consider a ghetto. That place is Philadelphia, but according to the people I talk to that don’t know that, I don’t talk with what they consider a traditional Philly accent. When I talk to people over the internet and they ask where I’m from, they seem surprised when I say Philly.

“You never say jawnt or hoagie, you can’t be from there,” they would say.

“I know, everyone says that,” I would respond truthfully.

I’d describe the way I talk as very basic. The way I speak doesn’t really give away the place I’m from. It’s how my family talks, and I’ve never liked it. If anybody were to talk in a way that isn’t fairly slow and easy to understand, I would have trouble understanding them. I’ve always wanted to speak in a different way than I do so I’d be able to understand more people.

On the plus side, it’s very easy to understand me when I talk. My words aren’t jumbled, the words I use are just English. They’re not from any specific part of the English-speaking world.

However, every time I try to change the way I talk, people laugh at me. They’re used to me saying things that they’d expect me to say, and every time it’s not something they expect they make fun of me. Even people I’ve never met before seem to notice that the way I’m speaking to them is probably not the way I’m “supposed to speak.”

Whenever this happens I quickly revert to the way I usually talk and forget about it. I’d try this many times until I realized that what I had done is prove to myself that the way I usually speak, my normal, boring way of speaking, is one of the ways people identify me. As James Baldwin once wrote, “[Language] is the most vivid and crucial key to identify. It reveals the private identity and connects one with...the larger, public, or more communal identity.” I had always wanted to talk a different way, but in wanting that I had been asking for a new identity, which I did not want. People are treated differently based on the way they speak, but if I speak in a way that is generally easy to understand, I figured I would have a better chance of having the other things about me dictate who I am to other people.