#<- neither of the characters i'm talking about are actually from manchester

[grimark]

literally "so i dabbed him, left him in regent's canal, and here i am instead."

[booksandwords]

Connections by K.C. Wells

Read time: 1 Day Rating: 4/5 Stars

The Quote: David Poulter. Fifteen years older and looking like sex on legs. Cameron couldn’t understand why David didn’t exude confidence. Does he know how he looks? — Cameron Trent

Connections is such a wonderful play on the home for the holidays trope. Where home is not so much a place but people. It all starts with thirty-something David Poulter waiting at the station to travel to Manchester for a college reunion. In something of a twist on the strangers on a train trope the man he finds himself sitting opposite is his college crush, Cameron Trent. Little to his knowledge Cameron had a crush on him all those years ago too. But neither of them talked about their sexuality and Cam lived his life with a mask on to protect himself from hurt. This just under 60-page novella is how they end up together. Honestly, is that a spoiler? I don't think so.

I'm honestly surprised that there wasn't more from the actual train ride up. It's more an 'oh no it's him. And oh wow time has been so good to him thing' for both of them. Including what they do for work now, what they are doing with their chemistry degree, they are different career paths and I like the choices. Most of the important catching up actually happens over drinks later. That conversation does get heavy but is also kinda funny. Both Cameron and David have nasty exes with manipulation problems. The is quite a foreboding sentence about a character called Sam fairly early on. It plays out well. He is the nearest thing to a villain but even he is more of a realistic sorta person that you might come up against. Particularly in a group of idealists.

I need to share another quote. “I am so, so sorry. And as for my opinion, I think you did the right thing. You leaving him, that was survival. I’m surprised you lasted as long as you did.” David says this to Cameron. Cam is a domestic abuse survivor, his former husband Tom is am a**. David's former partner is no ray of sunshine either but Tom is just awful. There are not a lot of details included certainly nothing graphic but it's enough. At one point Cam actually says “Yeah. I wasn’t happy about it, but I wanted to make him happy.” this made me so sad. It's a wonderful summation of living in domestic abuse. Luke, David's ex was also abusive but we learn less about that. He's referred to as a mind fucker.

Not much can be said about Connections. It's only 50 something pages long. But manages its characters, their pasts and potentials well. Though it does run some quite predictable paths. But I maintain that during the season that is not a bad thing. If you want a quick read for the holiday season I recommend this.

[adamsvanrhijn]

the tl;dr though is that (lol I'm a fucking liar I can't start a post and not go into too much detail)

So, the thing that I think Everybody agrees on is that Thomas Barrow speaks in different ways dependent on context.

You can look at this as him using different registers, i.e., the changes are influenced by the role he is performing, the people with whom he's speaking, and the people who may hear him speak. (You could also theoretically look at it as him switching between language varieties, or versions of English, but I don't really think that's the case and I've never seen anyone claim that so I'm going to stick w/ register here.)

I thiiiink it's common fandom knowledge that this was an intentional choice???

RJC used his native accent, coached to more closely resemble period dialect, as Thomas, and has said that he intentionally changed his line delivery depending on whether Thomas was upstairs or downstairs, primarily by altering his phonetic & inflection patterns, i.e. his speech sounds. This is a very good and cool acting choice as well as a historically informed one, and IIRC I think the dialect coaching of the actors of the servant characters emphasized that this was a Thing, but he really put a ton of thought into it which he has Discussed Before. Which is very cool.

And Joanne Froggatt (Anna) and Phyllis Logan (Mrs Hughes) both do this to some degree, too! And there is a fun contrast when you look at like, Sophie McShera (Daisy) and Lesley Nicol (Mrs Patmore), who play characters that almost never go upstairs and therefore have no reason to codeswitch into another variety of English or to a more formal register, which means that then when they do go upstairs there's always this like... they both play the unnatural delivery/trying-but-not-really-succeeding at changing their native speech patterns thing really well, and it's compounded by the fact, too, that of the times when they are talking to the Crawleys, very often they are in a very intense emotional place (true of Mrs Patmore especially) which realistically could affect their speech, and sometimes it does!

But this post is about Thomas because all of my posts that I go crazy on are about Thomas.

Which brings me to the next thing, the thing this post is Mainly about, which is that like, it isn't just sounds that change! I think we are all Also in agreement that, distinct from the phonetic accent, Thomas also sometimes uses Northern England English (which I am going to call N.E.E. for convenience but that is not like, official, to my knowledge) [1] constructions, e.g.:

the indicative past-tense copula "to be" is unmarked (or levelled) for person, as in first/third person singular past indicative "were", as in, "When I were last here..." (S2E3) [2]

double negative clause-final "neither", as in, "No enemies downstairs neither" (S4E5)

unstressed possessive "me" (~see footnote~, I find myself just as insufferable as you do I promise) [3]

(which are also features of other British Englishes deemed nonstandard, to be clear, and also these can be interchangeable with grammatical forms from the prestige variety, the prestige variety being the kind of English they're speaking upstairs)

And like, I said that this was intentional in a lot of ways, but for all of the DA characters who don't speak in the prestige variety with Received Pronunciation, the features of both colloquial (casual) speech and native variety (Yorkshire English, Manchester English) speech actually seem to be scripted less often than they appear in the show, assuming the trend in the S1-S3 scripts and in the film was consistent. (Clause-final "neither" seems to be scripted a lot though.)

Which means there is some actor/director flexibility there! they changed the lines around sometimes!

And one thing I've noticed is that Thomas's use of this grammar is more delineated than the upstairs/downstairs register codeswitching, in that he uses it by and large more around specific people (O'Brien especially in the early seasons), rather than according to his social environment more broadly (which is how register works)

And, and this is my Thing, this is my Thesis. In general, his use of these constructions seems to almost always be conditioned first by his relationship with his audience or speaking partner, and second by his mental or emotional state.

While it's true that first-language features of a person's idiolect (idiolect being the ways an individual person uses language) can be and often are conditioned by strong emotions, particularly negative ones, (and let's be real all fandoms tend to LOVE this trope, with both multilingualism and with language forms considered nonstandard) we see Thomas in distress, confusion, discomfort and just generally feeling strong emotions a lot more often than we see him using these grammatical constructions in particular.

It does happen, I do think it is partially conditioned by that. I think this because the only time I can think of that he uses a N. England English grammatical form to or in front of a superior, an authority figure, or a person of higher social standing is in the S3CS when he was just beaten half to death and uses the aforementioned "were":

Branson: What have they taken? Thomas: Every penny I had, but it weren't much.

...at which time he is still surrounded by mostly social peers, but being attended to by Clarkson and Isobel, both of whom are Above Him in the social hierarchy. And Branson asked the question. And I don't know the filming order of this episode (I would think this scene was probably filmed toward the end of shooting due to the makeup required but I can't definitively say that) but in-universe, although Tom is officially his social superior now, for the most part, they have been on even footing for much of the day and interacting like they are peers, so YMMV on where that stands.

But it's interesting to me that it's Branson who says it, and also that it was scripted, because that does to me make it seem like it was an intentional choice, that this dialogue is intended to be affected by the fact that he is, you know, in a lot of pain and probably concussed, etc. Maybe that isn't true, maybe that's just how I'm interpreting it in-universe, but given how rarely this seems to be scripted for Thomas I think it is a fair guess.

And my in-universe interpretation is that while he probably would have said it like that anyway, it is partially conditioned by the makeup of the group and the person he's responding to.

And ACTUALLY!!! while I'm talking about BRANSON! There is a VERY interesting shift in how Thomas speaks to him in terms of when and how he shifts registers over the course of Tom's Class Mobility Journey, in that ajdlkfjlasdhgjkaf

Like I said there are a lot of scenes where Thomas is distressed, and he is distressed in front of many kinds of people, he has many places where it is realistic that he might codeswitch and where many people would codeswitch, but by and large he is very, very consistent in when he uses the prestige grammar and when he uses the non-prestige grammatical forms from his native grammar, and not only is it in line with social context the vast majority of the time, he also uses the different forms way less frequently than some of his coworkers. He mixes it up and he seems to more often sit in the middle. The really marked forms (this time marked means 'notably nonstandard to speakers of the prestige variety') rarely enter his vocabulary.

Which I think could indicate (again, in universe, this is fan analysis) that he has been doing this for a While!

Given his background it is very reasonable to assume that he was interacting with/observing interactions with middle & upper-middle class people from a young age, in the context of those people being customers who have to be treated a certain way. He likely would have seen his father, sister, mother, whoever, changing their speech when interacting with people external to their social group. He may even have been explicitly told/taught about what that relationship is, about how you behave around these people, how you carry yourself, how you speak to them and what you say. Totally logical that he might have been given corrective feedback on his speech specifically with this audience in mind. (Think "we can talk like that at home but not here", which is also what he probably would have been hearing in school.)

Realistically I think he learned both by example and by instruction, but either way he would have I think at least recognized emotional labor pretty early on in his life, and knowing who he is as a person and also you know, drawing from things RJC has said about him, would have practiced it whenever he could and worked on actually developing it, including altering his speech sounds and speech patterns.

We have no idea what the family business environment was like, but it's not at all out of the realm of possibility that he was exposed to this as early as like, 4-6 years old, which is around when children start to recognize adult social patterns and rules: where and how you express your feelings when it comes to other people. If he was exposed to this that early, it would be fundamental to how he sees the adult world, like, he would recognize it early enough that it would affect his social development, and at least according to a usage-based approach, certainly his language development as well.

Recognizing it is one thing; practicing it is another, but if he had that early exposure, especially if he was instructed in it which if you hold the He Was Brought Up To Be A Clockmaker assumption to be true I think he would be, by the age of 10 he'd probably be able to do it pretty well! Certainly well enough for adults to understand that he understands their relationship, which in the context of cottage industry child labor is enough.

And this is like, complex stuff! This is a lot to navigate! Which brings me to the next thing which is like,

Thomas is not actually that good at emotional regulation!!!! He has a high negative affect and he experiences emotions pretty intensely and he makes impulsive decisions based on strong feelings he doesn't know what to do with! He gets stuck in feedback loops really easily, and most of the time, his emotional regulation strategies only seem to come into play after he has already had an emotional response (a.k.a. a feeling). He doesn't really do a good job of not having the feelings he doesn't like in the first place; he's not very good at the re-evaluating a situation and re-appraising and taking a step back thing. Part of this is situational in that life really does suck that much, but he's also just not as good at modulating as some of the other characters. He is by far not the only other character who deals with this, but it is like, much more emphasized with him I think.

(Poor and/or maladaptive emotional regulation can come from a lot of things, but one of them is repeated emotional abuse or neglect in childhood.)

Anyway what Thomas DOES have is a very comprehensive, very nuanced understanding of emotional rules. He knows social rules, he knows social expectations.

And for the most part, he follows them pretty much as strictly as possible. Over the course of the series, over and over they make a point of showing Thomas like, Clearly Holding Back when he is uncomfortable, upset, or angry around an authority figure or social superior (this is him having a negative emotional response and suppressing it, or downregulating) and then taking it out on everyone later (this is him coping with having had that emotion), where the stakes are lower and the power dynamic has changed and the social rules are different. Or like, sobbing alone. We get both!

And almost always, he succeeds in this. He is able to reel himself in and modulate himself (a few notable exceptions) when, say, in front of Lord Grantham, and then he cracks later.

But he adheres really well to that social element of what is expected of him where, what should he be doing where.

And this extends to language! This extends to language. This affects how he talks!!!! He rarely moves out of that intentional practiced language register with prestige-variety grammar and vocabulary when he is in the space where that is appropriate, almost never. When he does, yeah, he's in distress, he's in a bad state physically and mentally.

But I don't think there is really a correlation between strong emotion and N.E.E. constructions when he's with peers??? I don't really see that. Like I think he just naturally uses both, which is totally normal, that's a normal thing. He puts more thought into word choice and sentence structure and makes a point of changing his accent when he's talking to you know, his employers, but otherwise he mixes forms and it isn't even really an equal mix, he really leans into the syntactic structures from his language variety that are also found in the prestige variety. And I think for him an in-universe reason that that's his balance is the exposure he would have had to the prestige variety growing up... but he still associates the unique features with his class (which he is proud of!) and with home, I think.

Why does this matter! What does this mean anything! Why do I, smithensy, care so much about this!

WELL I care because I have brain worms and I feel like in fanfic Thomas tends to use these forms much, much more often than he does in canon. Certainly that he uses them in front of people who do not speak his variety of English more often than he does in canon, often presented in the context of him making a Language Mistake.

And on top of that, people tend to link it first to strong emotions and/or an abnormal mental state and second to social context, whereas I think the situation in canon shown on screen seems to be that his mental state supersedes his social context only very very rarely, because he really recognizes those boundaries, he is doing his best to stay in the right box.

I definitely live in a glass house here (although I've been more conscious about it since I came to this conclusion), so this isn't intended to be a throwing stones thing, or like a Write Fanfiction The Way I Think You Should thing, just a commentary. I don't make any rules at all this is literally just thoughts! I just have a lot of feelings and a linguistics degree!!!

Anyway, Native speakers / people who know his dialogue better than I do because they've been hearing it for ten years please speak up if you disagree but OTHERWISE.

This is my stance....... this is my hot take!

[1] Using the cultural definition and speaking specifically about syntactic structure because there are a lot more syntactic similarities between Manchester English and Yorkshire English, which many of the other working class characters speak, than there are phonetic ones, although obviously there are also phonetic similarities. I love how much more about this I know now than I did a year and a half ago

[2] Side note, in both the S1-S3 scripts and the show, subjunctive "were" seems to be used almost always by every character, which I hadn't realized until very recently—and that appears to be intentional period dialogue on Fellowes's part, because he uses subjunctive "was" frequently in his commentary!!

[3] I straight up do not recall a canonical example of Thomas using possessive "me" off the top of my head but practically every other character uses it and it shows up in fanfic so I'm going to assume it came from somewhere. Someone jog my memory!

Okay I desperately want to do a full analysis of Thomas Barrow's speech as performed but I don't know enough about Northern English structurally and would say some wrong things if I did it like, now. But I did ramble about the social and psychological patterns of his speech to Tama for like an hour on the phone once and it was very pepe silvia vibes but I am so solid in my correctness that I DO want to write that up at some point because I feel like... perhaps.... it is something that people other than me would be interested in!