In Their Voices

I don’t remember where the word “lathe” came up for me recently, but in my brain, it was said by Sam Rockwell. There are some words that are just like that. It isn’t even a whole line, though it can extend to one. From that same movie, you get “hammer” and “savings” and from a different scene “Richard III.” “Rock,” even. My mind is full of words like that, where a specific actor appears in my head from it. Sometimes I won’t even realize it until the word is said out of context somewhere else and it connects to me. This is more commonly from movies than it is from my own family.

Oh, sometimes, it’s TV—Rowan Atkinson in Blackadder II saying “Bob,” for example. There’s a certain pop he puts in it that I’ve been laughing at for decades. Mostly, though, it comes from movies. The way Richard E. Grant says “verve” in LA Story, for example. Frances McDormand saying, “Oh, yeah?” in Fargo. Greg Kinnear in Mystery Men saying, “Ah, dang.” I’ll frequently say the words the same way myself. My friends have gotten used to this. My children have never known anything else.

I don’t know why brains work this way. I wonder what sparked it, what it was like in the days before talking pictures. It wouldn’t surprise me if it was radio before that. But before that, it must have been just the people we knew day to day. I can certainly see having the way an authority figure used a certain word sticking in your brain—see all the ways people imitate a certain pronunciation of the word “China,” for example—but it’s odd any way you look at it. Maybe it’s from our hunter-gatherer past and the need to know what sounds were from our environment.

Whatever the reason, it’s why “excellent” is said by Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, or else sometimes Harry Shearer. “Inconceivable,” of course, is Wallace Shawn. “Multipass” is not a word that gets used much outside of The Fifth Element, which means it doesn’t really count, but if it ever becomes a common word elsewhere, we’ll all hear it in Milla Jovovich’s voice anyway. “Walker,” curiously, tends to be in Sally Field’s ranting voice from Soapdish.

What’s truly funny is how seldom these are the people thought of as movie stars. Obviously there are none in my head in Tom Cruise’s voice, but there aren’t any in Harrison Ford’s, either. “Sardines” calls up Carol Burnett, who’s not a small name, goodness knows, but she’s one of the biggest names who summons this kind of thing for me. There are few from the Golden Age of Hollywood at all, even though I watch movies from then all the time. Sentences, yes—can you hear anyone but Humphrey Bogart when it comes to the stuff dreams are made of or the beginnings of beautiful friendships?—but no single words. If the phenomenon is as young as that, it makes it even stranger.