Hey everyone, ro b ot god just turned 27.

[side_show]

get out of my brain, dude.

Nothin' at all!

In my singles linguistics class I ...

They combined dating and linguistics?  Word word word, cunning linguists!  Word, word.

[pmcd9]

Maybe I watch too much BBC, but I don't think East London cockney accents sound particularly intelligent, even to most Americans. Fun to listen to and perhaps even "exotic" in a mundane kind of way, but I think most Americans with half an ear could hear the class difference between cockney and RP.

Anybody who has watched Mary Poppins knows this.

[miles]

They combined dating and linguistics?  Word word word, cunning linguists!  Word, word.

Ha! I was trying to figure out how to make this joke work.

I know this has come up before but the single linguistics class I took was taught by David Bowie, who learned at the feet of Professor Wombat.

Also, because the class was at BYU where you basically are expected to get a marriage license in addition to a degree, it kind of was a singles linguistics class.

[wombat]

I had forgotten that! How could I forget that? It is such a wondrous coincidence.

[wombat]

Anybody who has watched Mary Poppins knows this.

Or anyone who'd watched My Fair Lady, you'd think. But as a matter of actual fact most of them don't.

Some people just don't have an ear for it and an hour and a half movie doesn't exactly work as training. Like I can't for the life of me remember bird songs or frog calls, even though I am trained as a musician and you'd think it wasn't all that different.

Also, you know, some people just use language, they don't spend a lot of time thinking about it, like posting on internet messageboards that get into arguments about prescriptive grammar.

[wombat]

What happens to people who spend too much time arguing about language.

[Nabubrush]

Well, and Mary Poppins and My Fair Lady and etc represent pretty extreme examples of accents. I suspect the zookeeper probably wasn't babbling in rhyming slang all the time.

[wombat]

No, and that's an interesting point because if she had been, then you couldn't give anyone credit for identifying her accent anyway. That's vocabulary, not pronunciation, so if that's what people take away from those movies they haven't actually learned anything about the accent.

[jay-ell]

No, and that's an interesting point because if she had been, then you couldn't give anyone credit for identifying her accent anyway. That's vocabulary, not pronunciation, so if that's what people take away from those movies they haven't actually learned anything about the accent.

Rhyming slang is fascinating. There's such a strict pattern to it, but sounds so utterly random. I can't follow it at all, because it's rarely used on TV, and only then to display how incomprehensible it is.

But it seems like it's no worse than any other slang system -- how many people outside the US would be able to parse, "I blew my stash on PBR, so I was totally buzzed, but there was this knockout at the bar and she was game so we went back to my pad." Especially if it was uttered with a thick accent of any kind on top of it.

[Nabubrush]

There's always these posh bastards.

[KeithHernandez]

What does shelving a Bennie mean and why?  No cheating

[jay-ell]

There's always these posh bastards.

I love that movie. Yes, it's a film I've actually seen! I think Brad Pitt is only hot in movies where he gets his ass beat. Snatch, Fight Club, totally shaggable. Legends of the Fall, not so much.

His character in Snatch reminds me of Fenster in The Usual Suspects. That's some high-quality acting, right there.

IN OTHER NEWS: Hot Cockney Action. You guys probably know all about this, but I'm behind the times. My BFF introduced me to her music this past weekend, seemed apropo.