Chips are what you have with fish. Crisps are the proper name for what colonials call chips Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless handheld
-----Original Message----- From: "Noah P. Melnick" <[email protected]> Sender: [email protected] Date: Wed, 9 Nov 2011 21:34:21 To: feistfans-l<[email protected]> Reply-To: "feistfans-l" <[email protected]> Subject: Re: New "get to know you" question The Brits do have some funny phrases that really haven't become part of the American lexicon. E.g., blimey, bollix, chips (they're fries dammit), etc.... On Nov 9, 2011, at 2:24 PM, "Raymond E. Feist" <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Nov 9, 2011, at 9:57 AM, Earl Borah wrote: > >>> A language is a living, evolving thing, and could change rapidly before it >>> became "fixed" by print. >>> >>> Best, R.E.F. >> >> How much has modern media (radio, television, movies) helped "fix" >> language? When an entire country - or even much of the world - is >> watching the same television shows and movies, does the pronunciation >> and dialect from Hollywood help minimize the local variances we'd >> otherwise have? >> > >> Specifically -- while I recognize there's still a difference in >> southern speech and New York speech compared to what I hear every day >> here in Oregon, are those differences less than they'd otherwise be >> due to the prevalence of audio media? How does that effect compare to >> the effect of print media? >> >> What happens when a show like Doctor Who becomes popular in the US -- >> does it affect our speech patterns much? How big a deal is American >> television/movie to the rest of the English-speaking world -- are we >> affecting their speech patterns? >> >> Not that I expect anyone to have a definitive answer, they're just all >> questions I find interesting. >> > > > Very good point. First radio introduced Americans to "mediated speech" which > was more or less eastern, upscale (even among some broadcasters sort of a > "Mid-Atlantic" half US/half British, witness someone like Alistair Cook) > which is a bit like monied Americans like FDR spoke. That evolved into what > is now modern "Mediated American Speech," which pretty much is a bit of a > broad midwestern twang toned down a great deal and softened, witness Walter > Cronkite or Tom Brokaw. If you go to cities like Atlanta, you don't hear the > broad southern accent you here in more rural parts of Georgia. If you go to > San Francisco or L.A. among non-ethnic neighborhoods, you hear a westernized > melding of accents from all over the nation. > > Yes, media is making us all slowly sound alike. > > Importing shows from Britain has little effect. Ironically, a much smaller > nation, there's almost nothing like the melding of speech we have in the US. > Perhaps it's due to there being more of a connection between accent and class > and neighborhood in the UK? I don't know. > > Best, R.E.F. > > ---- > www.crydee.com > > Never attribute to malice what can satisfactorily be explained away by > stupidity. > > > > > > >
