Remy wrote: >However the BBC and other UK providers have dropped "Received Pronunciation" >and we are greeted with wild accents ranging from Brummie to Jordie. Nothing >wrong with this as long as it is mild and correct and this does much to drop >the comic connotations associated with such accents (think Red Dwarf and >Lester or Cat for that matter) but a "posh accent" was a requisite for >social mobility. I'm not saying bring back the bad old days but things have >gone a little to far!?
Remy, I think I might be the only American on this list who has the remotest idea what you are talking about. RP, or Standard English, as some have called it, was made up out of whole cloth about 1870 in an attempt to create a uniform accent thereby not separating people in England by region or class. Naturally, it had the opposite effect, as do all policy wonk schemes. So it was taught eventually only in the public schools, which we Americans call private schools, hence the term "public school accent." Hope I'm not oversimpifying this. Even though I'm a plain American redneck, I have to say it's sad to see all the really grand accents disappear. The curator of the Queen's pictures, whose name and actual title I can't recall, makes everyone else in England sound like a cockney. But he's pretty old and when he and his contemporaries go, that will be about it. I wonder how things sound around White's and the RAC these days. The grandest, haughtiest accent I ever heard in person, was that of Michael Straight, whose sister Bea was a friend of mine. Everything he said sounded so witheringly condescending that a few words from him seemed to drop the temperature of the room a few degrees. I imagine his old pals, Philby, Blount, Burgess and Maclean had similar accents. Michael Straight, you may recall, bailed out of his Soviet spying duties just in time not to be associated with the more famous four. He was later editor and publisher of the New Republic, a magazine of the far left that Jed has recently characterized as "mainstream". >A friend of mine out in Kent who is some 30 years older than me puts it this >way: all human activity goes in cycles from one extreme to another, be it >accents, foreign policy, people's suspicions of foreigners, how fathers hold >their children (oops what will people think if I hold my little girl in my >lap just a bit to long? Am I cold or am I a perv?). >The only conclusion is that most people are dumb and need to be lead or at >least have an example set to them. Hey, just a minute. Didn't you say earlier that you had "faith in democracy"? >There you go I'm non-authoritarian authoritarian, non-patrician patrician of >the right liberal leaning kind. Winston Churchill said that the United State and Great Britain were two countries separated by a common language. And let me translate a few things for you here, Remy. In the U.K. and in Europe, you call your socialists "socialists". Here in the U.S., we call our socialists "liberals". How that came to be I am not sure. I can't think of anything more illiberal than socialism. Since liberals have hijacked the word, we have had to make up a replacement. That is "libertarian". Pretty confusing, no? BTW, Remy, how did a nice Brit boy such as yourself get that suspiciously froggy name? M. (Who has wandered far OT) _______________________________________________ Join Excite! - http://www.excite.com The most personalized portal on the Web!
