Barbaric, backwards ancestor worship

[Shane_Simmons]

I ain’t bovvered

[GilbertWham]

Not to mention ‘aluminum’.

[pixleshifter]

It’s buoy that gets me. It’s pronounced ‘boy’. Because it has buoyancy, is buoyant, and buoys on the water.

[Shane_Simmons]

@Donald_Petersen

I mean outside of Hee Haw and The Dukes of Hazzard you couldn’t find a southern accent in any context other than a deliberately southern character used to make a specific point (often no more than a gag at southern people’s expense).

That’s the thing TV taught me as a kid: only ignorant-ass hicks spoke with a drawl.

@Donald_Petersen

But eventually it creeped me out. The fact that, any day I felt like it, I could go get a six-dollar haircut, borrow a shiny pair of shoes, step into any job interview I liked and not have to alter my accent at all to be treated like a respectable fellow was and is profoundly unfair.

As someone who comes from 100 miles away from St. Louis, and who had to alter his accent, this. Having a drawl is a sure way to not be taken seriously.

@Donald_Petersen

I’ve left out a lot of things that were much, much worse when it comes to sexism and racism in my life, but this little anecdote was somewhat relevant to the topic at hand. Please don’t take it as the only thing that ever occurred to me as unjust in my life.

And it saddens me that you have to add that disclaimer…

[GilbertWham]

It work?

[Ladyfingers]

Clearly it’s injustice, but the question is who in their right mind would not want their kids to be taught how to pass for someone of a higher class? It’s capitulation, certainly, but what an advantage.

[shaddack]

@GilbertWham

A dictionary attack?

You mean, beating the suspect with a dictionary until he coughs up the password?

[Donald_Petersen]

Well, you make a good point, but my awareness of this phenomenon makes it stick in my craw. Call me out of my right mind, but I honestly don’t want my children to take advantage of such an unfair thing. I love the little boogers, but enough is enough; I do not want them to unfairly benefit from an unfair social system. If things don’t profoundly change in the next decade or two, my kids will enjoy quite enough of an advantage by being white Americans who have parents that love them and spend plenty of time and money on their upbringing. And the fact that they speak in what might as well be America’s Accent in the way that either the Yankees or the old Dallas Cowboys were America’s Team also gives them a huge leg up in the way that I described above.

But that doesn’t mean I have to like it. I suppose in some circles my kids might enjoy greater privilege if they spoke with a Boston Brahmin accent like Thurston Howell III, but does that mean I should encourage them to adopt such an atrocious affectation?

Wanting my kids to “pass for someone of a higher class” implies to me that class has some legitimacy, whether earned or otherwise, and I instinctively recoil from such an idea.

[shaddack]

@MarjaE

Formal English isn’t all that helpful for communication, though.

I read many sorts of Englishes, and the formal, or at least formal-ish, form is much easier to process. For both me as a person and for machine searches/processing.

@MarjaE

First, today’s search engines often yield results which don’t include the keywords.

They still rely on the keywords that have to be indexed and then processed. This is a somewhat irrelevant argument.

@MarjaE

Second, today’s search engines often yield results which are horse-seo.

And the SEO optimization usually uses the proper spellings, therefore burying the misspelled data even further.

@MarjaE

Third, today’s search engines often merge superficially similar names and words, such as Arimer with Larimer, or Germanic with German, even with quotes.

Didn’t encounter this much in my searches, but saw it a few times. When it happens, use “-larimer” and “-germanic”, with the minus sign and quotes, to prevent the added ones from diluting the results.

@MarjaE

Fourth, the same word or phrase may have different meanings in different places and times, such as population and estimate, so that searching for these two words might yield sources which use estimate to mean commentary on someone’s awesomeness, instead of informed opinion of something’s size, scale, and/or number.

That’s why you combine them with other words.

Now take all the problems you described (and that can be handled with some practice), and multiply them with the fuzziness of inaccurate spellings and poor sentence structures. And you get from the bad you described to way way worse.

And then there is the problematics of machine translations…

[shaddack]

@Donald_Petersen

Wanting my kids to “pass for someone of a higher class” implies to me that class has some legitimacy, whether earned or otherwise, and I instinctively recoil from such an idea.

What about wanting them to be understood without much effort when they talk? Accents, especially the heavy ones, can get into the way pretty hard. Granted, English is not as bad as the plethora of Chinese dialects, but the Mandarin Chinese solves it for them and some equivalent in the form of “Mandarin English” is a useful concept.

No need to shoehorn class issues into everything.

[MarjaE]

@shaddack

They still rely on the keywords that have to be indexed and then processed. This is a somewhat irrelevant argument.

Except that the keywords aren’t there.

@shaddack

Didn’t encounter this much in my searches, but saw it a few times. When it happens, use “-larimer” and “-germanic”, with the minus sign and quotes, to prevent the added ones from diluting the results.

“-Larimer” and “-German”. I’ve tried it. I often end up with results that exclude terms I’m specifically searching for, and include ones I’m specifically excluding, on both DuckDuckGo and BeEvil.

@shaddack

That’s why you combine them with other words.

Of course, I know that, I usually use quite long search phrases.

@shaddack

Now take all the problems you described (and that can be handled with some practice),

And the patience to go through hundreds of pages of mostly-irrelevant results.

@shaddack

and multiply them with the fuzziness of inaccurate spellings and poor sentence structures. And you get from the bad you described to way way worse.

Not everything has standard spellings? Consider the various renderings of Chernyakhov or Cherniakhiv or Chernjakhowo or…

[daneel]

A croggie is a ride on the crossbar of someone’s bike (or the stunt pegs, as we did it). A jitty is an alleyway. Mi duck is just a term of endearment. I can’t remember too many other words - ote for anything, cob for bread roll, wazzock as an insult…

I’m only first (and last) generation East Midlander, so I never really spoke like a local anyway. Actually got mildly bullied at school for talking posh (basically sticking extra 'R’s in after 'A’s). Luckily my dad never really had a Cornish accent, not sure how I would have turned out talking.

[shaddack]

@MarjaE

Except that the keywords aren’t there.

The results must be found in some way. There was apparently some sort of correlation between text strings you asked and text strings that were in the indexed files; what exactly did happen only the search engine software knows.

@MarjaE

“-Larimer” and “-German”. I’ve tried it. I often end up with results that exclude terms I’m specifically searching for, and include ones I’m specifically excluding, on both DuckDuckGo and BeEvil.

Are you sure the author of the text you are looking for spelled it correctly?

[jerwin]

I thought there was a sort of southern california vibe to Skywalker’s whine.

[Ladyfingers]

If anyone’s interested, I was raised in South Africa during the '80s. The school I went to was a government institution, but was run in the mould of the English public school, with boaters and blazers and all that sort of thing.

My parents are second- and third-generation children of a generalised European ancestry, and for various reasons were bereft of accents identifiably South African to anyone but other South Africans. I picked it up and also took my teachers’ corrections to heart, and am now stuck/blessed with an utterly unidentifiable “hot potato” accent that sounds oddly “posh” to most people. And I’m not posh at all, really your very basic lower middle class schlub.

English-language TV and radio was presented in something approaching Received Pronunciation until the late ‘80s. What I saw happening to accents in South Africa as the country liberalised was an embracing of natural accents, and a general blurring between the Afrikaans and English South African accent. This made my accent distinctly unfashionable and left me as a sort of relic, making people regard me as snooty and putting-on-airs. It doesn’t help that I’m shy and come off as haughty. It endeared me immensely to a certain generation of women, but was a bit laughable to my own generation, and drew occasional mockery from English-speaking South Africans and suspicion from Afrikaners (leftovers of the ol’ Boa Woa). It was of no advantage to me in South Africa, almost certainly precluding me from any client-facing role because I would apparently come off as smug and superior or worse - English!

Since leaving the country (ptui!), I am absolutely thrilled to have no identifiable South African accent, because whatever image the readers of this little story are conjuring in their heads about my general countenance (I imagine it’s a man in khaki shorts kicking an African labourer) are mental images I’m more than glad to be able to avert in foreign friends. Australians can be a little suspicious and derisive of my accent because it sounds a bit too hoity-toity, but living in Sydney means that the vast majority of people I meet aren’t Australian anyway.

I suppose I’m saying that in one’s own country, having a cultivated accent and a nerdy reticence to use dialect and slang sounds affected and can be a problem, whereas as a foreigner it’s bloody great. Thumbs up for elocution lessons from me.

[aeon]

Likewise I haven’t used this Forest dialect in a long while. Few understand a greeting of “Ow bist-ee, ol’ butt?” (Also hear it spoken, albeit toned down a lot).

My own take (having grown up with a dialect that leaves an accent widely considered to denote stupidity) is that schools should teach a standard accent, while making it plain that it’s for classroom, work and formal use. Then encourage regional variation outside because they are interesting and losing dialects impoverishes the language.

[daneel]

Adding this, because amongst my friends this was considered quite amusing recently:

[miasm]

Why?
<huh?>

[daneel]

Just the fact that she threw in some local dialect and a (reasonable) attempt at the accent. Ay up mi duck isn’t a phrase you’d expect to hear…

[Ladyfingers]

Incidentally, one odd benefit of cultivated elocution is that (I think) it allows you to learn and imitate other accents better. I think that an accent tending towards RP will tend to have a greater distinction between different vowels and consonants (the American cod/caught merge has always struck me as verbal laziness, and the flettened vahls of South Africa very grating) and so you have a greater well of sounds from which to draw.