The British need to get over it...

Hunter   Tue Apr 27, 2010 10:09 pm GMT
Quintus, you talk about "the stiffly formal delivery and much higher pitch of her voice"; but on the other hand you say that "nothing at all" in the early EII voice elicits a negative response from you.

Is the latter statement entirely true, in view of the former?
Uriel   Wed Apr 28, 2010 1:01 am GMT
<<If the trend may be said to have begun with Alec Guinness and Stan Laurel, then on to Richard Burton, Liz Taylor, Peter Sellers, Benny Hill, Quentin Crisp and Helen Mirren, you may be sure it continues a-pace with Bob Hoskins, Elijah Wood and Robert Pattinson and so on. (Necessarily, these names are very selective instances of what is a huge phenomenon in the States.) >>

Elijah Wood is American, Quintus. From Michigan.
Quintus   Wed Apr 28, 2010 5:29 am GMT
Hunter asks :
>>Is the latter statement entirely true, in view of the former?>>


Yes, entirely true.

Once you've learned that I'm an admirer of opera singers, and you've read the descriptions again, you'll probably understand that there is no discrepancy.
Quintus   Wed Apr 28, 2010 5:31 am GMT
>>Elijah Wood is American, Quintus. From Michigan.>>


Michigan ??- Can't get more American that that !

I must have been thinking of someone else. But you got the gist of it with all the other names : British Invasion.
Quintus   Wed Apr 28, 2010 7:28 am GMT
Perhaps part of the reason for the confusion over Elijah Wood (born and raised in Iowa) :

---
May 7, 2007 - The New York Daily News asked Elijah Wood why he suddenly sounded like he had a British accent. "Do I? I was just in London for two and a half months working on a film called 'The Oxford Murders,'" he explained. So was his character British? "No, American! But I was there, and I guess my accent is sort of a sponge for whatever I'm around."
---
Quintus   Wed Apr 28, 2010 7:37 am GMT
~ but I reckon Daniel Radcliffe was the actor I had in mind for the British list. They do bear a superficial resemblance to each other, he and Wood, and I've not seen any of their films besides.
Damian in Edinburgh   Wed Apr 28, 2010 1:15 pm GMT
I can't get my head round any British person of the present generation having such a name as Elijah - and to top it all his second name is Jordan - and he's only a year older than I am, but as he was born and raised in Iowa I suppose that explains everything. Does he have three sisters called Faith, Hope and Charity I wonder?

Surely it would be impossible for Elijah to pick up a British accent during the two and a half months he claimed he spent here? "The Oxford Murders"?....I've never heard of them, unless it was connected to the "Inspector Morse" TV drama series set in and around the city of Oxford, and now it's follow up series in the name of "Lewis" also filmed in Oxford....Lewis now taking over the role of the prime crime investigator after all the years he spent being Morse's sidekick, Morse having since shuffled off the mortal coil.

Oxford murders.....well, each time I've been to Oxford it's always seemed to be an exceedingly law abiding city with no battered, bloodied bodies lying under bushes at all - a vibrant and lively city, yes, but what would you expect with all those thousands of students knocking about all over the place - but not the sort of place with the kind of murder rate as portrayed in eiter of those two TV series.

I suppose it's a larger version of that outwardly quaint and beautiful wee English village called Midsomer....a haven of peace and tranquility set in the glorious countryside of Southern England somewhere - a serene setting which harbours a very dark side of homicidal criminality via the "Midsomer Murders" TV series.....a cosy village complete with 12th century church and 12th century pub, an unctuous vicar and a matey landlord, a do-gooder of a smiley spinster on a bike and a bosimy blonde temptress pursuing the newly qualified and very dishy village doctor - the village being home to no more than about a thousand people at the very most, but one in which an average of about four of them come to a sticky end each week in a variety of gruesome ways. Either they ship in replacements each week, probably in the form of immigrants from Eastern Europe or the Sudan, or else the whole series will come to a natural ending when there are no more villagers left to kill off.

And they all talk in "posh" RPEE at its very best, including each week's murderer wh is always tracked down and arrested....except for the rustic speaking village idiot who always seems to manage to escape being one of the murder victims.
Damian in Edinburgh   Wed Apr 28, 2010 1:56 pm GMT
Never mind the British getting over anything - will the present British Prime Minister Gordon Brown get over this? Campaiging in Rochdale, Lancashire, England, for his Labour Party earlier today he chatted with this woman - a Mrs Duffy - who expressed her concerns to him over the issue of immigration into the UK and the Labour party's seemingly lax attitude towards it, an issue which genuinely worries a large number of people in the UK.

She said her piece to him, and he said his to her, but when he left her and got into his car he forgot to disconnect his microphone attachment.

Mrs Duffy was somewhat miffed to hear what the muppet Brown had to say about her and the type of woman he thought she was when way out of ear shot....she said she was about to post off her postal vote ballot paper in which she had voted for Brown's Labour Party but she has since torn it up into little pieces and binned it.

Aren't unguarded moments just fantastic! Mrs Duffy will probably now go down in history as the woman who deprived the Labour Party of victory in the 2010 General Election in the UK.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/election-2010/7645072/Gordon-Brown-calls-campaigner-bigoted-woman.html
Damian in Edinburgh West   Wed Apr 28, 2010 7:28 pm GMT
Under the heading of "How should I vote in the General Election on 06 May?" I completed in full a very comprehensive and searching survey and questionnaire about every conceivable issue and official policy affecting us here in the UK. The purpose of this whole exercise was to discover which political party I should vote for on 06 May based on all the answers I gave and options I selected in the survey.

This is my result:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/election-2010/7541285/How-should-I-vote-in-the-General-Election-2010.html

My home constituency of Edinburgh West is currently held by the Liberal Democrats with a majority in 2005 of 13,600 over the Conservatives in second place, and Labour way down in third place - no hopers in this area.

Oh wow!!!.....I'm a true blue little Conservative and I never even suspected it! Now I feel like something out of a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta.
Trimac20   Thu Apr 29, 2010 5:27 am GMT
Poms whinge about anything, but I don't see alot of English complaining about how bad other forms of English are. Indeed I often hear them complain more about regional dialects like Brummie or Geordie.

Americans who say they 'don't have an accent' annoy me more, as if everyone in the world should speak GenAm. They don't realise to foreigners they have a very strong accent.
Crunch   Thu Apr 29, 2010 8:03 am GMT
This whole Mrs Duffy affair is a perfect demonstration of how spineless the British are. From every side there is enormous spinelessness being displayed.

Mrs Duffy, he thinks you're a bigot. Yep. It's his opinion and he's entitled to it. You could be a bigot. Tough. Not only could she well be a bigot, but she's almost definitely a cunt too.

Mr Brown, you fucked up big time, yes. But it was a political fuck up, not a moral fuck up. Don't retract it and pretend like you "didn't mean it". Don't go bawling and apologising. You think she's a bigot. Good on you. What's wrong with thinking she's a bigot? Fuck her feelings.

British Media and Public. What a bunch of self-righteous cunts. Need any more be said?
Rene   Thu Apr 29, 2010 5:10 pm GMT
Elijah's a pretty popular name in the states, Damian, as are the names Zachariah and Noah. The parent's don't have to be particularly religious to do this, they just do. Over here, it's just a name. By the same token, I've never met a girl called Hope, so that may be more myth than reality.

I don't see what's so strange about Biblical names anyway. Michael, Daniel, Chloe, and Rebecca are all fairly popular names in Britain, aren't they?
O   Thu Apr 29, 2010 9:58 pm GMT
I knew a girl named Hope in elementary school. She's the only one though.
Wintereis   Fri Apr 30, 2010 4:56 am GMT
The government study showed that 21% to 23% of adult Americans were not "able to locate information in text", could not "make low-level inferences using printed materials", and were unable to "integrate easily identifiable pieces of information."

Tes, and if you bothered to look . . . you would find the same basic information about the literacy rate in the U.K.
Wintereis   Fri Apr 30, 2010 5:00 am GMT
"I must have been thinking of someone else. But you got the gist of it with all the other names : British Invasion."

No, Liz Taylor was born in Britain, but from American parents and she has spent most of her life in the U.S. Also, you have to realize that the popularity of certain people may have absolutely nothing to do with the way they speak. Your connection of the two is rather feeble.