Better English: Brits or Americans

Damian in Edinburgh   Fri Dec 11, 2009 4:59 pm GMT
*Scroats and slappers

Britslang for lowlife State funded screwball bonking machines and the equally lowlife, equally State funded bonkees who willingly lower their knickers if it means another possible bairn which in turn means more State funds being screwed out of the taxpayers and then generously supplied on demand by the Treasury courtesy of the profligate, wastrel Labour Government currently sullying this green and pleasant land....and whose days are now numbered.....Hallelujah! Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition....
danny   Fri Dec 11, 2009 7:48 pm GMT
American English is all-around better and cooler. I love how Americans talk - the sounds they make and their intonation, I love the way Americans choose their words, I love the way Americans form their sentences which seems considerably different from the way Brits do it.

To people who think British is better... well what can I say. Tastes differ and you're entitled to your own opinion I guess, just PLEASE don't act as if RP is somehow more nobler or more refined. It's not, it's just the variety of English which happened to develop in and around London which due to that city's importance has come to be considered the "literary" English. It's spoken by only about 20% of Britain's population though and many local dialects differ from it way more than GAE does.

Also, I hope you know that RP is not the "original" English. American English has changed in some ways over the past 300 years, but it also actually preserved many traits of the English of that era that became obsolete in England. So in some regards, American English is more "original".

Oh I forgot to introduce myself. Hi everyone, my name is Danny, I'm 20 years old, I'm from Russia.
danny   Fri Dec 11, 2009 7:52 pm GMT
Also, I hate how British is imposed on learners of English as if it were the only acceptable variant, without giving them a chance to choose for themselves, at least that's how it is in Russia.
Jasper   Fri Dec 11, 2009 8:11 pm GMT
DAMIAN: Americans swear less often? Hmmm.

The important thing to remember is that people in America who would air their dirty laundry out on a show such as The Ricki Lake Show, really are the lowest rung of society, Damian. A middle-class American wouldn't dream of telling millions of viewers how her husband is sleeping with her Mother, for example.

Normal people in America have different speech patterns than those people.
Wintereis   Fri Dec 11, 2009 9:26 pm GMT
Damian in Edinburgh   Fri Dec 11, 2009 9:28 pm GMT
Jasper - or any other native speaker of the English language - could you make any real and meaningful sense of the following phrase as spoken by that charlatan Graham Stainer to the Sky News reporter in that YT clip - Stainer of course being the self styled "counsellor" involved with that rotten UK TV show aimed at the British lumpen proletariat:

"Family units are made up of family units. There could be a single parent, or two parents within that famliy unit. It's not just about the family unit - it's how you communicate within the family unit".

Those were his exact words to that bemused reporter. Do you have any idea what he was banging on about? Something about "family units" being made up of "family units".

I suppose it's this man's job to communicate with people within "family units", but the problem with the types of people appearing on such shows is that they simply don't know the meaning of the words "family unit" - they wouldn't recognise a "family unit" even if one jumped out from behind a gooseberry bush right in front of them as they were on their way down to the social welfare office to lodge another claim on our hard earned cash or to their nearest drugs dealer or off licence*. But as he said, it's not just about family units.....is it? Isn't it? Maybe not....let's ask Jeeves, he's bound to know....

*An off licence in the UK is a store selling alcohol and related items for consumption off the premises.

Did you know that dogs look up to us as human beings while cats look down on us - but pigs simply regard us as their equals?
Damian in Edinburgh   Fri Dec 11, 2009 9:33 pm GMT
***Modern Man, George Carlin***....brilliant, Wintereis! A high tech verbal genius...thanks.
Damian in Edinburgh   Fri Dec 11, 2009 9:46 pm GMT
Jasper - indirectly we "exported" to yourselves in America a guy whose parents fled to the UK to escape the Nazis and who was born on the platform of a North London tube station during an enemy air raid on London in 1943. Soon afterwards he and his parents emigrated to America and much later on he became Mayor of Cincinnati, Ohio and then presided over his own kind of Jeremy Kyle type TV show over there.

Didn't he once have a guy on his stage who wanted to marry his horse or something? And didn't one guy shoot another guy dead on his show? And we sent him over to you guys??? Now I'm dreading finding out that Ricki Lake was actually born in an abandoned warehouse in some side street in Liverpool or Glasgow....surely not.
K. T.   Sat Dec 12, 2009 1:38 am GMT
I hear swearing (I call it cussing) in movies more than I do in real life.
Yes, teenagers do it and people who are arrogant, and people who are "low class" do it as well. I don't mean poor people, but people who don't have good enough vocabularies to express their frustrations in annoying, but clever ways.
Jasper   Sat Dec 12, 2009 5:07 am GMT
^ Damian, the above poster is someone you might find on the Ricki Lake show, or the Jerry Springer show. (The latter show is the one which featured a man who wanted to marry his horse.)

I'll get back to you on your other questions.
Jasper   Sat Dec 12, 2009 8:27 am GMT
DAMIAN:

Actually, I understood the "family unit" paragraph pretty well, although it's very poorly worded. I had to use my inner sense of intuition, as I sometimes do when you "write in Scottish". ;)

(For example, I understood every word of your rant against "bairns", although the vocabulary is foreign to me.)

He's referring to the fact that while most people's idea of a family unit is a Mom, Pop, and Children, families consisting of a Mom and Children, or a Pop and Children, are family units, too.

Moreover, he continues, the consistency of the family unit isn't important, anyway. What IS important is the level of communication.

I hope this clarifies.
Damian in Edinburgh   Sat Dec 12, 2009 3:11 pm GMT
Thank you, Jasper - so good of you to clarify what that "counsellor" man meant - it sort of confirmed what I thought he meant, but have you ever seen such a badly expressed statement before? Talk about obfuscation - he should have won some kind of booby prize for that form of verbal diarrhoea (that's how we Brits spell that word, Jasper - I know you have yur own version over there.) Thanks, too, for having the patience and determination to get past the seemingly endless load of obscenity in order to post.

At one time Antimoon had some kind of regular and effective deletion policy to deal with such idiotic and mindless exhibitions of perverse juvenile delinquency by anonymous morons, but it seems to have flown out of the window now, sadly.

There was a time when there was a routine deletion of any post which was deemed to contain obscenity or intentional disrespect, or even total irrelevancy to the topic being discussed in any thread...but not any more.
Nestor   Sun Dec 13, 2009 3:15 pm GMT
It's spoken by only about 20% of Britain's population.
.

According to Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, RP is spoken only by 3 % of Britishers, not 20%.
Trimac20   Mon Dec 14, 2009 1:46 pm GMT
@ danny

I find American English to be a string of cliches sometimes, especially those daytime soaps. I don't know, it's not just corny phrases, but the way they string words together, and the things they say are so Hollywood and predictable. Maybe it's because I tend to hear American coming through the TV, but not so much in real life. Like when I think American I think of a bitchy teenage girl saying 'eww, that is so gross!' or 'get off of me!' Those sort of cliched phrases, and the cliched cookie-cutter expressions of intonation - ugh!

Brit's have some silly sounding phrases too - as expounded on Little Britain. Phrases like 'he was well fit!' sound almost humorous to my ears. Australia probably has less of these cliches, but unfortunately is being influenced alot by the US. Kids call each other 'dude' instead of 'mate' and their intonation pattern is mirroring Americans, particularly the young, know-it-all ones on TV and movies.

Both countries have quite a large percentage of people who aren't too well versed in the language, and their fair share of articulate, educated speakers with an understanding of grammar, but also of the value of the laxity of grammar for expression etc.
blanc   Mon Dec 14, 2009 1:48 pm GMT
Did you also notice in the 90s how characters in teen soaps like Dawson's Creek or Gilmore Girls talked like college professors? Or any hipster type show/movie, for that matter? It seems bold, dumb phrases are the in thing now.