Most evenings my daughter asks what she needs to eat off her dinner plate in order to have some pessert.
My little sister used to say vegpetals (with a long a). It was pretty damn cute.
That is the most wonderful thing since the hot dog boy. Maybe more wonderful, since he wasn't being a little fucker.
Kids say the darndest things! Next Friday: cat blogging!
Awwwwww.
Ogged has gone mushy-headed on us.
For the first few years I could talk, the only I could pronounce spaghetti was 'pasketti'.
One of my sisters murdered the language as a youngster. Spaghetti was 'basketti', which isn't all that unusual, but I've never run into another kid who included "Give us some steak and jelly bread" in the Lord's Prayer.
wistonsin.
makes me feel wistful, just thinking about it.
when you wist, upon a sin/
makes no difference, who you're in!
when you wist upon a sin, yo dweems, tum, twoooo!
A nephew last year informed me that for Halloween he would dress up as "Yuke." Like from Star Wars. I replied that I, too, loved "Yuke," replacing the "L" with a "Y," when I was his age. And he stopped me and said, "no, I'm going as Yuke."
This is disgusting, coming from Ogged especially. We are a sophisticated, metrosexual group. From here on out we can expect girfriend --> cute little dog --> Ogged Jr. in quick succession.
At a certain age (probably 3-4) my son said "Stroot" for "Squirt".
11: true metrosexuals get a cute little dog first.
11: Aren't "girlfriend" and "cute little dog" sort of demographically inconsistent, if you know what I mean and I think you do?
13--
i don't see why you say that.
i've seen lots of guys carrying cute little dogs and calling each other "girlfriend".
so?
I replied that I, too, loved "Yuke," replacing the "L" with a "Y," when I was his age. And he stopped me and said, "no, I'm going as Yuke."
This is pretty common, actually; kids' articulatory capabilities lag behind their auditory perception for a few years.
13: not with the `metrosexual' demographic.
15--
but if he could tell 'luke' from 'yuke' when listening to anmik,
why couldn't he tell them apart when listening to the goddamn movie??
there's still a little bit splaining to do here, i think.
(in addition to the fact that he thought 'anmik' was 'annikin', of course.)
OK, big bouncy lovable dog. We regret the error. And probably the dog comes before the gf.
10: My oldest nephew was completely incomprehensible at a certain young age (2, 3, I don't exactly know), but he talked all the time and got very upset when you didn't carry on the conversation with the answers he required, not just repeating his sounds back to him. I admit I got a kick out of repeating, "I don't understand a word you're saying" while he grew more and more frustrated.
kids' peoples' articulatory capabilities lag behind their auditory perception for a few years.
Because, you know, dogs are easy to please but gfs are always demanding that you find the g-spot.
19: I had a cousin who would mix 3 languages, two of which I didn't know. That was fun for both of us.
21--
you've clearly got a very undemanding dog.
By beloved grandnephew (barely 3) went from unintelligible to articulate in about 3-4 months.
My daughter, when 1 year old, referred to the Buddha as Buba. Why would my 1-year old daughter talk about the Buddha? Because she was Enlightened. It's genetic, unlike IQ.
19, 24: That was kind of how Sally learned to talk -- she'd burble on very articulately sounding, but not in anything recognizable as English, when she was around one year old -- it sounded like full sentences, but not words I knew. And then over the next couple of months, I started being able to pull a word here and there out of the stream, until fairly soon I understood her complete sentences. But she never seemed to be intentionally using isolated words to communicate. (Newt, sadly, suffers from second-kid syndrome. He's clearly learned to talk, volubly, but I couldn't tell you when or how it happened. He did have a very cute inability to pronounce initial 's' in a consonant blend for awhile -- he'd come up to sit on my lap saying " 'nuggle?")
Same sister as the earlier comment used to ramble on and on and on and on and on and on and then end with a pensive and articulate "I think." Over and over.
second-kid syndrome
My mom tells me I just made car and truck noises till the age of two, then started talking, pretty much in complete sentences. Is this common?
32: That's not the Grover Norquist of the future, is it?
Same sister as the earlier comment used to ramble on and on and on and on and on and on and then end with a pensive and articulate "I think." Over and over.
My daughter went through this with stories she made up, with her sole narrative device being the phrase "And THEN ... "
My mom tells me I just made car and truck noises till the age of two, then started talking, pretty much in complete sentences. Is this common?
I took "second kid syndrome" here to mean "I have no idea when the little guy passed any of this developmental milestones because I stopped paying attention what's his name again?"
he'd come up to sit on my lap saying " 'nuggle?"
Ow, my ovaries.
She also would have been happy with a language that indicated possession in its definite articles, given the number of times she would ask if she could 'sit the lap the dad.'
33: Nah, the syndrome is the same one that leads to a million pictures of the first kid as a baby, and two or three of the second. Nothing odd about how Newt learned to talk that I noticed, but I wasn't focused on it to the point where I could tell you much about how it happened. But he does talk; he is the Ancient Mariner of small boys.
37: I was afraid of that. I feel so dejected.
he is the Ancient Mariner of small boys.
"I am an Ancient Mariner and I toppeth one of free."
38: It was exactly that cute. Cuter, if possible.
The #6 kid in my family didn't get a single baby picture, except one in a group. #7 was several years later and got a few. Both were accidents.
dogs are easy to please but gfs are always demanding that you find the g-spot
Of course, you do have to express your dog's anal glands from time to time, so there is that.
I can't get the image out of my head of ogged kneeling in front of this boy, pulling his shirt up, and kissing his belly Putinically.
The #6 kid in my family didn't get a single baby picture, except one in a group. #7 was several years later and got a few. Both were accidents.
The pictures, or the kids?
My father was the 9th of 10, and he is fond of telling me that he never owned a new article of clothing until he was in his 20s, and that he never got a piece of chicken that wasn't back or gizzard before he left home.
Accidental kids. I can't remember how old we were when we told them that. Probably about 5.
When my son was almost three, we were walking down the street on a miserably hot and humid July day, when he turned to me and said, "The sun is angry."
At the risk of threadjacking, a quote from Dean Donne to close the week on an inspiring note:
"All in all, is from the love of God; but there is something for God to love; there is a man, there is a soul in that man, there is a will in that soul; and God is in love with this man, and this soul, and this will, and would have it. Non amor ita egenus et indigus, ut rebus quas diligit subjiciatur, says St. Augustine excellently: the love of God to us is not so poor a love, as our love to one another; that his love to us should make him to subject to us, as ours does to them whom we love; but Superfertur, says that father, and our text, he moves above us; he loves us, but with a power, a majestical, an imperial, a commanding love...."
51: That your son has a literary imagination strikes me as somewhat different from a speech impediment. But maybe it's six of one, half dozen of the other. That said, it's quite a good turn of phrase. I hope you don't mind that I've just used it in an essay I'm writing. Unattributed, of course, as a footnote reading: "Invisible Adjunct's son, said while on a walk, some time in the past, notes in author's possession," might not do me any favors with my editor.
When she was first learning to speak, Caroline would say "Ig boo" for "thank you" and "pie fishy" for "privacy" (as in NOO! Daddy no have pie fishy in potty!)
These days the only cute thing remaining is "breffkist" for "breakfast," which I think is a pronunciation is common as pissgetti.
Joey is still a pile of cute, though. After he tells a joke he says "I funny."
My two-year-old calls the frozen treat a "popstickle." I don't think this is a speech impediment, though - I'm pretty sure this is because she knows the name of the object at the center of a popsicle.
She also seldom says "no" any more, substituting "No thank you" and "I don't think so."
20: I suspect it's largely the other way around from age 50 or so on.
10: When Caroline was 2 1/2, she pointed to a leaf and announced "that yeaf." Playing along I said, "Yes, that's a yeaf."
"NO not yeaf, YEAF" she said angrily.
Oh yes, we still set the table with napped-kins at our house.
My husband got left with babysitters with his own elaborate glossary as a toddler. Whereas around the same age I was capable of articulate guilt-tripping, e.g. "It makes me sad that you call me Katie when my name is Katherine."
I'm realizing with my nephew that it's actually a little hard to pinpoint the first word: he says "da da da" around his father, but I'm pretty sure it's sheer coincidence, because he makes that sound anyway.
Y'all are gonna regret starting this thread.
Favorite PKisms:
machine = tubchine
remote = tubmote
coke = tut (rhymes with put)
kitty = key (this was his first word)
His nickname was (is) Mr. Gr/nty, so by extension I was Mr. Mama for a while there. Also, all little kids are gr/nties.
Favorite phrases:
You have a point, Mama, but . . .
Actually . . .
In the way of . . .
Just wait, I'll come up with more.
57--
not da Craw! da Craw!
(for get smart fans)
Oh, how could I forget? When he was about two, he said to my good friend, "Miss Catty, you have a boofaboo kitty." Boofaboo is one of those words we still use, along with tubchine and tubmote.
Yeah, it's one of those operant conditioning things -- kid makes 'da da da' noise because it's a noise; Daddy's face lights up and he gets excited; kid says 'da da' around Daddy because Daddy's excitement is rewarding... kid eventually writes Hamlet.
63: cool. what does eating people's shoes signify?
60--
yeah, i remembered being floored by my first kid's mastery of "actually", because it was clear that she was already using it as a way of saying "you're stupid as dirt, but i'm not going to say that out loud, because i don't want to draw attention to your cognitive limitations."
"actually, i already hung up my coat!" she'd say, bright as a penny, and i'd retreat before her mastery of language, of cleanliness, of social nuance.
this was at age two or so, as i recall.
It really makes you aware of your own speech patterns. When he was two I forced myself to stop saying "I didn't get anything *done* today," because he was doing that every night before bed. Argh.
66--
actually, i don't think i ever use the phrase.
"Give us some steak and jelly bread"
My friend claims that as a child he used to pledge allegiance to "one nation, on the windowsill".
66: Another story about Sally learning to talk.
Keegan's first words were book and moon. Noah's first words were duck and boat.
We didn't realize until my younger brother was learning to write and spelling things phonetically that he had been calling suitcases "soupcases" his entire life.
69 reminds me of a niece's baptism ceremony, where PK heard the priest mention Jesus and said in that little kid "outside voice," Jesus Christ!
If I hadn't been so mortified, I'd have died laughing.
A little girl I babysat in high school couldn't say "f" or "l" sounds for about a year, and said "sh" instead. She used to freak out when she saw bugs in the house and yell "A SHY! A SHY!"
Cutest ever was Max's younger boy, who at 6 still had "r" and "w" issues, but still replaced "r" with "w." Endless fun was had by getting him to say "swirl."
Sa-wuh-wuhl.
Oh! And the babysat girl also couldn't do hard "h"s, which she replaced with "th."
"BG, are you a monkey?"
"AWB, I'm a thyooman bee-een!"
PK often uses "pacific(ally)" when he means "specific(ally)."
69 is probably my favorite story on this whole blog.
72: When I was 4 or 5 years old, my dad was the church choir director and my mom was in the choir, so I sat with an older couple at the church, usually with a coloring book. The preacher was in the middle of his sermon and said "You can have anything you want in ths world," and paused. I didn't look up, but mumbled loudly enough to be heard "That's what he thinks."
60:
I don't want to encourage you, B, but:
Favorite phrases:
Actually . . .
is pretty marvelous.
60 reminds me how endlessly funny it was to me when Max used his kids' childhood words for stuff. "Tongue" was, due to early misreading, "tounge" (toonj), and I'm glad to see this in several LOLcattisms. Max would even read it that way when reading bedtime stories, totally deadpan. I'm sure his kids go around "correcting" people at school all the time.
I grew up saying "nekkid" (southern family) and never heard "naked" until I was 8 or so. I was horrified. How could everyone else be mispronouncing this word? "Naked" still sounds stupid and Yankeeish to me.
A nephew last year informed me that for Halloween he would dress up as "Yuke." Like from Star Wars.
I think I've told the story before of resolving a fight between my son and his cousin over who got to be Obi-Wan in their game by suggesting that one of them could be Obi-Wan and the other could be OB-GYN. My nephew decided that being OB-GYN was very cool indeed, which was later reported to have required some 'splaining at his preschool.
I grew up saying "nekkid"
A friend of Buck's was a high school wrestler, and despite an otherwise unremarkable mid-Atlantic accent, says 'rassle' for 'wrestle'. Very country/cowboy sounding.
It's mysterious why these things are so cute, but they are. Recent conversation with my friend's 18-month-old, both of us in the same room, holding phones up to our ears.
Hello.
ohhhhhhh.
It's nice to speak with you.
speekoo.
I'll skip the mispronounciations and go with stories along the lines of 51, 59, etc.
My older one always uses "someone" when something happens that he doesn't like, even when he knows that we did it. "Someone pushed in my chair!" "Someone put my toys away!" "Someone wiped my face!"
Also, there was this dialogue from earlier this year (older child X 2yr 10mo, younger sibling Y 10mo, mommy M):
X: What would happen if Y had no fingers?
M: What do you think would happen?
X: He couldn't eat! What would happen if he had no head?
M: I don't know. What do you think would happen.
X: I don't know. What would happen?
M: Then he couldn't see.
X: He also couldn't eat. Maybe one day, like maybe on my birthday, X will not have a head.
M: Um, maybe.
X: Then he couldn't eat. And then we could go to the store and buy new heads!
I remember when PK told me that it's monkeys all the way down.
Ok, one mispronunciation:
When the older one was about 1.5, he got very into trucks, all on his own. His favorite was the backhoe; Unfortunately, when we were in the book store and he saw a book with one, it sounded like asshole, which he screamed over and over again because he wanted the book.
75: Our older boy does that, too. And until recently, when referring to the ocean located nearby, he'd say, "Atlantific." In that case, though, I think he really had no idea that there were two different oceans that he sometimes visists: one near Miami, the other closer at hand, near Big Sur. As I think about it, I suppose he's right in some ways: it's all one big ocean.
Also the time he set a series of balls of varying sizes on the floor in a long line, with not half bad approximate spacing and relative sizes, and then used a stuffed parrot as a pointer while explaining to me that "THIS is the sun, and THAT'S Mercury . . ." all the way down to the little one inch ball at the far end of the room "and THAT, way over THERE, is Pluto."
Oh, if the floor is open for generally cute stories...
Newt and Sally were both very good sleepers; past a year or so they hardly ever woke us up, barring illness or something. One night when Newt was about eighteen months old, I woke up at about 2 am because he was wailing, distraught. I ran for his room and swept him up out of the crib, asking what was wrong. He stopped crying, and said, very clearly and flatly, "Cake." He'd woken up and been driven to despair by the lack of cake in his crib.
So I cracked up, and got him a little piece of cake, which he crammed into his mouth with both hands, and then he lay down and went back to sleep.
84 reminds me of a talk I went to about Nigerian (specifically Yoruba) conceptions of mental health. Someone who's acting anti-socially gets yelled at, "Olori buruku!" meaning "one who chose a bad head." The idea is that you chose your head before you were born, so if you act crazy, it's your fault for choosing a bad head. But AFAIK, this is still yelled on buses a lot. (Maybe WillieStyle will correct me on details?)
I am often tempted to yell "Olori buruku!" on NYC transit.
Newt and Sally were both very good sleepers; past a year or so they hardly ever woke us up, barring illness or something.
NO FAIR.
Africans are not children, AWB, you racist.
not half bad approximate spacing and relative sizes
Don't push it, embellisher.
89: I did exactly that once when I was three! My mother still won't let me live that one down.
it's your fault for choosing a bad head
I overslept on Headpicking Day and by the time I got there, all the good ones were gone.
92: Pbbt. I should have saved it for a different thread.
89 sets a dangerous precedent, but if you insist: I recently was poking through the crap on an older external hard-drive sitting around my office. By chance, I found an MPEG file that shows our older boy, now five but twoish in the film, looking right into the camera and introducing us to "baby penguin," the imaginary animal that he'd been carrying around for a couple of months. When baby penguin "got hungry," he explains in the movie, our boy would "drive him to the zoo in my little van. He eats there." I burned the file onto a disc and gave it to my wife as part of her birthday present. She liked me for that.
91: Oh, they'll probably steal cars or something as teenagers, at which point I'll be envying you. My family are generally a sleepy people, which works out great with little kids.
I may have told this here before, but when I was small, my parents (I think they got it from my grandmother) would say 'Telephone!' whenever the phone rang.
So one day we were at church, and at this church, they followed the practice of ringing a bell during certain parts of the service. Like, in the middle of the consecration. Priest holds up the host, bell rings, I gleefully shout 'Telephone!' into the silence of the church.
93: No, really! The sun was like a basketball, Pluto and Mercury were those tiny superballs, the earth was of course one of those swag sqeezeballs that looks like the earth, Jupiter was a rubber ball with like a 4 inch diameter, etc. Seriously. It was impressive.
But the best part was the emphatic parrot-waving.
98: My kid is eleven now and it's only the last year or so that we're able to get through the night more often than not without being being awakened by an elephant tromping into our bathroom at least once a night. There are reasons he's an only child. He's also always been an early riser. I suspect he may grow up to be one of those horrible people who only need four hours of sleep a night and can be productive as hell while still getting some leisure. More likely he'll take up sleeping late when he becomes a teenager and never rise before the sun again.
I'm being pedantic, B. Jupiter's diameter is something like ten times that of the earth, and the distances are such that Pluto would have to be in your neighbor's yard.
I said "not half bad *approximate* spacing. For a 3 or 4 year old.
Come on, it was cute, you party pooper.
Ooh, planet story. A colleague's child excitedly recited to me the names of all the planets (hundred miles per hour, top of lungs) and then explained that Pluto used to be a planet but it got 'downloaded.'
Solar system scale calculator. No excuses.
99: Cala, my oldest brother did something similar during the bell-ringing/consecration of the mass, but he yelled, "THE ICE CREAM MAN!!!!"
"downloaded" is funny. PK's still kind of pissed about that.
He used to use this gesture when he wanted to interrupt, of holding his two forefingers vertically, about an inch apart, in front of his face. At some point I asked him where this gesture came from, and he explained that it was the "pause" sign on the remote.
We still use that one, too.
105: What did you ever do with that little note PK wrote at dinner?
Still have it. When I turn up dead, they'll know who to blame.
(Link duly bookmarked for use later.)
Totally cute. Next time we're in town, you're coming to the Exploratorium with us.
At some point I asked him where this gesture came from, and he explained that it was the "pause" sign on the remote.
Ok, that's awesome.
This should be re-enactable here with
||
Eh?
Fuck "OT": my thread-jacks are PK-style from here on out.
Seriously, though, Ogged, we're all invited to the ceremony, right? Just set the date and I'm sure we can come up with a bride somehow.
Kid stories like this are cute because the kids are operating not completely, but half outside our adult solar system. The logic's right there, penetrable, and the language is there, but the self-censorship isn't, and the recognized pathways aren't so damned set.
Fuckin' delightful. Makes you long for what we lose along the way. New heads all round!
My kid is regressing. When he was younger my wife was a crystal-clear "Ma-ma", but for some reason over the last 6 weeks or so she has exclusively become an equally-crystal-clear "Baa-baa".
53: Sure. Feel free to use the phrase.
I was 17 months old when my sister P. was born. My parents love to recount how, when some friends of theirs came over and were oohing and ahhing over the newborn, I sternly reprimanded them with: "Don't touch baby!"
I was 17 months old when my sister P. was born.
Wow.
Oh, wait...gestation is only 9 months. I was confused. 122 retracted.
The logic's right there, penetrable, and the language is there, but the self-censorship isn't, and the recognized pathways aren't so damned set.
That's it exactly. What amazes me is how the sense of narrative is there, and at a very early age. When my son was 2-3 years old, he was constantly asking me, "What happens next, Mommy?"
What's not there at an early age, on the other hand, is a sense of the passage of time, or of generational time, I guess. When James was maybe three, I showed him a photograph of me and P, taken when we were 5 and 4, or perhaps 4 and 3 years old. He pointed to me and said "Mommy" and then I pointed out my sister P, which seemed to make sense to him. And then he looked at me with a puzzled expression on his face, and asked, "But where's Mommy's James?" It really takes a few years to get that one across: that there's a vast stretch of time that predates your own existence, that there was a time when your parents were here but you were not yet. And it's a disturbing lesson to learn, because it inevitably points toward our mortality (which little kids do grasp, at some level, I think).
My wife's oldest sister and her brother were born in March and December of the same year.
My sister in law and Buck are May of one year to March of the next; not quite as close, but almost.
125: Because of this temporal confusion -- collapsing time and space actually -- my son delights in the idea of me as a kid, as though my childhood took place at a time only a moment before his memories began and in a place just out view of where we're standing in the present. And I promise that I was only kidding about stealing your son's intellectual property.
127--
that's nothing.
my wife and my sister in law were born only four months apart.
(but then, dealing with *her* family is my *brother's* problem).
Okay, well since the blog is totally broken I guess I'll just talk to myself. Here's a confession: I totally do this. I don't know why--I can't seem to help myself. It's not a deliberate decision, that's just the way the lyrics play in my head. I try not to say them out loud that way.
Oh, except one difference is that instead of always replacing "eye" with "thigh", I always replace "you" with "Jew".
"Have I told you lately that I love Jews?"
"With or without Jews... I can't live... with or without Jews."
"Jews give love a bad name."
"When I think about Jews I touch myself."
Oh, hey, look--the blog's not broken anymore.
Can't remember any pronunciation stories but my favorite gives a hint as to my daughter's personality.
She's about seven or eight, we're on a newish big bike on a flat straight road with no side access for miles, and it's completely empty. We're doing a bit over 100 mph when I hear her screaming "Faster, Daddy, Faster!"
The bungee-jumping, scuba diving, parachuting, and other adrenaline junkie stuff came later.
132: sure, but that's a given, right? At least I make songs of it.
Actually, Buck's Jewish boss used to do the same thing, although he was deliberately being funny.
130: Ha! My best friend (now Chasidic and living in Monsey) and I used to play that game! You know, "She loves Jews, yeah, yeah, yeah" -- but it was a contest to give pop songs Jewish content. I won (so definitively we retired the game) with "I'll send an SOS to the mohel, I'll send an SOS to the mohel . . .." I still sing it that way, actually.
My husband is 11 months older than his younger brother, which spacing I think a pretty strong argument in favour of breastfeeding, but 126 presents an argument that is even stronger.
125:
our mortality (which little kids do grasp, at some level, I think).
Really? I'm not seeing this, how little kids grasp mortality at some level.
I had a weird experience this evening w/r/t Jewish jokes. My advisor, who is very involved at his synagogue and researches Biblical stuff (tho not very pious, all told) was really glad to hear I got the teaching job at [Very Orthodox Uni]. Except that he started immediately making all these jokes about orthodox people and kinda going, "Am I right or what?" And I'm sitting there feeling like, "You know, I'm not really in a position to think Jewish jokes are cool." I just sorta laughed and went on.
This is the same reaction I got from an old student (also not-pious Jew) when I told him where I was teaching. "Heh heh... [insert I-can- make-this-joke- because-I'm-Jewish joke here]. Right?"
Now, I gather that it's SOP for non-pious Jews to be sorta weird about teh orthodox. But I feel uncomfortable when put in the position of being asked to assent. Suddenly I get nervous and humorless and say, "They're wonderful studentst! I really like them!" (I met them, and it's true; they're magnificent.) What's going on here?
(This is in the context of just getting out of an art history lecture about the pre-history of medieval anti-semitism, so maybe I'm being hypersensitive about, like, the 900 intervening years of Christian hatred.)
We get 121 too. He'll mutter under his breath, "I don't want to share my baby," or, "I don't want to share my dog." Also for himself- someone was admiring the truck on his shirt and he unhappily muttered, as if the person couldn't hear him, "Someone's looking at me. Someone's talking about me."
For the Harry Potter people, he sounds like Kreacher when he does this.
130--long ago another kid told me that john lennon sings
"baby you're a rich fat jew" behind "rich man too".
i didn't believe it, because a) john lennon was a hero, and b) our stereo was crap.
then i got better sound, and what do you know.
Now, I gather that it's SOP for non-pious Jews to be sorta weird about teh orthodox.
And, (as far as I can tell), vice versa. I worked for a small law firm with some non-pious Jewish lawyers, and some non-pious Catholicish or unaffiliated lawyers, and a bunch of orthodox clients. The orthodox clients appeared to prefer working with the gentile lawyers; things got very conflicty with the Jewish lawyers.
"keep all your money in a big brown bag, inside the zoo, etc."
so the rest of the lyrics are not inapposite to the traditional slurs.
What's funny is I also found out the reason I got that job despite the terrible interview. My advisor called up the department and explained that Bible-belty Baptists are wicked-cool about old-school Judaism.
138: To become aware of the passage of time is to become aware of our mortality. And as children become aware of the one, they do become aware of the other.
And they do ask about death. Which they become aware of in all sorts of ways ... through all but the most sanitized of children's stories, for example, where animals die, or where there's at least the threat of death to the human protagonists (which threat, okay, they typically overcome to live happily ever after, but there's still the threat of death lurking in the background, or otherwise, what was the point of the struggle?). And pets die, or elderly relations die, and so on. Seriously, even young children can, and often do, evince some sort of awareness of death.
142: In fact, I think it's "rich fag Jew," being very terrible to Brian Epstein, indeed.
For some reason, this line of conversation makes me very uncomfortable. Being unaffiliated myself, and quite religion-blind with respect to other people unless they make mention of their, uh, affiliation.
because it inevitably points toward our mortality
Proselytization is forbidden on this blog, young lady.
147- Not yet. We have this book but he doesn't get it. When we're reading it he's much more excited about pointing out the food people are eating during the funerals- "Look, they're eating apples!"
148--
there you have it. a two-fer, at least. john, john, john.
oddly enough, i don't think i would have even known what that word meant in 1967.
If we wanted Father Arnall we'd have asked for him, thank you very much.
"All the young Jews...."
"... Boogaloo Jews"
Also- irrational fear of tape measures. When filling out the nursery school info form, there was a line for "unusual fears" where we put this. Also clocks, so maybe 147 is true after all- I'm always told to go unplug the digital clock in our bedroom, and we had to take down the analog clock on his wall.
irrational fear of tape measures
They do tend to snap back suddenly.
If he conquers his fear of tape measures, he will have an advantage over those who never feared tape measures, because he will be the only one who truly respects the power of the tape measure's power.
Proselytization is forbidden on this blog, young lady.
Your words wound me, Emerson, but I make good use of my suffering by offering it up to the souls in Purgatory (which my mother used to tell me to do, when I wanted to wear knee socks instead of leotards, which heavy woollen items itched so horribly that I used to do a little dance of protest every morning, but my mother told me I would get arthritis in my knees if I didn't listen to her, and this quite apart from the souls in Purgatory).
Parsimon, for real, I think I do not quite understand the basis of your discomfort. Nobody here is really and truly trying to proselytize or convert anyone or anything like that, you know? Or am I missing something?
Well, with the leotards on it's harder to screw every guy in town. I've never understood how leotards got their sexy image.
160--
i thought 149 was just amplifying awb's reflections from 139.
i.e., yeah, you get nervous when some jews rag on other jews, but at least you would know how to play the game among southern baptists. i feel that way around all the sects.
something like that, parsimon?
And they do ask about death.
As a child, I put two and two together by reasoning that if the dinosaurs were here once and became extinct, then so would I be one day. "Et in Arcadia Ego." Apparently, I got out of bed one night, walked into the room where my parents were and asked "Am I going to die?"
To which my parents replied "You are such a fucking downer, kid. Go back to bed."
It really takes a few years to get that one across: that there's a vast stretch of time that predates your own existence, that there was a time when your parents were here but you were not yet.
"History," Roland Barthes says somewhere, "is the time before your mother was your mother."
"History," Roland Barthes says somewhere, "is the time before your mother was your mother."
That's fabulous.
PK likes my stories about old family memories and stuff, but sometimes he gets sad because he didn't know any of those people before they were old, sick, and/or dead. Which makes me feel terrible.
160:
Nobody here is really and truly trying to proselytize
Eh, no, I just mean that pretty much all discussion about how practicing and non-practicing Jews or Catholics or what-have-you engage in odd remarks about one another .. and the jokey way in which this behavior is referred to .. just throws me. I've been blind to people's religious affiliations in this way for a long time. The thought that people walk around aware of it just throws me.
162:
yeah, you get nervous when some jews rag on other jews, but at least you would know how to play the game among southern baptists.
No.
Appropriate post for a Friday night, since it's more likely those tied down with kids are sitting at their computers.
PK and I are watching Animaniacs together.
||
Better to fly to Dulles or BWI? National is much more expensive, outweighing the convenience.
165: I didn't refer to it in a jokey way. Please read my comments before getting on my ass about them. I usually comment seriously.
165: Where I grew up everyone was Jewish -- secular Ashkenaz, Orthodox, and Sephardic (generally pretty observant). There was all kinds of tension and varying cultural response to one another. I guess I don't get why that's odd? Or rather uncomfortable-making?
I grew up saying "nekkid" (southern family) and never heard "naked" until I was 8 or so. I was horrified. How could everyone else be mispronouncing this word? "Naked" still sounds stupid and Yankeeish to me.
How did you pronounce "crayon?"
169: Please now, I didn't say you referred to it in a jokey way. Comments about this had been been referring to, and wondering about, other people joking.
I'm fairly sure I was three when I had a clear sense of my own eventual mortality. I remember the scene, in our then living room, which helps me to date it.
My mom says the members of the different protestant denominations used to have these jokes about each other's practices in her town, because theological differences were then much more widely known and emphasized.
My daughter just read was I was writing and said she was four, and it was thinking about a fairy tale I was reading to her.
For IA, the son of my Catholic friends came home on Good Friday, "...and they nailed His hands, and His feet, and His head,..."
The parents stepped in and sorted that out. So later, overheard, "..His hands, and His feet.. but not His head, ..."
The thought that people walk around aware of it just throws me.
The bad news, but also perhaps the good news, is that many people have yet to fully submit to assimilate into the universal and homogeneous state. Which state is not at all innocent of religious affiliation, no, no matter what they say, but which is rather presumptively 19th-century Feuerbach's Life of Christ and death of the Christ liberal Protestant. A gentleman's club, if you will, of amateur philologists and the like, where we'll all too scrupulously polite to speak of belief, much less (it is to shudder) its various and sundry forays into enthusiasm.
I'm being snarky, of course, but I'm at least 25 percent (and probably more so) committed to the above snarkitude. The owl of Minerva, and so on, and etc.
165: Huh. I thought I lived about as secular a life as you could manage in the US, but I can't picture finding day-to-day awareness and kidding around about sectarian differences suprising. Often to be disapproved of, but not something that would throw you.
Where are you from? Not US?
*I usually comment seriously.
Seriously, that's your problem right there. In the blog world, plausible deniability is your friend.
*I can say "cray-on" but"cran" is idiomatic.
*I just inadvertantly watched the Grammies. Call me what you will (homophobic, usually), but I can't stand divas. I went googling and found that Mariah Carey has (or could have had) opera-singer chops which she basically wastes on shit. In a better world she might have been a great singer.
Or not. But in this one she sure isn't one.
How did you pronounce "crayon?"
In Michigan we colored with crans. My boss pointed out just the other day that I still pronounce it that way. He approved though, as he is also from MI. People from Massachusetts colored with cray-ons. So wrong.
176: My erstwhile sister, the homogeneous state is never to come, nor should it; nonetheless I seem to be a freak in this particular regard.
We in New York also have disyllabic cray-ons. And more vowels that the rest of you Mary/merry/marry non-distinguishers. (That one bothers me for some reason -- it's like all you people are being lazy and shiftless about your vowel distinctions. I recognize this as an insane reaction, but have it anyway.)
Does "bag" rhyme with "vague" for you?
Southerners like to make words last as many syllables as possible, so we said "cray-yon" while all my midwestern schoolmates said "cran," to my great childhood irritation.
Me? No. Bag sounds like bag, vague sounds like wayg.
Any truly pious Jews won't be part of this conversation, since it's Shabbos.
It's true, I think, that teh Orthodox and teh secular Jews don't get along, but I guess this shouldn't be surprising... I feel like intra-religious squabbles tend to be particularly vehement.
The sexiest thing I had ever heard was the first time I heard a Southern girl say "mayonaise". I just about melted off the chair. There must have been upward of 15 vowels going on there.
181: My realfirstname, for example, LB, is distinguished in NYC from another similar name by the vowel sound. I never heard the "right" vowel for my name until I took (stage) voice class and had to learn to say it. Now it confuses NYers when I introduce myself, accidentally, the way everyone I ever met until I was 20 said my name, because they assume it's spelled with an "e," not an "a."
I distinguish merry from marry, but Mary is the same as marry to me. How do you say syrup?
187 crossed with 186, but the theater prof who said my name the east-coast way (which I'd never heard in my life) became, instantly, a violent crush. I remember he called me at my dorm once and said my name and I was melting off my seat. Gah. He was such a prick, too.
I say something closer to sir-up, but with a very short 'up'.
My marry and Mary are quite different. I get kind of New Yorky on maa-ry. While, "Mary" is "mare-y."
I feel like intra-religious squabbles tend to be particularly vehement.
You're... Reform, aren't you.
Some (wrong) people
simple, honest, downright, unaffected, homey, correct midwestern folks, you mean.
You're... Reform, aren't you.
Worse: lapsed Reform, with Conservadox relatives.
192 crossed with 190, to which I say pooh.
Okay, I'm not sure if this is a regionalism or just family weirdness, but I've been mocked hard enough for it that I've trained myself out of it. I grew up saying squirrel with two syllables -- squeh-rul. I've been forcefully told by several people that it's squirl, like girl, and got sick enough of the mockery that I trained myself to say squirl.
Suhrrup.
We get told up here we have to "cleanse" our acccents (eurgh) or an American audience won't be able to place us but will assume we're from Michigan, which will not help our careers. It's not just the ou sound, it's a whole wack of stuff. I cannot be bothered to work on this right now.
I can't picture finding day-to-day awareness and kidding around about sectarian differences suprising. Often to be disapproved of, but not something that would throw you.
I'm from the US. A military brat, moving every 3 years, so that might have something to do with it.
In any case, I hear the kidding around about sectarian differences, and of course I recognize and castigate the political program of the religious right in its various incarnations. But,
here's an example: once a year or so, someone will say to me, "Oh, so-and-so probably had that reaction to so-and-so because he's a Jew."
And I say: What? He is? And y'all are aware of it? It never occurred to me.
AWB:
My first serious gf's name is the name that people mistakenly use for you. Now, a co-worker has your actual name. It took me a while to accurately say my co-worker's name.
To try to get back on LB's good side after disrespecting her syrup pronunciation (the "simple, honest, homey" pronunciation sounds too much like "slurp," a word I can't abide) I'll confess that I sometimes pronounce "squirrel" as "squir-el."
Some (wrong) people say "sir-up."
Hey!
180: It is all but here, I am sorry to say, or when's the last time you visited a shopping mall?
And also, since Flippanter way upthread cited Donne, I cannot resist quoting his Holy Sonnet 17, written shortly after the death of his wife Anne in 1617, at the age of 33, after delivering of their twelfth child, a stillborn. His anger toward God is palpable, I mean it fairly leaps off the page, and anyway, it is remarkable for its poignancy ('her soul early into heaven ravishèd' we could stop and think of for a while, I think):
Since she whom I loved hath paid her last debt
To Nature, and to hers, and my good is dead,
And her soul early into heaven ravishèd,
Wholly on heavenly things my mind is set.
Here the admiring her my mind did whet
To seek thee, God; so streams do show the head;
But though I have found thee, and thou my thirst hast fed,
A holy thirsty dropsy melts me yet.
But why should I beg more love, whenas thou
Dost woo my soul, for hers offering all thine:
And dost not only fear lest I allow
My love to saints and angels, things divine,
But in thy tender jealousy dost doubt
Lest the world, flesh, yea, devil put thee out.
Yes, I've a soft spot for the Anglican crypto-Catholics. So sue me; or at least read their poetry.
Also squirl (but squir-rel is cute), crayn (very subtle y sound, but it's there), mary = marry but I *think* merry is slightly different. Also according to a friend of mine I say "warm" funny.
Squeh-rul, if you flipped the 'r', sounds exactly how my Grandfather would have said it. I almost never hear a flipped 'r' anymore, (and it's not like I'm going to try bringing it back by myself either).
Where are you Penny? Toronto, isn't it? Is the accent of which you must "cleanse" (yikes) your speech Canadian? The Michigan accent is kind of annoying--sounds pinched and nasal. Saturday Night Live once did a skit on fantasy phone sex workers with Michigan accents. It was amusing.
My ex (upper-class NYer) used to say "dunky" for "donkey," and "ruff" for "roof" (not even "roof" like in "foot"). Dunky drove me insane. Where the fuck do people say "dunky"? I think it might have been his Chicago-born parents.
There's a town in Washington spelled "Puyallup" but pronounced "Pyuallup." Used to kind of bug me.
My grandmother pronounced "wash" as "warsh." I think she was originally from the midwest somewhere.
209:
my ex mil still says warsh. kind of funny
Buck's grandmother would warsh dishes in the zinc. Central Pennsylvania, I think, which is pretty much midwest.
My "squirrel" is two syllables. Squir-rel. I'm always shocked when people don't speak exactly like me -- and I'm from New Jersey.
A Californian friend used to mock the way I said the terminal "ow" in pillow, tomorrow, sparrow, etc., claiming that I said something like "aow", and sounded totally affected, but I could never hear what he was talking about.
213: That's weird. You don't just use a long o sound?
206: Toronto's the closest big city to me. I usually can spot people from Michigan ( I'd love to hear that phone sex skit) and I don't think we sound like that, maybe people from Windsor do. I can sound like the MacKenzie brothers if I'm tired, unfortunately.
212: Come to think of it, no one ever made fun of me for my 'squirrel' until the Peace Corps, where I was stuck in a backwoods school with a Californian and a Chicago native. Maybe it's perfectly normal around here. (It's one of those things where I can hardly tell the difference -- someone who says squirl doesn't sound weird to me -- but the two syllable pronunciation is apparently the funniest thing the one-syllablers have ever heard.)
I just can't say it right. God knows I try.
That may be the northern cities vowel shift -- thge greatest vowel shift since Chaucer's time! But I'm not quite sure.
I think the "ow" in pillow is way more cropped on the West Coast, like the shortness of a Spanish "o," barely there by EC standards.
One of the nice things about growing up the daughter of parents with thick accents in a place where everyone else had a different thick accent is that I ended up being hypersensitive to vowel sounds in different communities as I moved. In Ohio, I talked as an Ohioan, and I find myself talking just a tad Brooklynish in Brooklyn (I can't help saying "thdee" instead of "three" now; so much clearer on the phone!) And I can always spot someone from the Pacific NW because they sound as blunt in their vowels to me as I sound to a NYer.
That said, someone would improve the composition grades of a million NYC kids by teaching NYers to pronounce "than" and "then" like two different words. They spell both "then" because they don't hear any difference.
Way back to 187: Come to think of it, I think I did get your name wrong when we met; I remember figuring it out later on.
207: Dunky is horrible unless coming from a recent immigrant from, maybe, Romania.
It's pronounced squrrrrrllll. Think Arabic.
They spell both "then" because they don't hear any difference.
Indeed I do. I have to go back and edit for this one, because I type them indifferently.
I'm sitting here trying to figure out how "Mary", "marry", and "merry" could be pronounced differently, but can't get anywhere.
213,214: Long 'O's a funny dipthong, now I think about it. It usually terminates in oo, but there are lots of different ways to start it off. Californians I've heard sound like they're saying ehoo or something. I bet Teo could spell it. Are you here on Fridays Teo?
Does 'than' rhyme with 'van' for other people? I think both 'than' and 'then' rhyme with 'hen'.
I said "crown" as a kid, but began pronouncing it "cray-on" when I got old enough to read. I pronounced milk and bridge as melk and bredge until a college girlfriend mocked me for it.
I also say "porky-pine", which my wife finds downright repulsive.
Than is like van.
Mary = Marry ≠ Merry
I'm here to answer all your questions.
"Than" does indeed rhyme with "van."
Does 'than' rhyme with 'van' for other people?
Does for me. Well, actually, maybe only when I'm enunciating.
227: Yeah, I think I say them the same. But I've never had any trouble distinguishing them when I write. Huh.
What's wrong with porky-pine? That's how it's said.
225: The girl's name is mare-y, like a female horse with a y at the end. The adjective describing Christmas is meh-ry. And what you do at a wedding is mah-ry.
221: You pronounced it the "e" way or the "a" way? I don't really care, as I grew up saying the "e" way but think it's really sexy when people say it the "a" way. As a non-NYer, the perceived difference between the two is sort of hilarious, and I have to think hard to notice.
222: Then I dunno. His parents were children of Czech and Russian immigrants. Does that count? He could not hear the difference. We had many conversations like:
M: Dunky.
AWB: Donkey.
M: Yeah, dunky.
AWB: DAWN-key.
M: Yeah, dunky.
Did I mention he got bored of me and dumped me?
That's how it's said.
If you're an Okie.
I also say "porky-pine"
This is adorable, Brock, but how often does it come up?
In my mind, than rhymes with van, but out loud I say "thun". But not "then".
The American Heritage Dictionary has sound files of standard pronunciations. It's very handy.
225: Those are all totally different. Marry=maa-ry. Mary=mare-y. Merry=meh-ry. (Repeat: I am from NJ.)
228: When I'm not thinking about it, "then" and "than" are pronounced the same way. But sometimes I am super mannered, and "than" becomes "thaan" and "often" is "off-ten" rather than "offen.
Por-Q-pine, or pork-u-pine, I'm not sure exactly which, is what I say. Porky-pine sounds rural, or southern, or something to me.
AWB, aren't there actually 3 ways to pronounce it, depending on vowel length?
Merry rhymes with berry. Mary rhymes with dairy. Marry rhymes with Larry. Though I suppose that doesn't necessarily clear anything up...I knew that was NYC-specific, but non-NY pronunciations still constantly surprise me: then & than pronounced differently? Who knew?
As a kid I got in a huge fight with my cranky uncle because he insisted that "almond" is pronounced "aah-mind," like "salmon." So, so wrong.
I think LB and I grew up in the same media market. Did you watch Spider Man at 4 pm on channel 5?
According to the AHD, LB's 234 is correct. I will adjust accordingly.
235: Now that I know your name, I say it with the a sound. When you initially introduced yourself, I thought you were saying the similar name with the e sound.
246: "Is he strong? Listen, Bud,
He's got radioactive blood,..."
In short, yes.
249: puh KAHN. Also, ah-ruhnj. And hahr=horror.
208: If I recall correctly, that's a native place name, and the latter pronounciation is close to correct
I grew up saying PEE-can, but I also remember my father saying I should use puh-KAHN because a PEE-can is what you put under your bed at night.
243: but berry, dairy and Larry all rhyme! And other than the first letter, they're all pronounced exactly the same.
PEE-can or puh-KAHN?
The latter, unless the word is followed by "pie."
253: I think that's right, but in that case they oughta spell it properly.
Berry, dairy, and Larry all rhyme where I come from. Again, with great strain, I can hear a difference if you make me, but this is after years of phonetic alphabet training.
242: My name? Holy God, I hope not. Two was confusing enough. I have this conversation all the time:
Solicitous Nice Person: Oh no! I just realized I've been mispronouncing your name! I'd never seen it written before!
AWB: Uh, what?
SNP: I've been calling you the wrong name and you're obviously just afraid to correct me!
AWB: Excuse me?
etc.
Horror has two syllables, period.
Use the AHD for the mary, marry, merry thing; the scales have fallen from my ears.
259 is correct, but the last syllable is almost swallowed.
255 (& 259 on preview): Right. It's the not hearing the difference that is the thing of it.
Discovered this when my NYC schools English teacher Mother-in-Law called me out on my pronunciation of "parrot", which I evidently was saying like "pairot" or "perrot". After a lot of slow, exaggerated pronunciation I coulda kinda, maybe hear the difference.
257: Yeah, it bugged me too --- blame the cartographers.
That's ones easy, too. It's not like tsawwasen or whatever.
256: I was about to suggest this, but then again, I usually split the difference and say it with a spondee: PEE-CAN. Because you always want to leave the possibility that the next word might be "pie."
260: Eh. I can hear it, but I don't say it.
244: Do you pronounce almond with an 'l' in the middle? Weird.
parsimon: for what it's worth, I sort of get this too. Pretty much everything I know about religion was from reading about it, though.
263 wuz me
261: Yes, exactly. I wrote "hahr," because it was easier, but it isn't quite so Fran Drescher. It's something like ha-r. A very gestural second syllable -- and very much unlike, say, the Chicagoan "whore-err."
259: Tell that to me at 10 when I relayed the news to my mother that you could tell a house was a "horror" house because it had a red light in the window.
245: Ha! But MRH has wrecked it for me forever with the slurp thing.
Because you always want to leave the possibility that the next word might be "pie."
I like the way you think.
almond has both ell and dee audible.
mary, marry, merry
Is this a common test? I would say each of these differently. Obviously this makes me smarter than those who don't.
PK confirms that I don't pronounce the "l" by saying that he'd spell it "a-m..."
275 crossed with 274. Aw-mund isn't crazy, but certainly not all-mond.
Do you pronounce almond with an 'l' in the middle?
The L that's right there in the word? Yes.
Obviously this makes me smarter than those who don't.
The Brits sound smart until they say glacier.
On second go-round, he says there's a "little tiny l sound," which I think is right.
Brock is picking his teeth with a big piece of hay right now.
278: It's regional in the US. Right along the East Coast, all three vowels are distinct -- for most of the rest of the country, they're the same.
205: When I worked at a nursing home, there was this elderly woman from Scotland who always used to flip her "R"s. She wore a pink bedjacket, and she had photos on her wall to commemorate the Jubilee, and I still think of her these many years later. "Oh, is that Mary?" she'd ask, and I never could figure out how she knew who I was, given that she was supposed to be mostly blind and deaf. I admired her greatly, and later I learned that she once ran a tea-room in Maniwaki. I always wanted to give her a hug, but confined myself to serving tea and biscuits. She was 104 years old when I knew her.
My paternal grandfather was born and bred in Canada, but he couldn't quite pronounce the English "th." So dis and dat for this and that, which embarrassed me as a child, I am sorry to admit. He sounded almost French, I guess, but his origins were (Ottawa) Valley Irish.
God, it's amazing we can understand each other at all.
I have what seems to most ears to be a pretty American Standard pronunciation, for the most part. (That's what all that IPA class stuff was about, fer goodness sakes.) But every now and then my students or a colleague will have no idea what I'm talking about, especially when I first moved here. It's better now that I've learned to take on some of the conversational rhythms of whoever I'm talking to. For fun sometimes I'll talk to my students with the voice I use with my mom, and it cracks them the fuck up. Still sounds EC to mom.
Although my charming native accent has been almost wholly effaced by a decade in the U.S. (in the absence of fellow natives or several beers, anyway), I still cannot get pronounce the letter "R" in a way that Americans can hear properly. When I say it (e.g., when spelling something) they think I am saying the word "Or" and get all confused.
I feel like I speak standard American too, but the scales were lifted from my eyes when my English friend's girlfriend apparently told him that "some chick from 90210" had left a message on his answering machine.
Listen to Brock, you east coast screwballs.
I feel like I speak standard American too
I am reliably informed that you speak like a valley girl.
I've been told that I speak newscaster english, but that might just be about the fabulous hair.
Despite spending formative years in both MO and NJ, I've got fairly standard pronunciations. The only time I ever get mocked is when speaking with a Canadian. I have one Canadian friend who will occasionally devolve into giggles over how American my "a"s are.
You do sound tres Cali to me, B, but it's charming, not 90210ish.
Yeah, I know I do, because I can hear it when I playback a recording of myself speaking. Oddly, it seems stronger when I'm speaking formally than otherwise, at least to me.
My Southern accent gets heavier as I get drunker. Or maybe slurred speech just sounds more like a Southern drawl. Or maybe Southerners are actually drunk most of the time.
I was shocked by the existence of American regional accents beyond NYC and the South, when, as a 9th grader at an all-ages show in Trenton, NJ, I was asked by Tommy Stinson of The Replacements if I had "change for the pop machine" -- please hear this in the broadest Minnesotan you can imagine.
So do you say "eye-ther"/"n-eye-ther" or "ee-ther"/"nee-ther"?
I grew up on "ee-ther" but have somehow been shamed into "eye-ther".
British ex-pat actors in Canada flip their 'r's, if they're over 50 or so. I have to admit, the way they say "mirror" is better for clarity. Under 50, nobody does this, and we all just pretend there's nothing funny about that. My first day of work out of school I had to whisper to my friend, "Do we have to say 'spillets'?" (For 'spirits').
290: It gets worse --- I first learned to speak with a strong UK accent. Kids in my pre-school couldn't understand me. It was pretty much gone by 2nd grade though ...
... except when I'm very drunk.
I was once severely mocked by a waiter in Brooklyn for my pronunciation of "water". I thought it was a bit much, since he apparently thought I should be asking for "wooder". He said "Shore, honey, Ah'll brang y'all some waaaaaaaaahter".
299: That's true of Mr. B. too; he doesn't really have a southern accent when he's sober, but if he's drunk (or talking to a fellow southerner), it comes out really quick.
255: right, I realized a moment later that that might not help.
The weird thing is that I hear my parents as having strong NY accents & myself as fairly generic. But I've clearly got some residual, which comes through most strongly on "do words X, Y, & Z sound the same or different" quizzes.
I say ah-mund.
LB, do you pronounce the r in "garbage"? Or is it more like "gahbage"?
My friend from NJ says "warter" for "water." She can't hear the difference.
285: yes, the ell is there, but it isn't strong.
301: I use both, depending on context. Eye/nye more commonly, though.
I also grew up pronouncing "Hi!" as "Haaa". But that's very regional.
I sound West Virginian when I'm drunk, and pretty newscaster otherwise.
Sorry, 304 is more accurate. She says "wooder." It's so weird I can't even think straight. Cute, though.
Oh, God, my Philly-area relatives say "wooder" for "water" and it drives me nuts. They also say "yogrit" for "yogurt," which is just bizarre.
Mr. B. too; he doesn't really have a southern accent when he's sober, but if he's drunk (or talking to a fellow southerner), it comes out really quick.
Isn't Mr. B German?
That crazy "r" thing wasn't always only British. I'm thinking of Edna St. Vincent Millay reciting "Recuerdo": We wuh veddy tied. We wuh veddy meddy.
I don't think I sound any different when I'm drunk, but the fellows in college sometimes thought I sounded Irish or English when they were drunk.
I had a roommate from Philly who I was convinced could not say a 't' in the middle of a word. Wudder ice, the boy she like was Mar'in, ugh.
Cala sounds like a pretty newscaster!
But smarter.
This page has a nice map of regional accents in the US (click on it to get the names of the regions) and some discussion of indicative words and pronunciations for each.
Also, I can hear my mom & two of my sisters' accents when I go home and it drives me crazy. It's downtown, not dahntahn!
And now I am veddy tied, and must go to my pillaow. Night, all.
I have an acquaintance who says arthur instead of author and it makes my entire body clench involuntarily every time she does it. Also, during the last campaign, I had that reaction every time Kerry and Dean started talking about idears.
Though there are a few Pittsburghisms I can't quite get rid of that Weiner used to call me on here. 'Any more' to mean 'nowadays' is the big one, and I can't pronounce the word 'towel' properly.
And I have inadvertantly started telling people that I live in boo-wawston, which annoys me.
The water in Majorca doesn't taste like it ought to.
326 wasn't right. It's more just "bwawston".
My grandfather's dialect was so strange we never figured out where his family was really from. The only thing like it I ever heard was in the movie Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus when they interview some really out-of-the-way Appalachian coal-miners. But that wasn't even really it.
His co-workers in the Air Force wrote a dictionary of his speech that exists somewhere. Otherwise, they'd never have figured out what he was talking about.
325: You dumped "yins"? Yins is awesome!
Gonerill: Where is your accents homeland? My Wigan grandparents said "burr" for "bear" and and "hurr" for "hair," but that is because they were really Irish.
305: Dammit, if y'all are going to talk about me, you should fess up.
one of my uncles sounds quite a lot like Mayor Quimby. It's really odd. My mom & several of her siblings have the traditional NYC add & drop R's thing, but in his case it's mutated.
331: I never had a 'yinz.' I had a broadcast journalism major for a father. As kids, we could tell when my grandma called because my mom's accent would unconsciously change to good ol' city girl, and my surburban pretentious father would cringe.
Some accents are nice, but the Pittsburgh one always sounds very uneducated to me, no doubt due to my dad.
Isn't Mr. B German?
By birth, but he grew up in Kentucky.
not how I say it.
Take the hay out of your mouth.
336 continued: which is to say, he's German in exactly the same way you're Iranian, more or less. And you don't have a foreign accent either.
Where in KY did Mr. B grow up?
he's German in exactly the same way you're Iranian, more or less. And you don't have a foreign accent either.
He's probably faking it. I bet the Iranian accent comes out while he's being tased.
Come to think of it 339 is more identifying, probably, than if I'd just said the name of the town. Oh well.
341: Interesting. That's not exactly where I grew up.
His co-workers in the Air Force wrote a dictionary of his speech that exists somewhere. Otherwise, they'd never have figured out what he was talking about.
This is beautiful.
Someone once told me that in England the short 'a' in dance was pronounced much the way it is now in North America, until the Grand Tour of Europe became popular, and the short 'a' changed to show that one had been abroad. Is this a legend? I can't find anything on it.
It's your fault, Brock, for always asking the nosy questions.
335: Some accents are nice, but the Pittsburgh one always sounds very uneducated to me, no doubt due to my dad.
I think the frequent dropping of "to be" is one reason for this. There is a lot of "the car needs washed", even among relatively well-educated folk.
Don't worry B--I won't tell anyone.
348: Interesting. A friend -- not from Pittsburgh -- was recently insisting that folk from Indiana said things like "these pants need hem." I insisted that was ridiculous. Whoops.
The Pittsburgh version would be to say, "These pants need hemmed."
Needs hemmed, needs washed, needs getting done.. The 'to be' just disappears.
I've never heard that dropping of the "to be". That would drive me nuts.
"Tarzan hunt now! Oongowa!"
Needs getting done sounds perfectly normal to me.
Yes, "needs getting done" is more standard. The weird Pittsburgh version is when people say "needs done."
Cala, before we watch the Stillers, we should stop by the Giantiggle to get some ink pens and some gum bands.
351, 352: Crazy! The Pburgh accent is just super interesting.
Gonerill: Where is your accents homeland? My Wigan grandparents said "burr" for "bear" and and "hurr" for "hair," but that is because they were really Irish.
Ireland. But I don't say "burr" urr "hurr".
I grew up in suburban DC, but my dad is from western Colorado and says "bahr" and "rassle". Sadly, I don't think he ever rassled a bahr.
AND you say "melk," because you are a freako. Melk.
357: Just watch out for the jaggers.
362: It's awful slippy out there.
359: Yes, well, these were folks born in Co. Clare in the 1880s and then packed off to Lancashire to mine coal. Or rather, my grandfather was down in the mines from when he was 6. I don't think either of them ever went to school.
If we're moving from accents to colloquialisms that do not travel properly, my saying "I gave her a ring but she was engaged" once provoked a certain amount of bemusement amongst a group of Americans.
I don't think I picked up "melk" from my dad. It may be just me my own personal craziness. My mom is from Boston, but her folks were from New York, and ever now and again a pure New Yorkism appears in her otherwise mid-Atlantic speech. "Warshing machine" is a good one. I have vague memories of her using "on line" when I was younger.
but that is because they were really Irish.
Well, Gonerill's folks are not really Irish, of course. By which I mean, they're not really formerly the Kings and Queens of that mythical Emerald Isle that holds pride of place in our hearts, but are in reality just peasants from Cork or Clare or some such place that says "shanty." Don't let him kid you about being only three feet tall and making shoes or something all day long, the better to steal your soul at nightfall or some such shite.
I kid, of course (well, of course!), because I must, or because I will, or, well, just because I can.
"I gave her a ring but she was engaged"
That's great. But does it not also mean the same thing in Ireland?
"Reddup"? I haven't hit that one before. Stupid in-laws! Speak more yinzer when I'm around.
But does it not also mean the same thing in Ireland?
It could mean this in Ireland, but only as a special case. The salience of the connotations would be reversed. Absent some other contextualizing information there wouldn't be any confusion about what was meant.
'round my people's way they would say "redd" but not "reddup." Fascinating, how even here in the New World there are many species of peasant.
I say "the dishes need washed," "the floor needs cleaned," etc. I think it's just about my only interesting linguistic quirk, well, that and my midland pronunciation of "o" which leads everyone to misunderstand my own name at parties.
My accent is pretty standard Californian, and the only markers I have are in diction, which mostly only come back when I visit my cousins.(tight, hella, etc...) My parents also were hopelessly devoted to wodehouse, and it didn't occur to me until I was 13 that not everyone was,so I'll occasionally say "mirthless fuckin L." or some such.
Speak more yinzer n'at when I'm around.
how much yiddish is it normal to know? Some of this list is pretty much standard english, some of it's widely used in NY, & some of it's more obscure (though not especially so), but where's the line:
Shlep, putz, shmuck, mensch, shtup, meshugge, shlemiel, shlimazel, zaftig, zayde, bubbeleh, knocker, kvell, kaynehora, beshert, chazzerai, mispocheh.
Huh, IA? I don't get that at all, but if you're implying that I have some kind of romantic notion operational here, if you read what I wrote, I think you'll find that that is not at all the case.
People drop Yiddish words with me all the time in conversation, and usually I can figure them out from the context (aside from those I readily know--like 3/4 of your list, K). It feels sort of embarrassing when I have to ask.
For me, the line is between "kvell" (known) and "kaynehora" (not known).
Knockers are tits you silly Hebrews.
kaynehora
How Yiddish suicide pilots in WWII signed off before their final dive.
beshert
A kind of sweetened borscht.
chazzerai
Paid to take photographs of famous mohels.
mispocheh
Elderly lady driven around by Mel Brooks.
378: By which I mean, they were actual, literal, non-haha droll, peasants from Co. Clare. But honestly, if you're looking for the stereotypical American "professional Irishman" (as my father, pbuh, used to call them) here, you've managed to find the opposite.
378: Christ, oudemia, I'm just kidding around. Really.
I think I grew up in one of the few places in the country, or, I guess, world, where use of neither Yiddish nor Ladino was particularly marked.
I think I grew up in one of the few places in the country, or, I guess, world, where use of neither Yiddish nor Ladino was particularly marked.
Jews are what, 2 percent of the population in this country? Most people never hear this stuff.
Jews are what, 2 percent of the population in this country? Most people never hear this stuff.
Most people never watch TV or movies?
According to Wikipedia, only 2.8% of Jews are raised speaking Yiddish. Of course, use of isolated Yiddish words is way more common, but not really common among Jews outside large Jewish populations like NYC.
According to Wikipedia, only 2.8% of Jews are raised speaking Yiddish.
I'm surprised it's even that many. Virtually all of them would be in ultra-Orthodox communities.
Most people never watch TV or movies?
I meant by real live people in their neighborhoods.
Here is the site I was really looking for. (The guy was written up in the Times a few years back, has since moved from Harvard to University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.)
Maps of 122 dialect characteristics from an online survey. Crayon is #9, Mary/merry/marry is #15, almond #29 and many more including #49 "I ____ her lifeless body from the pool."
I grew up on Long Island & knew no more than 3/4 of those (& probably less) until I married into a Jewish family, despite my family owning Isaac Bashevis Singer children's books & so forth...I was wondering how much was NY, how much was my in-laws, & how much was the Seinfeld factor.
I thought Ladino was really obscure, no?
You have to go to the grandparents' generation to find fluent, native, yiddish speakers, I think. 2.8% is a lot higher than I'd have guessed too.
I'm done after zaftig,and thus would draw the line there but would add the following: tukkus, plotz, kibbitz, chutzpah, schpiel, schtick, assuming they're all real words, and yiddish. But I'm not a NY person and my exposure to Eastern Europeans has been limited, so if you were and yours wasn't, you'd probably want to draw it lower.
Jews are what, 2 percent of the population in this country?
This always shocks me. That's what happens when you grow up in a Jewish suburb, get engaged to a Jew, and work for a company owned by two Jewish guys. You people are everywhere.
The map in 321 is quite good, but perhaps overly detailed for most people's purposes.
But to be clear, I don't know anyone who speaks *fluent* Ladino. It was more a matter of slang word usage that, interestingly, bled out into the general population.
I've never met a Ladino speaker, which is too bad.
I was really surprised when I realized, at age ten or so, that Jews were not actually a tiny, obscure minority, but a well-known minority hugely overrepresented in elite circles. Like, people had heard of us! So weird.
389: Not in conversation. I think it's different somehow. Most people understand accents when they hear them (even strong ones) on TV, but can't understand someone using that same accent in person. It goes past easier on TV, I think.
Ladino:Spanish:Sephardim::Yiddish:German:Ashkenazim
400: If Yiddish is Hebrew + German, Ladino is Hebrew + Spanish. The Jews who speak/spoke it are folks who were tossed out of Spain and ended up in North Africa. In fact, the Sephardic Jews that I grew up with who speak it call themselves "Syrians," even though they're not from Syria in any vaguely recent decade.
I know almost all the words in 377 and 396, of course.
The Jews who speak/spoke it are folks who were tossed out of Spain and ended up in North Africa.
Also the Balkans, the Netherlands, Brazil, and various and sundry other places around the globe.
When I was singing in choirs, we did a great song in Ladino. Really wonderful language to get to sing in.
Actually, now that I think of it, the only lyrics were, "Adiyo, kerida. No kero la vida; me l'amargates tu." If you speak Spanish, it's pretty clear what that's about.
Nevermind, there was more in the verse. My memory of high school comes in spurts.
The oldest synagogues in the US are also Sephardic.
411: Like love.
Ok, to bed with me!
Cuando tu madre te paryo
I te kito al mundo
Corazon eya no te dio
Para amar segundo
Va bushkate otra amor
A harva otras puertas
Aspera otra ardor
Ke para mi, sos muerta
Oh, and kvetch. The yiddish words that managed to end up in English are all so negative. This is what makes America great: we get our landcape/weather words from the Spanish, our food words from the French and Italians, and our bitching words from the Eastern European Jews.
412: Teo, the two oldest are both named Touro, in Newport and New Orleans, no? Or are those just the two longest running? And really, what I mean to ask is, are they both Sephardic? Of course if they aren't the 'gogues you were talking about, please ignore all of this nonsense.
As far as I know, Touro in Newport is the oldest synagogue in America, and is (was?) Sephardic.
Touro in Newport is the oldest, and is Sephardic. I don't know what the second oldest is, and I actually had not heard of Touro in NO. The other very old one I was thinking of is Mikveh Israel in Philadelphia, which is also Sephardic. There's probably an old Sephardic congregation in New York as well.
Until well into the nineteenth century the majority of Jews in the US were Sephardic, and the few Ashkenazim went to Sephardic synagogues, so any pre-1800 synagogue is almost certainly Sephardic.
Touro in Newport. Congregation founded 1658, current building dedicated in 1762. Still a functioning Sephardic orthodox synagogue.
Touro in New Orleans was founded in 1828 and was apparently the first synagogue outside the original 13 colonies. The current synagogue is an amalgamation of a Sephardic congregation and a German Reform congregation, and is itself Reform.
Mikveh Israel was founded in 1740. It's changed locations several times.
414: ooh, pretty. Though if it combines the Spanish rolled r & the Hebrew "ch" it would be embarrassing to attempt.
415: except "mensch" but I'm not sure that's as fully in English as some others.
I found the lyrics to that song right after I typed them from twelve-year-old memory. Turns out: I really remember the lyrics! Also turns out: my Ladino spelling is basically 100% horrible!
Beth Elohim in Charleston was founded in 1750 and is still in existence.
If the site is superslow for y'all too, just fyi that it seems to be our provider (their own site is the same way) so I assume it'll be cleared up eventually.
Also turns out: my Ladino spelling is basically 100% horrible!
Hardly surprising; do you even know the alphabet?
just fyi that it seems to be our provider
I figured you were sticking it to the hebes.
Thanks. I've been to the two Touros I mentioned, though I never really considered whether they were Sephardic or not. My failure to take note is both a comment on how little attention I pay to my surroudings, and, perhaps, the cultural hegemony of the Askenaz in places that I've lived. Actually, I'll go one better: the cultural hegemony of the Askenaz nationwide, including in popular culture, after WWII.
They've got us surrounded, gswift. Best to wait it out until reinforcement honkies arrive in the morning.
Shearith Israel in New York looks like it's actually older, having been founded in 1655 by the twenty-three Brazilian Sephardic Jews who had famously arrived in New Amsterdam the previous year (the first Jews in what would become the US). I wonder why Touro claims to be the oldest; maybe Shearith Israel wasn't officially organized as a synagogue until later.
426: I assume there are standards when using our alphabet. Maybe not.
Maybe I should have rtfa:
Despite their permission to stay in New Amsterdam they continued to face legal troubles and were not given permission to worship in a public synagogue during for some time (throughout the Dutch period and even into the British). The Congregation did, however, make arrangements for a cemetery beginning in 1656. It was not until 1730 that the Congregation was able to build a synagogue of its own, which was built on Mill Street in lower Manhattan.
Rhode Island's famous religious toleration was probably the differing factor, but this seems like splitting hairs to me.
I assume there are standards when using our alphabet. Maybe not.
Probably not universally agreed upon ones (there aren't for Yiddish). Your spelling looks pretty much like the transliterated Ladino I've seen before.
301.
So two Boston Brahmins run into each other on Beacon Hill and the talk turns to arguing about how to pronounce "neither". One favors nEE-ther and the other favors nI-ther. They throw all sorts of arguments at each other (German, English tradition, etc.) but they can't agree. Finally they do agree to put the question to the next person to walk by and abide by that judgment. They look around and see a guy wearing a flat cap and jacket walking toward them. They ask him, which one is right: nEEther or nIther? Paddy, surprised at their ignorance, replies: "Why 'tis nAYthur of them!"
(Heard while growing up in Boston, but not among the Brahmins.)
432: Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson, and the Jews there probably wouldn't have deemed religious toleration a matter of splitting hairs. But we should stop; we're making Ogged nervous. He knows that it's only a matter time until we control this part of the media as well. And then we install Marty Peretz as editor.
Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson, and the Jews there probably wouldn't have deemed religious toleration a matter of splitting hairs.
I just mean that if Jews were practicing their religion openly in rented quarters in Manhattan in 1655 but weren't officially given permission to worship publicly until 1730, it seems odd to proclaim that their congregation doesn't count as the oldest in the country. Technicalities, you see. De jure toleration v. de facto toleration. Etc.
There's only like three Jews around here tonight. Ogged's just an anti-semite.
Or maybe just one, and no gentiles. I win!
Not so fast.
For it is now the hour when the Euros awake.
Nope, still here. This is JDate, right?
Wow, the internet really does annihilate space and time. It's like the railroad of the twenty-first century. Only more Jewish.
re: 442
No, although I do know quite a few yiddish words, e.g. from the list above.
The fun is just getting started, I know, but I have to get some sleep. My son is sick, which means he'll be shambling into my room sooner rather than later. Time to clean up a few footnotes and then crawl into my bed before he does. He hogs the covers. Good night.
Are there many Jews in Scotland? I actually have no idea.
Good night, anmik. Hope your son feels better soon.
re: 446
Quite a few, yeah. Thousands rather than tends of thousands, though. Fairly spread out now, as well. There used to be large and quite dense Jewish communities in Glasgow. The area [the Gorbals] my Dad grew up in was a strongly Jewish area when he was a kid.
I quote Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Scotland):
Middle Ages had state persecution of the Jews, culminating in the Edict of Expulsion of 1290 ... there was never a corresponding expulsion from Scotland. Indeed the eminent Jewish-Scottish scholar David Daiches states in his autobiographical Two Worlds: An Edinburgh Jewish Childhood that there are grounds for saying that Scotland is the only European country which has no history of state persecution of Jews.
That quote was truncated, it should have read 'England in the Middle Ages ...'
OK, so I woke up late; but there was a long discussion on, I think, the excellent linguist's blog "separated by a common language" about the way in which the English vowel in "water" does not exist in most American dialects, rendering the word quite incomprehensible when spoken by an Englishman in the states. And it's true. It's really hard to ask for a glass of "water" in the USA in my experience.
423: re: "mensch": On the face of it sounds good, except for the fact that it describes an exceptional condition. I guess I'm prejudiced because my mom would always tell me, "Be/act like a mensch" in response to my acting like anything but.
Will be looking forward to DCon then, to see if I can understand any of you. Glad LB mentioned the squirl thing - I'd have been wondering wtf was meant if I'd heard anyone say that.
Cute kid stories are great, but I am really enjoying having big competent children these days! The 11 year old cycled down to the Farmers' Market this morning to see if she could get some ice pops, whilst the 9 year old cooked pancakes, and I lazed about drinking tea which the 7 year old had made for me.
Perhaps it was already linked upthread, but I recall a web survey about 5 years ago that asked where you were from then covered several of the points discussed here (crayon, Mary/merry/marry)- my google-fu is failing me, however. Results were plotted on a map. Also included some vocabulary questions- what do you call the opposite corner of a 4 way intersection? What's the strip of grass down the middle of a divided highway called?
Ah, here's a summary of it- I guess it's no longer up but someone posted the questions. Unfortunately this site doesn't give you the regional maps, just how similar your choices are to the majority.
I can't believe no New Englander has mentioned the Aunt/Ant debate.
As a New Yorker, I grew up with an Ant Janet, but started saying Aunt as an adult; I'm not sure why.
Mary = M'εri (long vowel); Merry = M'εri (short vowel); Marry = M'æri (short vowel). What problem? I dunno...
Detailed dialect map of the US. Even if you don't know the IPA the clusters are easy to see.
one of my uncles sounds quite a lot like Mayor Quimby.
Isn't Mayor Quimby spoofing on JFK?
This is blandest Unfogged thread ever, BTW. Kids say the darndest things + how to pronounce words.
I pronounce "John Emerson" as "Aren't you ashamed of yourself, putting down nice people?" As in, "Aren't you ashamed of yourself, putting down nice people? says the darndest things."
Reacting against Thursday's shenanigans I imagine, John.
And I just worked out that next August, the ages of the me and my siblings will add up to 100, so we'll be able to say, "We've had over a hundred years experience dealing with Mom."
NOW WHO'S BLAND? YEAH.
I need to get a shorter handle or stop coming here.
Nobody could accuse you of being bland, heebie, but either you're older than I thought, or you have a big family.
I'm an only child. Why, how old did you think I was?
453: Yes, the results are what I linked to in 393.
Here it is again. The fellow is now at UW-Milwaukee. (Although the survey failed to include "John Emerson is a spoilsport/wet blanket/party pooper".)
456: And another dialect map here. (from 321)
Why do you need a shorter handle? Is it sticking out?
I never discuss a lady's age.
My handle is so long I misspell it when I have to put it in again after I've spring cleaned this elderly system.
It just shows us that you're glad to be here.
The notable thing about a lot of the maps in 464 is how much they all seem to reflect normal population distribution and not regional variation anymore. Like, the offspring from the generations who developed the verbal tics are now smoothly located around the country.
468: Yes, I was a little disappointed at how spread out they were. Perhaps another way of displaying them would better highlight the small residual differences that indicate their origin. A few are still pretty indicative, such as soda/pop and grinder/hoagie etc.
I also like the people who say, "I have no term for this." I imagine that is what they say when it comes up in conversation. "I would like to go to the corner which is two right angles away from the corner I am on, but I have no term for this."
Incidentally, what is the word anyway? I'm not aware of one either in standard UK English or in my own dialect.
The other choices were kitty-corner, catty-corner, or diagonal. The correct response is kitty-corner.
Ah, that's a totally new one on me.
There's another dialect map which I can't find now which gives a more detailed breakdown, where Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Charlotte, St. Louis, and a couple more cities each get their own dialects. (New York and Boston are left out because they've been well covered already). It's by Labov and/or Telsur, I think.
It also starts to define a Western dialect. It's focused on the the middle area between northern and southern, and says that the sharpest divide is between northern-middle and northern, with southern-middle being close to southern.
The Scots have no concept of "diagonal", but ironically have a hundred words for "oatmeal".
Suck on that, Alanis! That's irony, you stupid bint!
Here in Cleveland, the grassy strip just before the curb on some sidewalks is called the "tree lawn," which I love. (I previously had no term for this.)
Scots and oatmeal are the new Eskimos and snow.
In Michigan, some of my friends called a sliding glass door a door-wall, in their nasally declarative style that I find so hilarious.
Yes, no concept of the diagonal. As a result we never invented anything of note, produced no scientific innovations and to this day are mathematically illiterate.
Here in Cleveland, the grassy strip just before the curb on some sidewalks is called the "tree lawn," which I love.
A friend of mine likes to say that it's so cruel to put those wooden fence skirts around trees because it's like "Here! Wear clothes made from YOUR BROTHER!"
The Picts were much brighter, but of course the Scots beat them to death with their cabers.
Yes, no concept of the diagonal. As a result we never invented anything of note, produced no scientific innovations and to this day are mathematically illiterate.
Huh. There's some word for when you say the opposite of what you mean, but I can't put my finger on it.
In Oregon awhile back a lot of Douglas fir trees went down, and the TV showed a tree that had fallen on a house that was in the process of being built and had only been framed. Framing timbers are normally made of Douglas fir and I thought of the downed tree as taking kamikaze revenge on the timber industry, but the TV people didn't pick up on that.
"If trees screamed, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time for no good reason."
475: I could not find the overall national map, but the regional links here probably show pieces of that map. (At least it has some of the city dialects broken out.)
478: tree lawn
A mere 30 miles south that was a "devil's strip". A very localized usage I think.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d5/Scotsdialects.png
Nowhere near as specific as the maps in the above links.
Here is a beautiful county-by-county map of the pop/soda/coke. It's for stuff like this that the fucking Internet was invented. Kudos to the creator - it was from his senior project at East Central University in Oklahoma.
458 - Yep, talk of all children, EXCEPT Emerson's nephew, should be banned.
Is the diagonal corner two right angles away? You only have to turn through one to get there.
Saying coke for all soft drinks seems a bit odd. Coke for all cola-based drinks, fine, but how could orangeade be a "coke"?
Pop or fizzy here. Soda is what I think all Americans cal lit.
In parts of Scotland, all soft-drinks are 'ginger'. Even Coke is 'ginger'.
492: I find it weird and think of it as an Atlanta quirk (where Coca-Cola's headquarters are.) It's a term that's just gone generic, like Xerox or kleenex or band-aid.
490. That map seems to be suggesting that Glaswegians and Edinburghians sound the same (Urban Scots), which isn't my experience.
408, 410: We totally did that song in my high school choir, too. I can't remember the melody or anything, though.
My choir teacher (grades 6-12) was all about teaching us songs in obscure (as well as non-obscure) languages. Then he would find someone in the community who spoke it to come in and talk about pronunciation.
As a result, I am now awesome at learning how to pronounce things in a new language. Thanks, Mr. Montgomery!
re: 495
I presume it's identifying that fact that in the cities people tend to speak something closer to standard English albeit with an accent and some Scots vocabulary. In terms of actual content Glaswegian English is much closer to standard English than the language spoken by someone say, 20 miles further east and out of the city.
The accent varies a lot between Edinburgh and Glasgow but the dialect isn't really that different.
470: Not only did I never learn this word (and I'm completely American), but I don't remember ever even having a need for it. I think it's more likely to come up in the context of crossing the street in that direction, which I, an innocent, never do. (I have a vague memory that Germans do.) Otherwise, for giving directions, it's [finger point] or perhaps "diagonal from".
You have no term for "I have no term for this"?
Grandnephew, asilon, but otherwise you've got it about right.
help! I'm trying to buy concert tickets and every time it asks for "word verification" I'm typing the word in wrong somehow. It's not capslock. But I can't get past this stage for the life of me. Might it be a high-volume traffic thing and I should just keep retrying?
486: If trees screamed, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down?
If they did, you would see endless footage of Republican presidential candidates cutting down trees.
Soda/pop/coke/ginger? I call them phosphates.
Special thanks to RFTS for giving me a term for something previously I had no term for. Tree lawn! I would in fact find the need to describe one (it's how Chicago is set up, too) and would say things like, "Well, there is like some grass and trees next to the street on one side of the sidewalk, and then the sidewalk, and then peoples' front lawns."
501: In that situation I usually just try again the next day when the site is less screwed up and I'm sober.
501- Maybe you're spelling it right but saying it wrong.
we're having a blizaard around here, BTW. It's the first blizzard I've seen in about 40 years. I'm very happy.
503: You were not alone, that had about the biggest "I have no term for that" response in the survey (~70%). That surprised me since it does seem to beg for a specific name.
I finally got through, our seats suck, and I paid too much for them. I'm grumpy.
At least I can go to the bathroom now.
I never knew what "catycorner" meant before. I've heard the word but never had any need to understand what people meant by it.
I believe that in the past I have used "diagonal", that being the word that describes diagonal situations.
Recently LanguageLog has linked to, and described in depth, a mind-alteringly annoying video purporting to introduce one to the "Northeast PA dialect". The main feature of this is supposedly the use of the word "Heyna?" in place of "Isn't it?". I lived surrounded by such people for 18 years and never heard that. I have now lived in Pittsburgh for 7 years and have never heard anyone say "Yinz", despite hearing "n-that"/"n'at" and the dropping of the "to be" all the time, not to mention the bizarre replacement of "rubber bands" with "gum bands".
I don't see any reason why everyone should join up to promote myths that only support the industry of little "humorous" books about the dialect of a region.
478, 488, 503, 507: Parking strip.
Nobody in Pittsburgh wants to talk to you, Ned.
A friend of mine likes to say that it's so cruel to put those wooden fence skirts around trees because it's like "Here! Wear clothes made from YOUR BROTHER!"
Heebie Geebie, do I know you?
Devil's strip. Seemingly the Moral Majority is getting the city to change the name to "lawn area".
Other names: (a) berg, (b) boulevard, (c) parking strip, (d) neutral ground, (e) devil strip, (f) city strip. (Dead link)
We say "boulevard" around here.
Nobody calls it a "ticket de métro"?
May I lower the tone here for a moment.
510: Have been in Pittsburgh on and off over the past 30 years. Yinz/yunz/youuns has fascinated me, so I have kept a running mental map of where I have heard it and have annoyingly badgered friends and colleagues from the area about their experience of it.
1) Its usage is increasingly confined to folks in the lowest social, economic and educational ranks. In the past its use was more widespread. (And your comment made me realize that I can't recall hearing it myself for several years now.) Its use is widely parodied and ridiculed, even by those who use it.
2) I have found no usage of it any distance south or west of Pittsburgh (in Ohio or West Virginia), but have encountered as far north and east as State College.
3) You are right that a bit of a cottage industry has sprung up around "Pittsburghese" that is a bit cloying. Here is an interesting article on it: "Pittsburghese" in the Daily Papers, 1910-1998: Historical Sources of Ideology about Variation. Particularly relevant is the section "Standardizing 'Pittsburghese' Through Representations in Print".
515: Thanks, John. Giving too much away, I'll just say the first link hits very close to home.
My marry and Mary are quite different. I get kind of New Yorky on maa-ry. While, "Mary" is "mare-y."
Just to add a data point, I always assumed that everyone pronounced those two the same way when I was growing up. But "merry" is quite different.
The Brits sound smart until they say glacier.
Or "debris".
Pee-can, all-mond, whor-er, mere-er. I tend to turn vowels into schwas, but enunciate all the consonants in a word.
Though there are a few Pittsburghisms I can't quite get rid of that Weiner used to call me on here. 'Any more' to mean 'nowadays' is the big one
That's also part of the supposed "Northeast PA" dialect. I use it. Also, when I was growing up people seemed to use the word "lady" about fifty times as often as "woman", which I now think is unusual.
The way people talk in Pittsburgh is almost identical to Scranton/Wilkes-Barre, with the exception of "yinz", if it actually exists; "pop" instead of "soda"; and the whole "needs washed" thing.
Ant, ee-ther, water rhymes with daughter, the L is silent in almond. I've picked up a few things moving around the country; eg pop, y'all.
The thought occurs to me that since the flight attendant is going to make me turn off the device in a minute, these slight words on this bland thread might be my last utterance on earth. Planes don't really crash, and I don't usually think about it anyway, but geez, what a way to go out.
I had dinner last night with a woman from St Cloud. I can say 'ish' in a near perfect Minnesota whine.
Try it. It really lifts the spirits, if you get the accent right.
Ned, you're at one of the universities in Pittsburgh, right? So you're surrounded by highly educated people who probably didn't grow up in the area? Seriously, though, 'yinz' is something that seems to me, at least, to be confined to my grandparents' generation (blue collar) and humorous radio parodies of the accent.
Things like the 'ah' in 'dahntahn', what my dad used to call 'swallowing the L' sound, and the missing 'to be' n'at are a lot more distinctive. Anymore. Don't ask me to say 'towel.'
524, exactly. I've heard all the stuff you're supposed to year, but never "yinz". This leads me to believe that younger generations consciously stopped saying it because it alone was publicized as such a stereotypical thing to say.
AWB is the only person I've ever heard identify a Pacific NW accent. I don't know that I've come across it myself, or at least I've never heard an accent anywhere in the NW that seemed unique to the place. The Robert DeNiro character in This Boy's Life was supposed to be using one, but when I saw the film I just thought, WTF is that supposed to be?
Since nobody ever moves away from the Pacific Northwest, people in other areas rarely encounter natives of the region.
457: yep. Said uncle sounds a lot like Ted Kennedy too. I think of an old school New York accent as totally different from the New England thing the Kennedys have going on, but there's obviously actually some overlap (mainly the thing with the Rs, which Wikipedia tells me is called "non-rhotic" pronounciation).
St. Cloud R me. Or my sister, anyway. If's Napiw's been messing with my sister, great! She's been looking around.
I've always been really charmed by "gum band." A friend of mine who grew up in the 'Burgh and I used to work out before going to our office. One day she was complaining that she just had "gum bands" for arm muscles -- and I totally filched the expression then and there.
Tony Soprano sounds just like my dad. Embrace your stereotype!
Wait. I have a cousin and two uncles who use 'yinz' sometimes. But one of those uncles sent all his kids to Ivy League or Ivy League level schools, and they don't even have detectable accents any more.
I've met one girl from Long Island who pronounced "awesome" as "wwwawsome", along with the rest of that paradigm, and it was annoying as all hell. Abandon that place to the sea, I say.
I sound just like you're supposed to.
528: Yeah. While I have the NY markers, they're reasonably worn-down by TV exposure -- I don't sound grossly NYish. But older family members spoke cartoon Brooklyn/Queens 'dese, dem, and dose', 'Toity-toid Street', lighting the 'earl' burner in the winter, and while it has some points in common with a thick Boston accent, they don't sound much alike at all.
My paternal grandfather, though he had only a high school education, had no strong Pittsburgh accent. This confuses me a little bit... did the accent just skip Carnegie & Heidelburg?
DON'T DRINK THE MILK!
IT'S SPERLED!
Like Heebie, I think that other people sound funny, and they think I sound funny, but I'm right and they're not.
530: "If's" should be "Iffen".
Does any one know what regional accent was common in older Hollywood films? It's something I've noticed but can't describe well. All the actors and actresses seemed to strive for exactly the same vowels sounds and diction.
Thanks for the link, O, but I think I need a bigger set of samples, especially since the one speaker is a 22-year-old from the Portland metro area, where you don't meet that many people with deep roots in Oregon. Her speech sounds pretty generic to me (and she should have had some water before making the recording).
541: Do you mean that quasi British sound of Myrna Loy say or Irene Dunne?
I've always thought it a variation of "affected upper-class NYC" -- in real life found in George Plimpton and William F. Buckley.
On the original topic: one of the great things about raising twins is that you always feel as though you're in the middle of some informal scientific study. Specifically, M & S have different accents. The difference is less pronounced now (at four and a half) than it was a year ago, but you can still hear it clearly in some of the vowels; S, for example, pronounces the first syllable in 'water' with a broad, diphthong-y Brooklynese sound.
I may have mentioned this before, but one of my sisters and I were sent to speech therapy in early elementary school; because of our accents, the school authorities suspected developmental disabilities. Then they learned that my mom was from Boston and my dad from Brooklyn, and that was the end of that.
Old Hollywood had a lot of Germans, Austrians, Poles, Swedes, etc., Jewish and otherwise, and they might have developed a generic artificial dialect produced by voice coaches. Practicallyu everyone had to change their speech -- Southerners, New Yorkers, Minnesotans (Jane Russell at least; Judy Garland grew of in CA).
543: I thought that was referred to as the "mid-Atlantic" accent. An old president of Corn/ell (circa 1995, before my time) had it too.
543: The name I know for the Plimpton accent is Larchmont Lockjaw; Plimpton is, I think, the youngest person who actually spoke that way. But it used to be, I think, a standard "Rich people all over the Northeast" accent. I don't know why it died out so hard and so fast.
541: you mean like Katherine Hepburn in Philadelphia Story? I think of that as NY/New England WASP but I'm not sure because basically people don't talk that way anymore.
I grew up on Long Island. I think the extent to which that accent differs from generic New Yorkese is exaggerated, and the really characteristic sound isn't the "Lawn Gisland" thing, it's something off about the "D" "T" sound.
547: Funny! I call it "Locust Valley Lockjaw."
Not Katherine Hepburn; she always sounded sort of distinctive. But pretty much anyone else from that era. It might be a style thing, too. In older movies the actresses always sound a little breathy and light, and the vowel sounds are all just different.
This may be Broadway dialect rather than Hollywood dialect. I'd imagine that they're close. I'm sure that a linguist could go through Skinner's book and decribe the dialect she taught exactly. I wouldn't be surprised if whe didn't inadvertently sneak some localisms she grew up with.
Reading between the lines in Wikipedia, I think the main reason it was prominent in both actors and upper-class types (or strivers thereto), and why it died so quickly, was that it was an artifact of the period before the American accent had any international prestige.
Comparable, perhaps, to how some aristocrats in Tolstoy affected the French 'r' while speaking Russian.
You mean that it was an artificially affected accent even for the rich Northeasterners who spoke that way all the time (at least in part), and so it died out when the prestige of it went away? I could see that.
we're having a blizaard around here, BTW. It's the first blizzard I've seen in about 40 years. I'm very happy.
It's coming down pretty good out here too. I'm probably going to get dragged to the park for sledding soon. Snow means fortifying yourself with the breakfast of champions, coffee and peach cobbler.
Kelsey Grammar is supposed to be a Skinner Mid-Atlantic English holdout. I don't remember him that way but I don't watch TV much.
That Portland woman pronounces every word exactly the way I do. I conclude from this that there is no Portland accent.
556: I hate you. I'm in the office banging my head against my timesheets (exciting fun Saturday deadline as a special treat to kick off the holiday season), and writing a brief. I hate life, and myself, and all of you.
If only everyone (including us) were much, much more responsible about shoveling their walks, I too could love snow. I'm sure I would adore snow as a New Yorker.
559: I'm grading precalculus tests, and it's drizzly outside? Don't hate me; I'm not like the others.
It must have been a slow news day yesterday, because the media outlets were all talking about the big storm coming. ZOMG BLIZZARD AAGH! So we just had a snow flurry, of which nothing remains a half-hour later.
559: don't hate me, I'm writing a brief too! On the same f*cking issue that I have already written 6 other briefs on times, because the Court will not pick a coherent test & stick to it. And while OUR motions to reconsider are so unserious that the Court can deny them without full briefing, our opponents' does not, oh no sirree. I hate life, myself, litigation, & the federal judiciary.
and I bet my draft's real coherent, too, judging by the above paragraph.
but the snow's sticking! I retract the part about hating life.
543: I've been told that George Plimpton's father's accent was even more comically pronounced than George's. From the imitation I was graced with, I can believe it.
In NYC, the thing I spent so much time getting used to in Cleveland as a "tree lawn" is called an "easement." Maybe this is the more universal term for it? We never called it anything growing up because our side of the street didn't have a sidewalk.
Ogged should note that NW ladies' voices are creaky, not breathy. Isn't that one of his criteria for compatibilaty, not being breathy?
HOW CAN YOU BE SO BAD AT MATH? HOW?
How can you work with sq. rt (9) / 1 for a whole problem without simplifying it to 3?
Why didn't you speak up if you've been so goddamn mystified for the past month?
WHY ARE YOU PULLING BULLSHIT OUT OF YOUR ASS AND PASSING IT OFF AS SIMPLE ALGEBRA? That is not how you add fractions.
I swear to god, these kids are in college. Like, a normal college for normal kids.
The Pacific NW dialect thingie looks weak to me.
But at least they've got great Texas accents.
How can you work with sq. rt (9) / 1 for a whole problem without simplifying it to 3?
All right, heebie's life is more difficult than mine right now. And Katherine's, and, oh, hell 99% of the people on the planet's. I'm just having a particularly pronounced bout of wanting to change my name and move to Belize rather than do my timesheets.
"Sean Connery is a hopeless case. The writers have to create back stories (as in The Rock) to explain why he will always sound like the Scottish milkman he once was. As well teach a seal to bark Shakespeare as Connery to sound genuinely American."
568: I adore that accent. Honestly, if I could walk around talking like Jennifer Jason Leigh in The Hudsucker Proxy without getting smacked in the teeth, I would.
566: Dude, creaky voice? You won't believe my lazy ass, so I'm just going to wait for Teo to show up and explain why that study is completely lame. But in the meantime, some excerpts from the article:
"Bill Clinton is a good example of creaky," said Ingle.
Ingle agreed, noting that her study of speech in Ballard involved only 14 people yet took countless hours of recording and analysis.
"Everyone thinks the Pacific Northwest is too young a region to have our own dialect. It's discrimination."
571: I had that freak-out a few weeks ago with my poetics students. I got like three papers (topic: analyze the relationship of form to meaning in one poem) whose thesis was "Form has no meaning in this poem because Sir Philip Sidney basically had to write in sonnets because it was the Renaissance and what is really important about this poem is the words he uses and the feeling behind those words." *headdesk*
I gave them all a stern talking to. It's fine for them to like the poems, but if you're turning in papers whose thesis is basically "I have learned nothing in this class and I'm working as hard as I can to show you that I actively don't give a shit," it had better be conscious hostility against the course, because that's how I'm going to read it from here on out. Turns out the woman whose paper was most egregious was just feeling sorta romantic that day.
All right, heebie's life is more difficult than mine right now.
Nah, mine's just fun to bitch about. It really is astonishing how poorly the Texas schools larn math on these kids, but my job is fun anyway. Plus I get to play soccer this afternoon.
"Joe Bob, this new Yankee arithmetic teacher is a Gucci Chablis elitist, if you ask me."
Well, you know, isn't Sidney all about the sex?
581: Yes. If she'd actually paid attention in class, she would have been able to do an awesome reading of how the sonnet form itself actually provides a key to unlocking A&S XXX as an erotic complaint. But she didn't. And, like all my students (who live with their parents), they refuse to see sex in anything. I point it out; they giggle. I remind them; they've forgotten. They are these weird beings wandering the earth with no erotic imagination whatsoever. I think they know someone's talking about sex if they use the words "cock," "cunt," "fucking," etc.
"HOW CAN YOU BE SO BAD AT MATH? HOW?"
You probably shouldn't write that on their papers.
I hate time sheets with a white hot passion, LB. As I think I've said before, my job is in many ways a lot like being in college--me sitting at the computer in my living room researching & writing papers & getting really stressed out about deadlines. Only, there's no spring break, winter break, summer vacation, or lazy beginning-of-the-semester period, I don't have any editorial control over what I'm writing, & I'm supposed to be keeping track of my time in six minute increments. Brings out all my worst habits.
I don't know why a writer would hide sexual references in things. It sounds like a juvenile thing to do, to me, so I usually hope it isn't happening or at least isn't intentional.
Maybe you could write "Simplify, simplify, simplfy."
As well teach a seal to bark Shakespeare as Connery to sound genuinely American.
As well as, maybe better.
Someday I'd like to get a stamp kit with the phrases I write most often, like "simplify" and "the inverse is not the same as the reciprocal" and "use SOH CAH TOA", etc.
585: Not much for them high-falutin' figures of speech, are you?
Yay! Mine would say "Evaluation is not analysis!" and "Read this aloud" and "What does this mean?"
588: I always remembered it by "Oh hell. Another hour of algebra." Of course, that one must remember "sine," "cosine," and "tangent" by oneself.
576: My grandfather sounds a bit like that in my childhood memories, perhaps out of a desire to fit into '30s and '40s New England after he left the Midwest forever.
591: Whoops. That WAY one must . . .
George Plimpton may be dead, but his accent lives on every week on "Piano Jazz".
"use SOH CAH TOA"
I have completely forgotten what this means. The extent to which I've lost all math beyond geometry really freaks me out sometimes.
595, I think it has something to do with the Lost Colony. The settlers who found it were as mystified as you are.
The "devil strip" is properly called the "parkway".
595, 596: No, she was a Native American princess who saved the first Christmas.
"Camp Sohcahtoa" would be a great name for a math nerd summer camp.
In honor of the passing of Evil Knievel, I offer this remembered bit from a book published in connection with The Young Ones TV show:
Q: What is the world record for jumping over nuns with a steamroller?
A: Half a nun.
I heard the opening guitar whine of U2's "Even Better Than The Real Thing" while driving home at or around the legal BAC limit last night, and I am moved to declare: Achtung Baby is a better album than The Joshua Tree.
The Joshua Tree is a brave letter from an earnest man. It's unembarrassed anthems are genuinely moving.
But Achtung Baby is a document of a demigod ascending. The Fly emerges. Bono's fascination with himself is pure and druglike, unencumbered by attempts to rhyme with Nicaragua.
I went through an Achtung Baby phase. It's the only U2 album I was ever interested in. Perhaps this makes my judgment more suspect?
Wrongshore and AWB really piss me off. They really irritate m!
Plane didn't crash. That means I'm going to have to do timesheets after all.
Emerson, I went out with a gal from St. Cloud in the 70s. Not your sister, I'm quite sure. Stopped in to visit in the 80s, and she made the best apple pancakes ever. Now that I think about it, I went out briefly with another gal from St. Cloud around the same time period.
I was there (and in neighboring St. Wendel) several times for different purposes back then: pretty much the apex of human civilization, so far as I'm concerned.
Is it because we're monopolizing the discussion?
No, WS. I think of you as Rightshore. U2 is just one of those bands I hear named and I think "Gawd, I hate them," but then I think back on that one summer when I listened to AB all the time. Seems like tokenism in me to only like their first "fuck earnest political sentiment" album.
607:
I just wanted to be one of the cool kids. I couldnt think of a reason why, so I left that part blank.
I need to do some billing work this weekend too. What a pain in the ass. I need to work on getting paid in American dollars, not art work.
610 -- AWB, I'm sure Will will let you pay with artwork.
I try so hard not to like AWB. I really do. I need to think of more reasons not to like people.
Napi's clients dont run out of money like mine.
Is AWB an Artist? Or will she just try to pay me with poetry lessons?
Look at it. Is it tokenism? Reflexive iconoclasm? Or were you just needing something other than earnest political sentiment from U2?
I like me some anthems, and I am positively brimming with earnest political sentiment. But I like Bono's monomania better than his messianism.
(There is a breed of iconoclastic liberal who distrusts any belief too earnest because it leads inevitably to totalitarianism. I still burn at the memory of a college journalist explaining to me that "I'm an iconoclast. That means I smash icons." And another friend, who thinks of herself as the best Bush-hating lib in the world, who was wigged out covering the janitors' union because the all clap at the same time and yell chants. But I still like Achtung Baby better.)
613: I dunno, I'm in BigLaw like Napi, and we get clients not paying us reasonably often. (In a charmingly ironic fashion, as well. I spent the spring and summer coming up with a series of pyrotechnically brilliant briefs justifying our client's decision not to make certain payments that the unenlightened might have thought it was bound ot make under a lease. The client's next attorney will be writing a similar set of briefs justifying its decision not to pay our bill.)
613: When I need a divorce someday, Will, I will pay in lectures on the relationship between sonnet form and blues lyrics. It will so so be worth it for you.
614: I actually dig earnestness, but I prefer earnestness that isn't trying to seduce others into assent. I guess that's kind of perverse and annoying, but I have a hard time believing that people's very sincere feelings and thoughts are ever anything but strange to others. I really like hearing something that I can appreciate aesthetically without being asked to "agree" with or pledge allegiance to. Does that make any sense?
For the record, my daughter is has her Casio keyboard out and is making it play Home on the Range repeatedly. (An uptemp version.)
Every 3rd or 4th time, she lets me dance with her. Otherwise, I am expected to sit and watch her.
547: Funny! I call it "Locust Valley Lockjaw.
"Ligonier Lockjaw" here in SW PA. Ligonier is where Cheney goes to slaughter quail on a ginormous private club largely owned by Mellons.
I was so turned off by the whole PopMart thing that I completely forgot until this summer how good AB is. Really good!
without being asked to "agree" with or pledge allegiance to.
example of aesthetic object that asks for your agreement of allegiance?
(In a charmingly ironic fashion, as well. I spent the spring and summer coming up with a series of pyrotechnically brilliant briefs justifying our client's decision not to make certain payments that the unenlightened might have thought it was bound ot make under a lease. The client's next attorney will be writing a similar set of briefs justifying its decision not to pay our bill.)
I guy I used to work for did expert witness work for a rich asshole suing the architect who designed his (fairly tacky) house. He basically billed forward, knowing damn well that he would never get his final payment without going to court over it. Sure enough, Rich Guy refused to pay final invoice, but the architect was already whole.
It's a weird point of principle for (some) rich people to screw people over on bills. I suppose, on some level, it's better than them actually pissing on you or fucking your spouse.
Will, we still have to observe Rule 1.
A partner of mine, an old Virginia litigator, tells of hearing the following request for a continuance (rendered in a thick Cavalier accent): Your Honor, the case is not financially mature.
It also has a nicely practical connection to remaining rich.
The client's next attorney will be writing a similar set of briefs justifying its decision not to pay our bill.)
In my first year of practice, a partner got me to help him represent a guy who was refusing to pay his former lawyer's bill. I had to laugh when I found out that the partner had not gotten the client to pay a retainer or sign a retainer agreement.
AWG:
I've been listening to Pinetop Perkins a lot lately. Please connect the dots between Pinetop and sonnet form.
OT: Now, we are listening to La Cucaracha. Lots of smiles and fast moving of feet.
619: I think Joshua Tree is a pretty good example. Certain hymns, too, but not others. When I visit my parents' church, I find myself singing along quite happily with most of them, and then a particularly rhetorically demanding one will just make me grit my teeth.
I would accept alarmingly little money to be pissed on. Not that I get anything out of it, but as long as I can keep my mouth closed and shower soon after, pee just isn't that bad for you.
Wrongshore: Pissed on>screwed over on bill>fucking my spouse.
And no, I am not going to UnfoggeDConII.
When the money hits the wood, the case go good.
In my area, we refer to the "Lynchburg witness" not having arrived yet. The judge usually laughs and says, "well, Mr, Green better be here by the next date."
It's a weird point of principle for (some) rich people to screw people over on bills. I suppose, on some level, it's better than them actually pissing on you or fucking your spouse.
My brother has experienced that at his coffee shop (where obviously well-off people dip into what is clearly labeled as the tip jar so they don't have to break bills) and I have experienced it with a non-profit selling overpriced stuff to rich people for a good cause.
I've been listening to Pinetop Perkins a lot lately. Please connect the dots between Pinetop and sonnet form.
No payment until you give me a divorce, will!
Rich people are used to getting stuff for free, and they're often quite skilled at it. Cf. that Blanchett scene from Coffee and Cigarettes. On swag:
Shelly: It's just... funny, don't yah think, that when you can't afford something, it's like *really expensive* but then when you can afford it, it's like, free? It's kinda backwards, don't yah think?
Cate: Yeah, well... the world is a bit like that, I guess, in a lot of ways.
No payment until you give me a divorce, will!
Perhaps we should just stay married AWB.
628 -- AWB is unclear on the concept of the retainer. First you pay. Then the lawyer works.
Newlyweds ought to start paying will when they get back from the honeymoon -- that way if/when things go south, they won't be looking at a big bill.
It's like a protection racket: "Nice lookin' marriage ya got theah. Sure would be a shame if something happened to it..."
632:
You could start giving the first year's payments as a wedding gift.
It's a weird point of principle for (some) rich people to screw people over on bills
I catered a posh party for some such people. What I charged was a bargain for them, and pocket change in the context of their typical expenses, but sure enough, as soon as the deal was done they refused to pay. I think they were used to dealing with people who were used to not being paid, and this was expected to lead to negotiations and, in effect, an after-the-fact discount. (I wasn't a professional caterer, so I didn't expect this at all and basically responded to them with Bartleby-like immobility for a couple of months; the woman was in tears when she finally wrote me the check for the full amount.)
631: Package deal. Marriage, divorce, private detective, bail bond, legal defense, medical expenses, reconstructive surgery, bodyguard, counseling, anti-depressants. All marriage related expenses all in one package.
In NYC, the thing I spent so much time getting used to in Cleveland as a "tree lawn" is called an "easement."
I call it a "curb strip," but would have to ask around what other people call it in Chicago, were it is indeed snowing.
I've just come out of a Migraine to find a white world.
636 -- A fine idea, and it will certainly make the no relationship policy look economical by comparison.
Until this moment, I've always been secretly ashamed that the only U2 album I like is Achtung Baby. No more!
I'd also like to join the "I hate my life" chorus, as I'm trying desperately to write an original and interesting paper on whether abstinence-only education works, and whether condom distribution leads to increased teen sex. (Hint: no, and also no.)
Jesus should get his money up front
He should have thought about that before he chased us out of the temple.
Jesus should get his money up front.
Jesus has learned from such experiences.
522: I can say 'ish' in a near perfect Minnesota whine.
Sadly, those who used to say "ish", and then said "oh fur yuck" now often say simply "SIH-ck, SIH-ck!"
If condom distribution doesn't work, how should we increase teen sex? Negative criticism without proposing an alternative is ...... negative, I guess.
mrh:
"Sex feels good. Kids like feeling good."
If condom distribution doesn't work, how should we increase teen sex?
More sex in popular entertainment.
Duh.
On the veldt, abstinence education was a bad idea. We're hard wired to reject it.
mrh, whom I like to think of as "Mr. H" four-fifths of the time and "myrrh" one-fifth of the time, is my music buddy.
Will no one defend The Joshua Tree? I am being slightly heterodox here. Come on, people. Don't make me become Slate.com.
There must be a thirty-six-to-forty-year-old out there who got TJT right in the veins when the blood were most accomodating.
Mrh: have you seen the report that Henry Waxman's office prepared on abstinence only education? My impression was that it was the definitive take-down on the subject.
Dammit. "Myrrh" would have been such a kick-ass pseud.
I just got a FB group invitation from a high school acquaintance for a group protesting the Satanic influence of "The Golden Compass." Apparently Satan was directly involved in the penning of a script for a movie so seductive that children will beg to read Pullman's novels and God will be murdered in the process.
I keep wanting to write her an email asking exactly how frightened God is. Is God sitting in His apartment, curtains drawn, muttering to himself with a shotgun propped against the door?
"The Golden Compass" (or at least the whole trilogy) is kind of a tricky one on that front, though. Certainly, if you're going to be sane about it, getting bent out of shape over any work of art is goofy. But it does explicitly depict with approval the mercy-killing of the aged and demented God of the bible, as a means of overthrowing the evil Church that serves him. You wouldn't have to be all that wildly traditional a Christian to think that you didn't favor your kids reading that, or going to movies based on it.
Still nuts, but less nuts than getting weird about Harry Potter.
have you seen the report that Henry Waxman's office prepared on abstinence only education?
I have indeed, thank you. (Waxman's report mainly details the ways in which the particular abstinence programs in use today are terrible.) The anti-abstinence-only literature is kind of an embarrassment of riches. Just this year, the independent study mandated by Congress in 1997 was finally completed and, guess what? It doesn't work.
(In fact, the only reports claiming that it is effective come from the Heritage Foundation. Hmm.)
Abstinence was a great idea back on the veldt, actually, but it was a little hard to grasp, and only those whose mental capabilities were up to the task of grasping it were able to grasp it, you see. And of course they all abstained, which is why everyone is so dumb these days.
478: I'm extremely dubious about the prevalence of "no term for this" in the Twin Cities-area hits in these survey results -- everyone in Minneapolis says "boulevard" to refer to this feature of the urban landscape, and I'm pretty sure I've even seen that usage in official notices.
Will no one defend The Joshua Tree? I am being slightly heterodox here. Come on, people.
I will defend Saul Williams' cover of "Sunday Bloody Sunday".
but it was a little hard to grasp
Once you do grasp it hard though, does that really count as abstaining?
Is it reasonably settled whether there was less sex among high schoolers, in say the sixties, when I was in HS?
Looking for some sort of baseline, however complex the reasons might be for any changes.
My understanding is that Chris Weitz has taken out all the more explicitly anti-Christian elements of the HDM series and shaped a more generally pro-freethinking franchise -- still a good thing, I'll bet, though sad that you can't make a jillion-dollar anti-Christian movie.
The fundies are protesting the movie because it could turn kids on to the books; some of them admit that the movie isn't anti-Christian. (Very big of them.)
Here in Minnesota it's forbidden to sell glue to kids under 18. I guess we have come up with a new rite of passage. Cigarettes and glue at 18, and then booze at 21.
I am quite seduced by all the ads featuring battle-armored polar bears. RAWR!
I'll admit to loving Joshua Tree.
Running to Stand Still had particular significance in a relationship involving mutual love that could not happen.
Chris Weitz has taken out all the more explicitly anti-Christian elements of the HDM series and shaped a more generally pro-freethinking franchise
They're going to have to stray increasingly far from the books to keep this up over the course of the franchise, but it seems a pretty good strategy for The Golden Compass, where what exactly is going on (with respect to The Authority, etc.) remains unclear.
Yeah, but for a parent who's genuinely troubled by the content, it still seems legit to worry about the movie's connection to the books, despite the fact that the movie's been toned down.
battle-armored polar bears.
These were wildly cool in the book, and look good in the movie ads, I must admit.
LB, notice the number of your comment? See?
666 - so fucking what? It's not fucking compulsory! (Anger directed at fuckwits, not LB.)
(Anger also being diverted from 9 year old having temper tantrum. The whole of the last month has been one long temper tantrum and I'm about ready to start beating her or finding a boarding school.)
I find the Golden Compass series pretty pro-God in effect if not intent ("free will" as the answer to the problem of evil is somehow more convincing if you show how evil & dictatorial & horrfiying it would be for God to try to control people's thoughts), but that probably only works if you're starting out pretty heretical. It did always amuse me how they somehow attracted less crap than Harry Potter did.
The previews look kind of cool. The third one seems unfilmable to me though.
I like the Joshua Tree. Actually, the one I mainly listen to is Rattle & Hum, but close enough.
War wouldnt be so popular if women werent so easily seduced by armor-wearers.
I'm looking forward to the film very much. Read the books, cried through the plays (twice) - the weak bits in the play (for me) were the witches and the bears (the witches more than the bears), and I think the CGI should sort that out nicely. Hope it's not too mangled.
Via Crooked Timber, here is a pretty good recent e-mail interview with Pullman about the books/movie.
The plainest and simplest description of the world, for me, and the truest, is that there is no God, but that human beings are capable of great goodness and great wickedness, and we don't need priests or Popes or imams or rabbis to tell us which is which.
(Anger also being diverted from 9 year old having temper tantrum. The whole of the last month has been one long temper tantrum and I'm about ready to start beating her or finding a boarding school.)
Only children with bad parents have bad temper tantrums.
Parents who have had a glass of wine are less likely to be bothered by children having temper tantrums.
Finally, divorce allows you to ship the bad child to the bad parent for a break.
On one hand, I really do agree with my fundamentalist students that anti-Christian literature corrupts the religious imagination. On the other hand, my Christian students are the ones who are most bored by genuinely Christian writers. They eat up the heretical stuff like candy and beg for more. I point out how problematic this stuff should be to their belief systems, and they really don't care. The students who really take to genuinely Christian literature and have problems with the heretical stuff are my Jewish, Muslim, and non-religious students.
661: HDM series? These threads just get more and more arcane.
If I had kids, I suppose His Dark Materials would make an excellent opportunity to teach them (i) about Gnostic heresies and the tendency of certain people to hear secret harmonies and (ii) that insecurity, petty resentment and name-calling (easy on the clutch, Phil, you're grinding metal) are as common among adults as children.
Also, there's an early screening of The Golden Compass at the Lincoln Square theater this evening at 7. You can buy tickets online.
That is, I'd like to think that, if I were still a Christian, I'd be a lot more concerned about all the ways Christianity has been corrupted by mass culture to resemble something like a fixation on Santa Claus and the blessings of white skin and heterosexual parents. A guy who honestly says "I'm an atheist and I'm writing children's books that promote that worldview" shouldn't be too much of a bogeyman, comparatively.
679: I'm off to see "Control" at 715, so I'll miss it, but I might not mind seeing it eventually.
War wouldnt be so popular if women weren't so easily seduced by armor-wearers
Armor is quite beautiful, although without much history or resonance on this side of the ocean. In some units of the British Army officer's full dress includes a Gorget, a small piece of residual armor.
I used to think the Art Institute had a good collection until I saw the Musée de l'Armée.
The US Army had curassiers, heavy cavalry with armor, as late as the 1890's, I think. I don't think ever used in action. Now there is Kevlar, but hasn't built up any cache nor sex appeal, no doubt due to it's bulkiness.
My ancestor no doubt wore a breastplate at least in the Pequod War in 1636.
Hm. Lincoln Square, you say? It's going to be tight for me but some of my plans fell apart this evening, so I'll keep that in mind.
the blessings of white skin and heterosexual parents.
To be fair, it's a pretty sweet gig.
576 - thanks will! I'm only 75% bad though, the other three are perfectly normal, but this one ....
Still, you're right, wine helps. Wine (in a rather large beer goblet!), Will Self on the extended repeat of Have I Got news For You, and wondering whether I can be bothered to go to the shop to get chocolate before it shuts ...
Smasher, if you're interested in joining Bave and I, we're meeting at Village East (2nd and 12th) at 645. Movie starts at 715.
679: Turns out we are going at 7:00 to see it.
But the extraordinarily annoying thing that I do not have time to sort out right now is that it did one of those "xxx has bought a ticket" things for my son's facebook when I bought the ticket online. We really have no idea how it is connected, different e-mail, he was not logged onto facebook on the computer I used.
680: ...all the ways Christianity has been corrupted by mass culture....
I said something about this, or something very close to it, to an old classmate of mine who had suggested that [politically] liberal theists can't disdain the Dawkins et al. attacks on right-wing religious types unless the liberals attack their right-wing counterparts with as much contempt, ridicule and scorn as atheists. I am inclined to believe that Christianity can't be genuinely expressed in the idiom of the mass media, which is what both the Dawk and James Dobson traffic in.
Asilon:
75 percent? You can do better than that. Plus, the worse your kids are, the more wine you get to drink.
I've always had the impression that armor was, and is, enormously uncomfortable, from the hoplite's helmet scraping his ears raw in the heat of the sun to the clanking, sandwich-sign-esque bulletproof vests of the '30s and so on.
I was talking about The Golden Compass.
691: There's no avoiding the weight and bulkiness, and how hot it is, I imagine. But I'm sure as with everything else, fit, quality, undergarments, and so on make a big difference. The Armor for the kings of France, very individuated, or for Joan of Arc, demostrate how closely fitted it was for the top wearers, although the lowest were probably tortured by theirs.
Smasher, if you're interested in joining Bave and I
Bave and me.
691: IMX heat building up is the worst thing about wearables designed to lessen the damage after making a mistake on a motorcycle. Good protection isn't fun stuff to wear in the summer no matter what it costs.
Right, but it can only be worse when it doesn't fit. My head is larger and differently-shaped than my brother's and for years I just accepted that to ride a motorcycle was to have a headache, never having worn a helmet that fit.
Asilon, send the bad kid to me. I want another kid.
i have never been to Wisconsin, it's really faraway
for me geographically and otherwise
seems a nice place according to that 70's show
this is one of my favourite shows, may be you know it
hope you'll enjoy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FQCpPKhHmw
there is no translation, sorry
I've never been to Wisconsin either, actually.
B, if you're looking to get pregnant you should really consider sleeping with me. I have a great track record.
So it seems. And yet, I really don't need that additional level of complication in my life.
Then again, you're a lawyer, right? I bet you could pay lots and lots in child support. Hmmmm.
Oh, you'd definitely need to sign away child-support rights in the pre-coital agreement.
I don't think I can legally do that; after all, it's *child* support, not me support. Sexist.
The whole of the last month has been one long temper tantrum and I'm about ready to start beating her or finding a boarding school.
My girls are eight and ten, and I've had pretty good results with push ups as a punishment.
Really--you can't do that? Are all sperm donors technically liable for child support? (Honest question. I think you're wrong, but don't really know.)
But be warned that if you keep calling me sexist I'm going to retract my offer. And then you'll NEVER get pregnant with my baby.
I've driven through Wisconsin, very pretty. Rolling hills, farms, pretty much what you'd expect. It was a big relief to get there after driving through the Upper Penisula. We stopped at the town my grandmother lived in when she first crossed the border and took a few pictures.
My brother did his PhD at Madison. Get two beers in him, and he'll start to say stuff like "You know, Wisconsin is paradise." I wouldn't go that far, but I keep hoping I'll get to take a courier trip to Milwaukee some day. I'd totally blow my per diem on bratwurst.
Wisconsin is an important center for American cannibalism and alcoholism. It's much like Minnesota in other respects, or Minnesota crossed with Illinois maybe.
Lest I gave the wrong impression, I should say that Minnesota is bright normal WRT alcoholism, but Wisconsin is genius level.
Minnesota is mediocre in the cannibalism area. It's hard to compete with Gein and Dahmer. Credit where credit is due.
Really--you can't do that? Are all sperm donors technically liable for child support?
I'm pretty sure B is correct about this, and I certainly hope that she is. In terms of sperm donors, I think it's all very murky because the laws were written well before anyone had even imagined such arrangements. I'm pretty sure I've heard of courts ordering donors to pay child support, even though the parties had signed a contract stipulating that the donor would not be responsible for support (with the court ruling that such a contract is unenforceable because invalid: the adults don't have the right to sign away a child's right to support). These wouldn't have been cases involving anonymous donors, I guess, in which case it would be pretty hard to sue.
I think sperm donors are protected somehow if they go through an official anonymizing agency, but possibly not if it's an informal arrangement between friends.
Fine, B, you can have your child support. But you're going to have to drag it out of me every single month. Take me to court, garnish my wages, the whole fiasco. And every time I move or change jobs you're going to have to hunt me down again. Trust me, it won't be pretty. Hardly worth the time or effort. But: the offer of sex still stands. (Because I care).
possibly not if it's an informal arrangement between friends
I'm quite certain they're not protected if it's an informal arrangement between friends. What I'm wondering is whether there's any way for them to be protected by formalizing the agreement. I bet IA is right that this is a pretty murky area of law.
There was a case when two identical twin brothers both slept with the same woman on the same night and she had to prove which one was the father in order to get support.
Raymon hopes to continue his appeal of the decision. "I want to go to the Supreme Court," Raymon told ABC News. "If they can't prove it's me then they should throw it out of court." And as for the child support, he said, "The state should eat it."
Gawd, I remember that. Two identical twin brother assholes, sounds like.
We're all assholes, B, though at crunch time women are called something else.
i thought it's cute kid's thread
sequel two :)
"use SOH CAH TOA" I have completely forgotten what this means.
See, sine = opp/hyp, cos = adj/hyp, and tan = opp/adj. Now go calculate!
B, you'd love her - all my friends do. Those who haven't seen her in devil-child mode don't really believe she can be like that. She's used to 7 year old brothers too! If I hand her over to ogged at DCon he can bring her back to you?
Push-ups - I'll bear that in mind. What about shooting her? Can I do that?
You can probably spray her with a watergun all you want. Like what people do to get cats to not scratch the furniture.
728: Yes! Hand her over to Ogged, because even though I'll be at DCon, I'll be going to spend a week with my boyfriend afterwards. Ogged can babysit until after the New Year, and I'll pick her up in time to start school for the spring semester!
Oooh *squeals like a 4 year old* I didn't realise you were going to be there - for some reason you were on my mental "sends apologies" list. Cool.
Ogged can babysit until after the New Year = Pilot episode of "Uncle Ogged" sitcom!
I'll be at DCon,
Hey, I didn't realize you'd be there either! Cool.
There must be a thirty-six-to-forty-year-old out there who got TJT right in the veins when the blood were most accomodating.
Oh yeah. I was a relatively minor acoylte in an entire cult of U2 among my teenage friends, but that music still has a huge impact on me. I saw the band in 2005 in Croke Park, having last seen them at this 1987 concert. It was like a time machine back to being 16. Usually if I go to gigs there's a part of me that's always detached but I was able to be fully absorbed this time. I am considering buying the anniversary re-issue of the album because it has the original version of "The Sweetest Thing" which for a long time was my favourite song ever.
Gonerill's story way upthread - same thing happened a friend of my mother's visiting the US in the 1960s. She to young man - So, you'll give me a ring. Him - stricken look of panic.
