h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

>>Didnt she also leave in Russia till she was six years old?

Nine, apparently. But glo'al stops aren't particularly Russian, Plus she doesn't sound particularly Russian otherwise (Except when she sings in Russian). Unlike, say, the guy in Gogol Bordello.

Maybe its just me and accents then, I have been proved to be hopeless in the past when it comes to identifying them. there's a guy in the park who speaks to me most mornings and I cant honestly tell if he's Portugese or Polish raised, sometimes Im inclined to think he's Italian


I know that Bjork comes from Iceland and loves the London, Cockney accent but to be honest when Ive heard her speaking lately sometimes she sounds as West country as a pint of rough cider.

Maybe its the mix of accents and then the aimed for sound that singers are known to effect that through up wierd or unsusal sounds in her speech. I was listeneing to her last night on the radio and she didi have some odd bits that make her words hard to understand till you hear them a fw times and work out their meaning by context.

I had the same problem with Elvis Costelo and Sting but I think that's as more to do with the way they try to sing as their regional accents.

I've often noticed that Bjork slips momentarily into Sarf London. (Not Cockernee - It's specifically Sarf London). I *think* she lived in Brixton in Sugarcubes days. (I never met her, despite having often been in the area at the time).

Sting - yes, I can definitely detect some poshified North Eastern there. Mr McManus - well, his is from my home territory.

But I'm increasingly getting (some) Liverpool and Manchester accents confused nowadays. They've both changed since I left.

It's strange how influences of different accents affect some words and not others. Seems to imply that an accent affects each word individually rather than being some overarching influence on the way we speak.

I met a woman in Spain years ago who had grown up in southern Spain until her mid teens and then moved to the east end, and she would pronounce some words with a spanish accent (most of them) and others with an east end accent. But you didn't seem to get words which were half and half.

On the other hand the main influence on my accent till late childhood was for the short 'a' sound - the 'posh' 'a' rather than the longer 'common' 'a' but the influences through my teenage years was for the more 'common' vowel pronunciation. So I do tend to switch between the pronunciations for words - sometimes saying 'gar-Age' and sometimes saying 'garidge'.

I still pronounce fair, fir and fur identically (and using a vowel sound unknown outside my native parts).


Actually - not quite true. Thinking about it, my 'fur' has acquired a Scottish U sound. Sometimes.

PRU means Prudential Insurance Company to me, as in "the man from the Pru" and ESP means "English for Specific Purposes"(eg English for writing lab. reports) whatever it means to the rest of you.
The profession of Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) is notoriously abbreviation ridden - some 200 in everyday use.
Just off to do my LLAS duty in the SAC of the ELC

Ed - your 'native parts' have their own dialect? Blimey they must be big!

SAC = Strategic Air Command

ELC = Early Learning Centre

LLAS = Llangollen and Llanberis Amateur Singers

wtf?

I saw her singing that on TV yesterday Ed. I took it that she was just having a bit of fun with it and doing that because she was in England. It wasn't be'er every time the word came up in the song.

The rural library where I access the web does not have an OED or an OED online subscription but I have studied all their other dictionaries and encyclopediae on hand and come to the following conclusions (so far) about roughshod.

Rough and ruffle are closely connected from a Norse word from which we also get rug and rugged. And shod of course is the past tense of to shoe.

Running roughshod is distinct from riding roughshod because of anti-slip devices designed to fit over human shoes and boots which were supposed to be removed out of doors before scratching up the interior floors. Presuming the slippery conditions were caused by ice and snow we can easily imagine those working in the cold outdoors (finding themselves in need of a pee and) failing to remove their anti-ice clogs when rushing to (the loo or) the warmth of the hearth.

There were also specially designed horseshoes which were grooved or ridged to prevent slipping on ice. These would dig up clods of clay and turf in warmer drier weather. And it is true that sloppy blacksmithing could produce the same results with poorly fixed nails and because of this the original phrase riding roughshod probably predates the ice-traction horseshoe.

But the notion of hangnails on warrior horses being deliberately designed to inflict damage seems to be a modern romantic invention probably an extension from such evils as chariot wheel swords and sharpened elephant tusks.

In the same pessimistic spirit, most modern dictionaries seem to imply that both riding and running roughshod are synonomous with deliberate domineering rather than any accidental, careless or forgetful action.

The earliest reference I found quoted (in Collins I think) was from 1690 but without credit.

Hey you! Yeah you with the OED! How about it then.

~jwf~

1. Of horses: Having shoes with the nail-heads projecting; chiefly fig. in phr. to ride roughshod over, to domineer or tyrannize over, to treat without any consideration.
1688 HOLME Armoury III. 90/1 Rough shod,--when the nails are not yet worn that holds on the shoes. 1790 BURNS Ball. Dumfries Election xxiii, Lord, send a rough-shod troop o' Hell O'er a' wad Scotland buy or sell, To grind them in the mire! 1813 MOORE Post-bag i. 20 'Tis a scheme of the Romanists, so help me God! To ride over your most Royal Highness roughshod. 1861 Sat. Rev. Nov. 547 We remember that we have ridden roughshod over neutrals in our time. 1896 A. DOBSON 18th C. Vignettes Ser. III. v. 149 The Doctor rode rough-shod over him with an inaccurate illustration.
transf. 1891 SMILES Mem. J. Murray I. v. 92 The rough~shod way in which it [the Edinburgh Review] endeavoured to crush down rising authors.

2. As pa. pple. Provided with shoes which are roughed to prevent slipping.
1826 SCOTT Jrnl. 26 Nov., Horses..gone to the smithy to be roughshod in this snowy weather.

I wonder what the dress code is at the OED.

Are Oxford caps still compulsory, or do some of the dons go slipshod these days?

Yes, they ought to look like a bunch of lean ansd slippered pantaloons . . .

Having watched A Hard Day's Night recently I looked up the word 'grotty' in the OED. It was correctly credited to A Hard Day's Night, but to the book that came out after the film.

Alun Owen put it into the script, to see if he could foist a word on the language: he made it up, it wasn't Liverpudlian. But his name didn't make it into the OED; in their blinkered inkism they regard the paper publication, not the celluloid document, as the source. John Burke gets the credit

That is every bit as bad as treating the lousy pale piano reductions (the sheet music) as the primary documents of the songs.

The true documents are in vinyl.

just to bob back to accents for a minute heard a word pronunciation the other night. Well, new to me.
Was on the Grumpy Guide to Design programme (UK) and they got onto the subject of Ikea. Now I, and everyone I know, pronounces it eye-kee-ah. With emphasis on the 'I'. But there was a bloke on there who pronounced it with the emphasis on the 'ke' bit as ee-KAY-er. Didn't realise what he was saying the first as it is so different.

Would this be an affectation? Or is it perhaps closer to the Swedish pronunciation? Or perhaps a 'posh' pronunciation?

The lovely Regina was on TV and I never saw her?! I'd been looking out, too, 'cause I'd discovered she was doing the publicity rounds. I've never seen what she looks like in the flesh. She's a recent obsession.

Only in Britain could Ikea possibly be pronounced "Eye" kay ya. Do they call it that in their own TV ads?

It's an interesting point. Should a foreign company try and promote the "correct" pronunciation of their foreign name, or should they just stick with the way the locals pronounce it?

I remember Volkswagen trying to introduce the "fol-ks-vah-gen" pronunciation. They gave up after a few days and went back to vokes-wagon.

I've never heard Ikea pronounced any way other than eye-kee-ah. But I is not pronounced eye in any other European language.

>>"Only in Britain could Ikea possibly be pronounced "Eye" kay ya. Do they call it that in their own TV ads?"

Given the almost unbelievable repeated ineptitude and/or strategic incompetence they displayed whilst taking 9 months, half a dozen deliveries and collections (and quite a few more that didn't happen when promised) just to replace a single defective wardrobe door, their name is actually unpronouncable here, at least without a prelude and follow-up of words that don't bear repeating.

Well, I can certainly confirm that in Spain, at least, it's pronounced 'ee-Kay-ya'.... sounds right to me .

English speakers do not hold a monoply of localised pronunciation of foreign names. Radio announcers go out of their way to get composers' and peformers' names right, unlike the French with their Jean-Sébastien Bac', Mose-arr and the rest.

In fact the English disdain for American mispronunciation is sometimes misplaced. Van Ho and even Van Go are slightly nearer to the Dutch than Van Goch or God fobid Van Goff.

Hold on I feel a limerick coming on.