Username
Skeeter Lewis
Member Since
March 16, 2012
Total number of comments
165
Total number of votes received
210
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Latest Comments
Preferred forms
- January 5, 2013, 11:46am
It's 'Received Pronunciation' - what in Britain is perceived as an 'educated' accent.
Preferred forms
- January 5, 2013, 4:17am
Agreed. I'm English and I've never cared for the 'paw' rendering for 'poor'. 'Tour' can't possibly be 'taw' but many English people do say it that way.
Preferred forms
- January 4, 2013, 10:55pm
Americans, I notice, drop the 'l' in solder. It comes out as 'soda'. This is old-fashioned English. The 'l' in 'soldier' was also dropped at one time. That's why Kipling, in his phonetic rendering of cockney speech, uses the word 'sojer'.
Preferred forms
- January 4, 2013, 10:48pm
Yes, "an 'otel" was correct Englisn until not so long ago. My 99-year-old mother-in-law still says it that way. "An hotel" is an absurdity.
Good for the Americans with their " 'erb"!
Cockneys are great preservers of old-fashioned pronunciation. The cockneys still say "gorn orf" for "gone off", as did the upper classes until recently. And also "awspital" for "hospital". Good old-time English.
In the nursery rhyme 'Ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross' the word 'cross' has to be pronouced 'crawse' in order to rhyme - the cockney way.
Someone else’s
- January 4, 2013, 1:38am
'Passers-by' and yet 'passer-by's'. I got an ignorant red squiggle because of that closing inverted comma!
The Best Euphemism for Shithouse?
- January 2, 2013, 1:59am
Other possibilities, I see belatedly, are 'petits cotes' (with accent) and 'petites gastelles'.
The Best Euphemism for Shithouse?
- January 2, 2013, 1:48am
In fact, the contribution of French to Scottish English would make an interesting thread in its own right. There is 'petticoat tails' from 'petits gateaux', for example and 'fash' - as in 'dinna fash yesel - from the French 'facher'. Yes, I know there's a circumflex...
Past tense of “text”
- January 2, 2013, 1:29am
'Brings in', blast it.
Past tense of “text”
- January 2, 2013, 1:22am
'Text' is 'written', surely?
'I wrote you a text.'
Back in the real world, though - yes, it's 'texted'. New technology - like the printing press in days of yore - always bring in new words.
Questions
Medicine or Medication? | October 27, 2012 |
What’s happening to the Passive? | July 30, 2014 |
The 1900s | June 11, 2015 |
Preferred forms
I would say that RP is the accent associated with Oxbridge and the major public schools. The BBC accent is not RP, indeed Ed Stourton (Posh Ed) has suffered as a result and the former India correspondent (whose name escapes me) lost his job because of it.
It's probably just the meaning of the labels that divides us on this. URP I haven't heard of.
I think that cockney and upper-class English were broadly similar at one time. The newly-emerging middle classes were the engines of change, with their tendency to alter pronunciations to conform with their spellings - the speak-as-you-spell phenomenon against which Fowler inveighed so much.