Posted on 12/31/2009 11:04:42 AM PST by don-o
For some examples, tune in to Hannity's show in the afternoon and hear young (I assume) females who speak in some sort of Valley Girl / Munchkin combination of vocabulary and inflection.
In the interest of equal treatment, many young males also exhibit poor communication skills; but poor in a different way. Many sound like remarkable apes who have learned rudimentary human speech.
What is the cause of this loss of standard speech?
This has been troubling me for quite some time. The last day of the year is a good time to get it out of my head and out there for discussion.
Thank you for letting me share!
My grandmother raised this all the time (she was Cherokee). You can still get the seeds but have to look for the “old timey” ones. Not the newer ones. It will grow like a weed here in Texas.
http://www.plantplaces.com/photos/Nicotania_alata_plant.JPG
(for some reason I can’t get the pic to come up in preview window. Sorry. Tried html and plain insert)
flowering tobacco does well here but the humidity gets it. :( I love it and usually do some to sell at my greenhouse. Aphids love it. The new varieties don’t have near the smell that the old ones do.
Oh my!!! We have a woman at work who "axes" and who is "axed" questions. We shudder every time she "axes"!!
Speaking of pet peeves -
People who say “shrimps”.
We are often at a store where a person at the seafood counter when a customer will ask for 2lbs “shrimps”. At times we have found grocery store circulars or billboards advertising “Shrimps” on Sale.
Are our schools teaching correct english?
I agree with you, basically, but sometimes you can tell even with people (Walter Williams for example) who speak perfect English.
Laura Ingraham had the Chaplain for the Senate on her show (best of) the other day and he had a wonderful voice, but did not sound ‘black.’ It wasn’t until the very end of the interview that the subject of his race came up and I realized he was black. Sometimes black men have this wonderful, resonant voice seldom heard in white men, think James Earl Jones, etc.
Eh, no. You’re welcome seems haughty, as if you EXPECTED to be thanked, whereas no problem is humbler, less arrogant, indicating you see being thanked as a gift rather than an entitlement just for existing and complying.
How about:
“”Please do not thank me for the privilege and pleasure of serving you. Rather, I thank you for the opporunity and experience”
This seems less dismissive and condescending than “No problem.”
We dont’ have problems with humidity here and it seems nothing eats on the old stuff my grandmother raised. She gave me some and I had it for years until we moved and I forgot to dig up some plants to take. I will grow like crazy.
I wish I had some of my gma’s stuff. :)
Almost as bad as tawken to sumbudy fwom Neu Yowk.
i no wht u mean. mvbf tlks so lame. AAF, i :-), but i rly want 2 say BIOUA. Like enuf is enuf alrdy! So ur hvng a bad hair day! BFD!
I cringe when people use the word “less” when they really mean “fewer”.
I was visiting a Coca-Cola plant in Northern England. It was a very well run organization. They were explaining their hiring process, which included an examination in mathematics and in English. Our guide politely explained to my group, all Americans, that none of us would be able to pass the latter test.
Yes. There is an ad for movies on TNT, I believe. “More movie, less commercials.” Ugh!
I struggle trying to understand emails and memos from supposedly educated colleagues. They are littered with sentence fragments and thought fragments.
I often return the document with the note “The words are almost all English, but the sentences are not.”
I always thought of this phenomenon as being a result of the standardization of American English. What is being lost is regional accents/dialects/differences, not standardization.
I live in the Fort Worth/Dallas area, and among the women who are less-than-30 the nasal "Valley-speak" is quite common...no doubt part of a Yankee plot!
I blame it on cable TV.
Blacks, hispanics, Arabs, some Bangladeshi's, to say nothing of lower class whites (including the guys known locally as "guidos") tend to adopt ghetto speak. Kinda funny seeing a guy named Vito Antonelli referring to "his niggahz."
The old New Yawk accent has been dying a slow death, and can now be found in diminishing amounts only on Staten Island and in far flung parts of suburbia.
That’s because Anglo-Californians have NO cultural identity to speak of. They are the Wonder Bread of people. As are yuppies and hipsters throughout America.
(Slaps forehead). Here we go AGAIN!
The "Jersey Goombah" accent you speak of is usually only found around Italian Americans whose family roots are in the outer boroughs of New York City, but who relocated to suburban New Jersey. In other words, it is a "Noo Yawk" accent transplanted to New Jersey.
While it is true that northeast New Jersey in heavily influenced by NY speech, the accent is still mild compared to Lawn Guyland (especially Nassau and western Suffolk counties).
People in southern New Jersey speak similarly to folks in SE PA ("werter" for water, "drew-er" from drawer). In central and NW New Jersey, the accent is rather generic mid-Atlantic, simlar to what is spoken from the Lehigh Valley through central Connecticut.
In other words there is no such thing as a "Jersey accent." NOBODY says "joisey" unless they moved from a Leo Gorcey film from the 1930s. :)
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