Why can't we speak propa Engish no more? (1 Viewer)

Jon

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I remember when I was in my youth, my best friends father used to hate people saying - for example - 5p (pronounced pee). He said, "It's 5 pence!" He was very angry about it! :LOL: But the abbreviation was in common use. Five pee was much easier to say than 5 pence. I wonder what he would think nowadays? 🤔

Why do you think we don't speak proper English anymore, or do you think our recent evolved language is the new "proper?" Or has language now merged with :D:p;):coffee::geek:😍🤪😫?
 
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Minty

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Language evolves constantly, although I do wonder (particularly at the moment) sometimes if we haven't gone ridiculously politically correct.

Personally, some of the gender-related words being used are just unnecessary, bordering on laughable in their application.
I'm not a homophobe or anti-LGBT in any way, our best friends are a married gay couple and they find the current modern use of "They" almost offensive in its blandness and "we must protect the children" type of acceptance and use.
 

snow-raven

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It seems there's a stronger trend in looking down on those who insist on "proper" grammar. I admit that it has raised my awareness of local dialect and accepted use. I've had to give up on my fury over common "mistakes" after reviewing some of google's usage statistics and analyses by respected dictionary publishers. After all, language is meant for us to communicate with each other, so we're obliged to go with the flow, yes?
 
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The_Doc_Man

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There is a car commercial with Chris Evans and several other folks of varying prominence walking along a street in Boston. They are speaking in heavy "Bostonese" dialect which includes talking about "pahking a cah" in a tight parking space. It might have been intended to be funny, but somehow I find it offensive that the car company has to use, in essence, ethnic humor to sell cars. The Choice Hotel commercials with "bada book bada boom" offend me in the same way.

It is one thing to have a narrator with a mild accent describing the virtues of a product. It is another thing entirely to make fun of an ethnic person. I have never been one to care about political correctness very much, but these two commercials cross my personal line on social correctness.

I'm calling them down because they emphasis improper or highly regionalized speech - which would be lost on people who don't know the region. My wife is of true Cajun heritage, so I can understand Cajun accents such as some of what you hear on the Discovery channel's Swamp People. Despite the language usually being very clear, they sometimes supply sub-titles, which makes me laugh. But every now and then one of the people will start some discussion and suddenly even MY trained ear needs the sub-title, so I guess my ability to understand their patois is incomplete.
 

vba_php

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this is just one of the annoying things that technology does. why can't you just ignore it Jon? ;) but after all, let us not forget that you're the one that started this thread by posting a title with:
in it. :rolleyes:
 

June7

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Guess Hyundai thought if it was okay for Dish (the "Hoppah") it was okay for them. C'mon, Boston accent is funny!
 

vba_php

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Boston accent is funny!
speaking of Boston accents, I talked with a guy at 3am this morning in Arizona and his was pretty thick. He was from Boston. gotta love those falt "a"-sounding syllables when they speak words with that in it.
 

pbaldy

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It might have been intended to be funny, but somehow I find it offensive that the car company has to use, in essence, ethnic humor to sell cars. The Choice Hotel commercials with "bada book bada boom" offend me in the same way.

I don't know, I thought the Boston accent thing was funny, and I've got a lot of family in MA. I'm Italian and the bada boom thing didn't bother me either.
 

Micron

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I don't see the problem either. It's not racial profiling or ethnicity either IMHO. It's just poking a little fun at regional differences in a light hearted way. I guess we all have our buttons though, but sometimes they need to be disconnected at times.
As for Boston I've been there and I enjoyed it and the people immensely, and if I smile when I remember their accent, it's from fond memory, not ridicule. That's why I love this one (because it's so stupid and I can relate to it):

The US Fish and Wildlife Service was doing a study in Boston MA because there was an inordinate number of Boston crows being hit by trucks. Oddly enough, no cars were involved in the carnage, only trucks. Upon investigating, it was discovered that the reason for this was simple:

the crows could call out cah! cah! but they couldn't say "truck".
 

vba_php

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the crows could call out cah! cah! but they couldn't say "truck".
LOL. nice. I've had some run-ins with vultures in the past. When I was staying at a group home years ago, many times, at certain hours every day there would appear a huge number of turkey vultures in the back yard and they would all perch themselves on top, and on the side, of this really tall telephone pole. That went on for months if I remember right. I also had one weird encounter with 2 huge vultures back in October of 2013 when I was searching for work. I drove to the next town over to try and get my old job back at the Walgreens there and when I pulled into the parking lot and got out of my car, 2 of them swooped down literally out of nowhere (I didn't see where they came from) and landed like 3 feet from me. At the time I thought it might be a sign that I was condemned for eternity because of my unwillingness to be righteous and stubbornness with regard to givng up a sinful life. after all, christ says in Matthew 24:28:
Wherever the corpse is, there the vultures will gather
 

The_Doc_Man

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I did say the overdone ethnic "humor" crossed my line. I didn't write a letter of protest, though, because I knew it was my personal line that wasn't shared by everyone else. I just didn't find it funny at all. If you remember a comedian named Andy Kaufman, you might remember that his repertoire included doing standup routines while in the persona of an Indian or Pakistani citizen with a thick accent trying to tell American humor jokes. I found it painful and not at all funny.

Then I got to thinking about what makes people laugh. Now THERE is a thread for the armchair psychologists among us. If you think about it, most punch lines reveal some calamity or some failure on the part of the joke teller or the primary actor in the joke. It might be a tragedy. It might just be the discovery that the person in question was anywhere from a bit slow to stupid to unbelievably dense. But think about the jokes you know, or go look in the Watercooler's "Best Jokes" thread. A large number of them involve someone's misfortune. Puns are not excluded from this because in that case, WE (the listeners) are the ones who were dense in that we didn't see it coming. The late Bennett Cerf was noted for quipping "The pun is the lowest form of humor - if you didn't think of it first."

Basically, we laugh at someone's expense. Let's take an extreme (and I have purpose for that extreme). The Three Stooges were noted for slapstick humor in which Moe and Larry inflicted some humiliation or pain on the third member, whether it was Curly, Shemp, Curly Joe, or someone else. But their form of humor makes some people cringe. But the best man from my wedding was a Three Stooges fan.

Consider comedian Foster Brooks who used to appear on the Dean Martin show. His schtick was that he was a drunkard (when in character). There was the show Laugh-In which was a series of vignettes that included some pie-in-the-face routines as well as some more subtle humor. (Not a LOT of subtle humor.) Or consider Tim Conway from the Carol Burnett Show and one of his most famous routines, the inept dentist. Take a look at the videos on You Tube for the "Blue Collar Tour" comedians.

Please do not think that I have no sense of humor. I can laugh at almost anything - but sometimes in the process, I realize that the humor was at someone's or some group's expense and it gives me pause. It makes me wonder if sometimes, that which makes us laugh does so by incurring in us a sense of "There but for a stroke of luck (or the grace of God, take your pick on this one) go I." Or perhaps "Glad it was him and not me."
 

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