Language Log

Today's SMBC starts with a little lesson in phonetic dialectology:

I've often wondered why we use such seemingly random, yet colorful, terms to describe a state of drunkenness.  The list of words for drunkenness goes on and on and on: stoned; tipsy; bashed; befuddled; buzzed; crocked; flushed; flying; fuddled; glazed; high; inebriate; inebriated; laced; lit; muddled; plastered; potted; sloshed; stewed; tanked; totaled; wasted; boozed up; […]

King’s English and Cockney replaced by three new accents, study finds Britons depart from overtly class-based post-war speech epitomised by either clipped vowels or working-class dialects By Charles Hymas, The Telegraph, Home Affairs Editor 30 October 2023 • 6:33pm I vaguely recall an earlier study from about ten years ago that came to similar conclusions (including the emergence of […]

Commenting on yesterday's post "Semantic drift of the week", Nicholas wrote this about the pronunciation of different senses of the word battery: In Australia and many parts of the UK, the pronunciation between both is significantly different. "Batch-ry" holds the electrical charge. Batt-ery is the criminal charge. Pronouncing words like military, literally, and battery without […]

From John Allison's Scary Go Round for 12/23/2016:

The publisher's blurb for the fourth edition of Garner's Modern English Usage introduces a new feature: With more than a thousand new entries and more than 2,300 word-frequency ratios, the magisterial fourth edition of this book — now renamed Garner's Modern English Usage (GMEU)-reflects usage lexicography at its finest. […] The judgments here are backed up […]

St. Patrick's Day was last Thursday, but this afternoon I saw someone wandering around in a sparkly green top hat.  In that spirit, I offer a post about perhaps-fictional attitudes towards a variety of Scottish Gaelic. The content comes from Ken MacLeod's novella The Human Front, which the publisher's blurb calls "a comedic and biting commentary on capitalism and […]

Peter Serafinowicz has updated George Bernard Shaw's dictum that "It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him", by re-voicing Donald Trump to demonstrate that emotional reactions to British accents are easily evoked in Americans as well. There's "Sophisticated Trump", posted on YouTube 12/17/2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUGT30gGtiI

Olivia Rudgard, "Why you put on an American accent when you sing", The Telegraph : Even while singing that most British of songs, her own country's national anthem, it seems Hertfordshire-born Alesha Dixon couldn't resist the temptation to slip into an American accent. The pop star was ridiculed after performing God Save the Queen at […]

Josef Fruehwald, "America's Ugliest Accent: Something's ugly alright", Val Systems 10/1/2014. Update — See "The beauty of Brummie", 7/28/2004 — some quotes therein from Steve Thorne: In May 2002, I recorded short samples of 20 different accents of English… In order to limit the influence of extraneous variables, the speakers chosen were all male, white, […]

Kat Chow, "Make It So: Sir Patrick Stewart Moos In Udder Accents", NPR Code Switch ("Frontiers of Race, Culture and Ethnicity") 12/30/2013: Cow-d it really be? Have our ears herd this correctly? (Sorry, I can't help myself.) Patrick Stewart — ahem, Sir Patrick Stewart — mooed up a storm on the podcast, How To Do […]

Michael Robinson was looking through this Flickr group dedicated to photos of Chinese restaurants outside China, "Chinese Restaurant Worldwide Documentation Project", which includes around 17,000 photographs, when he came upon this photo that was taken on December 23, 2012 in The Lanes, Brighton, England, GB:

Not long ago I went out to see Cockney comedian Micky Flanagan perform at the Festival Theatre in Edinburgh. (One man alone on stage with one microphone. His two-hour mission: to seek out new laughs and new ways to mock civilization; to boldly zing where no man has zinged before. Standup is the bravest of […]