As a spot of light entertainment I thought I’d share something I found on my computer which I’ve obviously written at some point and – I don’t think I’ve shared it here before. (But my memory could be failing me. Let me know, I need to be told.) It’s Saturday afternoon, my spouse is asleep after a few pints but I don’t touch alcohol: I don’t need to drink the stuff when I can write crazy stuff like this:-
I am thinking of writing De Ub Do Dade Arry Podder boog.
Sorry, did you want that in perfect English? ‘The Up To Date Harry Potter Book’. You won’t get it in a BBC voice anymore because everything is pronounced without a sharp ‘t’. It’s possibly a development on the attractive drawl of the American accent but everywhere you go, everything you listen to, the ‘t’, it seems, is pronounced as ‘d’. Even the posh presenter of a history programme on the BBC can no longer pronounce English words properly.
The stade of the najhion’s pronunciajhion is so appalling thad id’s no wunder the kids carn’d spell any more.
When I was at school (I admit it was in the 20th Century) we were taught to speak properly at the same time as learning to write and spell. If we pronounced something badly we probably spelled it badly and vice versa, the two went hand-in-hand.
Sacha Baron Cohen – also known as Ali G – is an intelligent and brave performer but he has a lot to answer for in becoming a role-model for practically every kid up to the age of 26. Parents don’t talk properly and cannot teach their children to talk properly, nor can they spell, it seems, and pass on the wisdom to their offspring.
So why am I thinking of writing De Ub Do Dade Arry Podder boog? Because obviously the world and his uncle wants Arry Podder if he’s going to buy a book, and books are what I write. Why should I write anything else and throw it into a black hole? Writers need to eat and to do that they need to sell their books, so if I write an Arry Podder boog in the language that people speak then I must be onto a money spinner.
Don’d you thing?
Bernie
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
I'm pretty sure you haven't used this before so no need to worry about your memory.
I found myself saying yes, yes, as I read through this. My particular hatred is when people drop the 't' in words and use the glottal stop instead - rhe'oric instead of rhetoric. It's fine when it is a normal part of a dialect as in Scotland or parts of London but not when it is a sort of affectation because the speaker thinks it gives them some gravitas. It doesn't. It just makes them sound a pratt. It drives me demented. And don't even get me started on every sentence being turned into a question by ending with what Alan Bennett calls 'an inapproriate note of interrogation'.
Post a Comment