Speaker: Mixing it up, with stats like
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My favourite variance in pronunciation was Angela D'Audney who always, without fail, said day as dee - as in: Thursdee, Wed nes dee etc Lovely and never heard these days. Or should I say, dees?
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D'Audney, like my late Mum who was also a -dee person, went to Epsom Girls Grammar, and I would be highly surprised to hear any ex-EGGS girl of that generation who wasn't exceptionally well-spoken.
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The 1966 Encyclopaedia of New Zealand has a section on New Zealand speech, and has this to say on the pronunciation of -day:
Both in New Zealand and in Australia the names of the days, also holiday, and yesterday are given the full sound of -day instead of the standard English Mondi, etc. This is not a relic of traditional usage but a pedantic following of the spelling.
The whole section is quite an interesting read. My favourite part is when someone gets to have a moan about New Zealanders "incorrectly" pronouncing ate as 'ayt' rather than 'ett'. Chur.
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I woke up this morning realising that I hate it when people use "refute" when they mean "deny."
I blame David Benson-Pope.
What he should have said was: "I deny those allegations. And I intend to confront the alligators."
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While we're all getting pendantic about TV presenters' pronunciation, how about teaching some of the presenters to pronounciate their final Ws properly?
Mark Sainsbury, for example, can't say "how about". It comes out How Rabout. Mike McRoberts on TV3 does the same. I haven't been keeping a list, but you'll find several blokes on TV1 and TV3 saying Now Ravailable, etc any time a final W is followed by a vowel sound starting the next word. The only woman I can think of that does it is the one asking us to donate money to build a well and a school in Africa.
They must be sloppy kissers.
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Dyan,
Good comment, but "adoo"? Do you mean "ado"?Yes, I do thank you 1310, I had the spelling of ado mixed up with igloo and skidoo (the old Canadian name for snowmobile).
Groundhog Day was indeed a very good movie, but again, it somehow hijacks the True Meaning of Groundhog Day.
Like Valentine's Day and Halloween you didn't get the day off but they were each days in which everything at school was fun. No work would be done - in the morning you'd paint pictures or make models of groundhogs - which don't exist on the westcoast, so everyone would be looking them up in the encyclopedias at the back of the classroom and asking the teacher "what does a groundhog look like?"
In the afternoon there would be a class party - sometimes with a chocolate cake in the shape of a mound of dirt, where presumably a groundhog was about to burst forth. We'd play records, dance and have party snacks. Canadian schools use any excuse for a party, and silliness is hugely encouraged. My cousin - when teaching 8 year olds - turned up for class on Halloween dressed as a cat, complete with ears, whiskers and a tail. When the kids said "nice costume" she said "what costume?" and continued teaching. This is so peculiarly Canadian, like the time in 1967 when the Queen visited Canada and our then PM Pierre Trudeau turned a perfectly-executed and extremely fruity pirouette behind her back while the tv cameras were rolling. Silly, unserious and a little weird. Not that the Queen minded - women liked anything Trudeau did in those days.
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3410,
Another one: people using "light year" as a unit of time.
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Morning chaps!
Dragging the thread back to the original subject here...
I came across this exact question about our Pacific Island-born players on the Guardian blogs last night - They like the Irish in Bordeaux, and they like their wine too
The question was:
Is it true that a fair number og the NZ team are in fact Samoans, Fijians, Tongas aand so on , and if so how many?
Is it true that if players from these islands want to play rugby for teams in NZ or OZ they must first agree first forgo any ambition to be selected for their home country's national sides and be availbale to play only for the NZ OZ national team?
After trawling through the ABs website for the numbers and posting my first response (and putting them straight on the whole "can't play for their country if they play in the S14" misconception) I found this post and "borrowed" a bit of it to further enlighten the Guardianistas - hope you guys don't mind.
A couple of interesting responses from the Guardian blog this morning:
make it 96.5% for South Africa, Percy was born in waalvisbaai when it was actually a part of the Cape Province of South Africa and not part of what was to become Namibia.
Pedantic I know but hey, I only found this out last week when reading that he was Namibian!
and
Of the five Irish players you mention Ronan O'Gara, Malcolm O'Kelly and Frankie Sheahan were all born to Irish parents who happened to be living abroad when they were born and all were schooled in Ireland.
So there you go - and now you know!
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Webweaver reprazents!
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Just seen another word misused, over the South AFrica - England game - at least one report claims England was 'decimated'.
People use this word to mean something like 'badly beaten' but it has a very precise meaning: it means losing one in ten men. So if 1.5 England players were killed during the game (or 2.2 if you include the reserves) then it would be accurate. But only then. Anything else is not just hyperbole (and getting back to the sport=war metaphor talked about earlier) it just plain inaccurate.
It's a metaphor. Y'know. Like "South Africa just killed England." Or "England sucked the big one." "Robinson the only Englishman who could catch a cold." None of these things actually happened, but they're also not inaccurate.
And while decimated has origins in selecting people by lot and killing them (one in every ten men), it's also just as valid to use it as 'lots of people died'. As in 'The bubonic plague decimated the town.' The dictionary tells me so.
There's pedantry and then there's complaining about people using plain English in easily understood ways.
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Anything else is not just hyperbole (and getting back to the sport=war metaphor talked about earlier) it just plain inaccurate.
A slight derail, but it warmed this curmudgeon's heart when the latest series of Doctor Who used "decimate" in its correct form.
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And Brian Edwards can bite me if he thinks common usage based on error trumps correctness!
I seriously don't understand this view of language. 'Correctness' in language, as people put it about these days, is pretty much what our grandparents/parents (depending on your age) had beaten into them at school. It's post WWII Queens English.
The idea that there's nothing in 'correct English' which doesn't include words which are actually 'common usage based on error' of some earlier spelling, pronounciation. 's' used to be written more like 'f'. I don't see anyone standing up to demand that everyone do that anymore.
Language evolves through a number of means. All throughout that history people have sat and looked at 'current English' and bemoaned it being wrong based on the English of a generation or two ago. Do people these days think this is a new story? It changes, it's normal, and there's nothing you can do about it, same as has been going on for hundreds of years.
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The idea that there's nothing in 'correct English' which doesn't include words which are actually 'common usage based on error' of some earlier spelling, pronounciation. 's' used to be written more like 'f'. I don't see anyone standing up to demand that everyone do that anymore.
I guess some of us get antsy when the incorrect-but-accepted meaning kills off the real meaning of some very fine words.
I suspect that the battle has been lost with "enormity", and people will now happily use it as a synonym for "magnitude" and not to mean "horror". Tell me that's not a damn shame.
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[decimate] has a very precise meaning: it means losing one in ten men
Mmm, up until recently I thought it meant to reduce to a tenth, rather than by a tenth. I prefer my version.
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I guess some of us get antsy when the incorrect-but-accepted meaning kills off the real meaning of some very fine words.
I suspect that the battle has been lost with "enormity", and people will now happily use it as a synonym for "magnitude" and not to mean "horror". Tell me that's not a damn shame.
OK, but here's the etymology of some words you used in your post:
Guess originally meant to estimate/appraise, as in value. You've used it as a qualifier to water down what you're about to follow up with, and the meaning you've applied to it is "think".
Kill originally meant "to strike, hit, beat, knock", and didn't become associated with "depriving of life" for a century or so later.
Similarly, real originally meant "relating to things" (hence "real estate"), and didn't become associated with "genuine" for a couple of hundred years.
Battle means a physical battle between soldiers, and yet you've used it with a meaning of some sort of verbal/written battle about ideas.
It starts to get silly, but people complaining about the changing nature of meaning of words, using words which have all changed meaning... 'correct' and 'incorrect' are only relative terms from where you're standing in history.
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3410,
I seriously don't understand this view of language. 'Correctness' in language, as people put it about these days, is pretty much what our grandparents/parents (depending on your age) had beaten into them at school. It's post WWII Queens English.
Actually, it's "post-WWII Queen's English".
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Ironically, and this isn't a recommendation 3410, but not according to Urban Dictionary.
But yes, good poking at that apostrophe.
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Back briefly to the original thread. Sean Fitzpatrick has an article on the impact of Samoan players within the All Blacks in The Times.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/rugby/article2461113.ece
Sadly for us no explanation of Simon g’s I, 2 and 3.
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I really really reeeeeeallly don't want to go back into the earlier comments about racism but...
Black Gold:
New Zealand has enjoyed a seam of Samoa’s most talented playersCouldn't Fitzy have come up with a better title? (Oh and I'm not implying he's racist just that the title is possibly not the best for connotations)
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3410,
good poking at that apostrophe.
Don't forget the hyphen. ;)
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OK, but here's the etymology of some words you used in your post:
Guess originally meant to estimate/appraise, as in value. You've used it as a qualifier to water down what you're about to follow up with, and the meaning you've applied to it is "think".
Kill originally meant "to strike, hit, beat, knock", and didn't become associated with "depriving of life" for a century or so later.
Similarly, real originally meant "relating to things" (hence "real estate"), and didn't become associated with "genuine" for a couple of hundred years.
Battle means a physical battle between soldiers, and yet you've used it with a meaning of some sort of verbal/written battle about ideas.
It starts to get silly, but people complaining about the changing nature of meaning of words, using words which have all changed meaning... 'correct' and 'incorrect' are only relative terms from where you're standing in history.
Kyle, you have confused etymology which means derivation or the origin of the word itself with original usage , meaning how the word was originally used in its first state - whether that is Latin, Greek, Middle English, Old English, Scandinavian, Polynesian etc.
The etymology of the word "munted" for instance, is - (speculatively, because no one seems to know for sure) - Westie New Zealand, and is (guessing again) from a contraction of the two words "mangled' and "cunt". The original usage __of "munted" is as a verb, passed tense, meaning "fucked up beyond any practical use".
This is also the contemporary meaning of "munted", but there are other words that start off meaning one thing but eventually come to mean another thing, so let me try again.
In Westie English, the term "wasted" means "stoned and drunk to the point of incoherence" but both Middle English and Modern English the meaning of the word "wasted" would be the passed tense of "waste" meaning "to squander".
So while the etymology or derivation of the Westie word "wasted" is Middle English, and meant the passed tense of "squander", the Westie English word "wasted" refers to the state of a person's sobriety. So "original usage" of "wasted" would refer to different definitions in Westie English than it would in Old, Middle or Modern English.
So it is correct to assert that words that once meant one thing sometimes come to mean quite another thing entirely, but that still doesn't mean you can use words interchangably.
By the way, slightly off topic but distantly related - I noticed that Flight of the Conchords fellows Brent and Jermaine are each lacking the letter "r" in their names. I gather this is because NZers, unable to pronounce the letter "r" when it is a medial consonant, and ususally pretend it is silent, and in the case of the FOTC fellows, they are young enough that the silent "r" in each name has been dropped entirely out of the spelling. I also discovered that they invented Rap Music, in 1989, at a BBQ in Wellington, which is not relevant here exactly, but is an interesting piece of trivia as well. It is fortunate for the world that NZers only have trouble with "r" as a __medial consonant, or it would simply have been Ap Music.
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Getting back to the real subject of rugby, Mike (the originator of this stats post) has taken up the challenge and gone through all 1071 All Blacks to find out whether more All Blacks were born in Britain or the Islands!!!
The results are here: Retrospectively Speaking
Fickin heck!
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oops ignore the word "real" in the first sentence, don't mean to offend the etymologists
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By the way, slightly off topic but distantly related - I noticed that Flight of the Conchords fellows Brent and Jermaine are each lacking the letter "r" in their names.
Er, surely Bret is in fact missing one letter "t"?
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Kyle, you have confused etymology which means derivation or the origin of the word itself with original usage , meaning how the word was originally used in its first state - whether that is Latin, Greek, Middle English, Old English, Scandinavian, Polynesian etc.
Umm. Etymology, has three meanings in my dictionary:
1. the derivation of a word.
2. an account of the history of a particular word or element of a word.
3. the study of historical linguistic change, esp. as manifested in individual words.I think I fell reasonably well into 3, with a bit of 2.
My point was, people complain about how people now, in common usage, use words differently than how they used to be used, or 'correctly'.
That's a falsehood, as most words in the English language are no longer used how they used to be used, and to stand in say 1950 (1960, 1970 etc), pointing at 2007 saying "that's wrong", without looking at the couple of thousand years behind you is, I think, short-sighted.
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