Posts by Robyn Gallagher
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CNN.com had frequently updated news coverage of 9/11, but here's the thing - the site was groaning under the pressure from everyone wanting to find out WTF was going on. Even using a stripped-down front page, the site was still very slow to load and I ended up turning to b3ta.com, whose community was continuously posting relevant links and personal anecdotes. It seems that these blog sites had the structure suited for frequent updates from multiple people.
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Hard News: Those were different times ..., in reply to Jackie Clark,
But returning to accents, the regional accent differences in the UK absolutely fascinated me. Such a tiny country, and such huge variations in language. I’m sure Jen could shed light, but I still can’t really get my head around why the differences are so huge.
It's a small country, but it's important to remember that people didn't used to move around much. They'd likely stay in the same area their whole lives. Combine that with England's history of invaders and visitors, and you get a variety of accents that match English's rich and varied vocabulary: words from everywhere, pronunciations from everywhere.
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Hard News: Those were different times ..., in reply to Jackie Clark,
The New Zild thing is interesting, isn’t it? I can still remember Angela D’Audney reading the news and pronouncing the days of the week “Wednesdee, Thursdee” etc. Very posh.
From the 1966 Encyclopaedia of New Zealand:
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.
Also of interest is the Faults in Speech entry. I bet y'all didn't know that it's 'wrong' to pronounce ate as 'ayt' instead of the correct 'ett'. We once would have all sounded like Stephen Fry.
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Ah, and so if the television reporter who's interviewing you has a nice posh accent, you'd probably talk like them, deliberately or not.
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Could it be that our memory of how people talked back then is influenced by what we see in old film and TV? That is, people who have been trained to speak in a posh telly voice.
It's no secret that accents always change. My grandma sounded posher than my mum, who sounds posher than me. And our grandchildren, their accents will sound vile to our elderly ears.
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On the subject frivolous BSA complaints, I regular read the BSA findings (for professional reasons as well as entertainment value). There's a certain type of frequent complaint, the person who does a scatter-gun approach and seems to complain about everything, which usually includes a privacy complaint because, dammit, they're having to make the complaint in their own name. While these complaints are kind of amusing, I don't envy the BSA committee having to process them all.
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Fans of Don may wish to follow him on Twitter -
@McDONewt. It probably goes without saying that he's no less challenging to comprehend in 140 characters. -
I have a theory about K Road overbridge. I reckon it's designed specifically for how K Road will be used during the RWC. That is, post-match crowds will walk along there on their was to Party Central. So the bus stops have been separated from the pedestrian route so that people waiting for a bus won't have to deal with hundreds of rowdy fans streaming past, blocking their view of the buses. Ok, so during the RWC, that actually would be quite sensible, but what happens after that? K Road gets stuck with something that isn't designed for how people normally use the space.
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It was only 12 years ago, but yet sometimes it feels like 50 years ago:
More women will buy the iBook than any other computer ever. And only partly because it looks like a giant makeup compact.
Tee-hee. I'm a girl. I only buy computers that look like makeup.
The excitement around Sherlock 2 is amazing. I didn't get a Mac until 2001, and by then it didn't even occur to me to use a built-in app for searching the web. That is the one area where Google totally came along and pwned Apple. I'm sure it won't be the last.
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Hard News: 2011: The Year Of What?, in reply to Hilary Stace,
Don't forget about the disruptive volcanoes around the world, with the latest one currently erupting in Russia, and some worrying shallow earthquakes around Taupo.
Is this amateur speculation or is there something actually worth being worried about here? I.e., citation required.