Sunday, March 20, 2011
ABOUT BBC ENGLISH
I'll take this opportunity to respond to British commenter Ben Leeser who said that he couldn't stand to hear upper class accents on the BBC. I love that accent myself, but then again I live in America and have never had it used against me in the form of a class weapon. I thought it might be fun to put myself behind Ben's eyes, and try to see the language war the way he sees it.
Ben must go nuts when he sees short films like the one above. In the film Peter Sellers is a twit, but he's confident that his accent and upper class bearing will get him a date with a girl he doesn't even know, and it does. This arrogant, aristocratic confidence drives Ben crazy. It's as if the accent was deliberately devised, not just to insult and exclude working people, but to rub their noses in the insult in as many ways as possible.
Well, maybe it was, at least in part. Even so, I can't really agree that Britain would be better off without it (Ben never said that it would, but I'll pretend that he did).
Listen to Dylan Thomas (above) read "Do Not Go Gentle." Does anyone seriously think that poem would sound as good if it were read by a cockney? Does anyone imagine that the reader (Thomas) had the intention of suppressing anyone when he read it? My guess is that Thomas talks the way he does mainly because it strikes his poet's ear as beautiful...which it is...and because it connects him to Chaucer, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Milton. If Britain ever exterminates that language, and the best part of the culture that goes with it, then Britain won't be Britain. It'll just be another tube stop at the edge of Eurasia.
Let me digress to talk about what language and accent is. It's more than a conveyor of text. At the level Thomas uses it, it's layered with ideals of intellect and civilized behavior, of self-discipline, dignity and compassion, of manliness and efficacy. It's amazing that an accent was forged that can convey so much information, and can attach these qualities to whatever idea is being expressed. It's a language that attempts to improve the speaker and listener alike. I regard it as nothing less than miraculous...even if it is misused by people like the Peter Sellers character.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
18 comments:
Hi Eddie! If you're interested in British accents, here's a pretty good resource:
http://sounds.bl.uk/maps/Accents-and-dialects.html
I think in the UK a lot of people would associate Sewell's accent with this piece of Python genius!:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCyr1ugzxXM
I think that's quite true about how people use language as a weapon in that way. I bet when language came about, there were those who could grunt and those who couldn't, and maybe those who couldn't grunt -- maybe some of them could understand what the grunters were saying but couldn't actually grunt, themselves. And I bet the grunters were very satisfied that they, themselves, could grunt, and some of them might have learned to grunt in such a way that the non-grunters were made to feel bad that they couldn't grunt along.
Naomi: Wow! All the accents in England on one sight! My cup runneth over! Thanks a million,
Isn't Peter Sellers making fun of the accent (as well as he may be paying homage to it)
Spend some time in England, and they'll make fun of how you speak, among other things.
Some English think Americans are very class conscious, and we are, but differently than them.
After all. What Makes Sammy Run?
Thomas: Yeah, he was making fun of it, So was Terry Thomas, Peter Cook, the Pythons and a host of others. It's a great vehicle for comedy.
One of these days I'll read the "What Makes" book. Bette Davis said it was the best depiction of Hollywood executives that she knows of.
If the BBC type accent is for the English upper class then does that make the Cockney accent the English equivalent of the southern hick accent?
If so, then I wonder what the American upper class accent is.
Good as always, Eddie!
Here's a little exercise for American readers. Take a map of the United Kingdom, a red marker and a blue marker. Take a ruler and draw a line halfway up the country. Colour the top half of the land mass blue and the bottom half red. Many Americans think that the in the red area, poor people speak "cockney" and rich people speak in the manner of Terry-Thomas. In the blue area, everyone speaks with a Scottish accent.
But why shouldn't they think that? The UK is (physically) smaller than Oklahoma!
Our regional accents were formed pre-train, when the majority of people might never travel more than a few miles from the towns they came from. The accents in the Northeast are closer to some Danish accents than they are to the way people speak in London.
There has traditionally been resistance from the rest of the country to the received pronunciation "BBC" accent because our media and government are to an extent London-centric and regions outside London have often felt that they get a raw deal by comparison.
I think this explains it!
Hah! I do suppose that Dylan Thomas' reading wouldn't carry nearly as much weight if he were geordie, or something. That's a very good point, and I still don't think I agree with you, but thanks for trying to see things with my eyes. Most people aren't that open-minded.
I don't know if Britain would be better off without the accent, but it would definitely be better without the class snobbery that's behind it. As I said, it's that kind of snobbery that's currently destroying my country, thanks to the Conservative Party. But if more people used the accent in the way Thomas did, I probably wouldn't be so instinctively annoyed by it.
In terms of great British poets without BBC accents - well, I don't know if you've heard of Simon Armitage or if you would consider him "great", but people think he's so good that it's compulsory for every British child to study him at school during the GCSE period, so, uh, that's worth something at least. He's got a Yorkshire accent, which one critic said "endearingly signifies his non-metropolitan, non-esoteric credentials". I don't know how "non-esoteric" you can be if you actually use the word "non-esoteric", but that's poetry critics for you.
Also, thanks for the Sellers clip. You summed up my reaction perfectly, but aside from that, I'm a massive Peter Sellers fan.
Do you Americans are class conscious because of perceived class mobility, while the British are class conscious because of perceived class immobility?
...and accent is a mode of policing that perception?
UE- you may want to look up cockney rhyming slang, which is like a more sophisticated version of pig latin.
Find out what a "dog and bone" is in cockney rhyming slang.
should read "Do you think"
sorry, commented with partner's account.
Ben: Thanks for the link to Armitage. I listened to a couple with him reading, and they weren't very good. He's imitating our contemporary poets and we suck right now. If you have a kid and he's being taught that at school you should get should get mad. If there's nothing contemporary that's good, then they should teach the classics.
John: Thanks for the Stuart Maconie link. He makes me want to see the North.
A couple of years ago at a thrift store I found 2 LPs of Dylan Thomas reading his poems. I had never heard his voice, and I'd been listening to a lot of Carson McCullers' weak and quiet voice, so when I put on Dylan Thomas I wasn't prepared. The first LP began with him pretty much shouting the poem "Lament", and it scared the crap out of me.
Eddie, a matter of fact, I'm a child in the middle of my GCSE's right now! We're taught some Classics as well. We learn Simon Armitage and Carol Ann Duffy for the modern stuff, Tatamkhulu Afrika and Imtiaz Dharker for Other Cultures, and William Shakespeare and Robert Browning for Other Cultures. It's not that great, but it's one of the few subjects I get A*s in, so I'm sticking with it.
Americans have used the accent too. William F. Buckley is probably the most notable.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7XifkZ-7TQ&feature=related
I like hearing it come out of a poet but I hate it coming out of a politician or a pundit.
It's not dead either! I was listening to a radio show a week ago and a student at Brown, which is in Rhode Island, who petitioned the university to start a conservative philosophy class had the accent. I think he was originally from Connecticut. I remember looking at my radio stupefied that somewhere in America kids are raised talking with that accent.
Adam: Haw! I wish more people spoke like Buckley over here, but it's not going to happen. It doesn't come naturally to American speakers.
Ben: I listened to videos by all the contemporary poets you mentioned, and they all sucked. Duffy's "Valentine" was the best of the lot, and the kindest thing I can say about it is, that it wasn't horrible.
Browning was better than any of these people, but even he was a minor poet compared to the people you should be studying. I hate to say it, but you're not getting the education you should be getting. Maybe it's impossible to get a good liberal arts education anywhere nowadays.
cockney rhyming slang
Dog and Bone = telephone
Post a Comment