Two other countries separated by a common language

[Wilson Gray]

Did she say what the local's response to this was? He would have
understood it as:

"I know the guards can tell me. I was looking for someone closer to earth."

He must have been totally discombobulated.

There was a roughly similar case at the Widener Library circ desk,
when I was running it. An English male student assistant was
attempting to "chat up" - that's the way they say it over there, to
paraphrase a local Boston woman who was mocking English as it's spoken
in California - an American female student assistant. In the course of
his conversating, he happened to speak the word, "button." She
laughingly interrupted his rap, asking, "Buh-tun [b^t at n], Eddie?
Buh-tun?" The English kid, totally missing the point, merely replied
"Yes," and tried to continue. The girl, now laughing out loud,
repeated her question, "Buh-tun, Eddie, buh-tun?" Now completely
confused by her laughter and not understanding at all what was being
questioned, he again replied merely, "Yes." At this point, I told her
to stop that. The poor English kid, I'm afraid, never did understand
that the American girl was mocking his - dare I say it? - "English"
accent.

Speakers of dialect A tend to forget that, to a speaker of dialect B,
the oddities of dialect B don't exist. Rather, it's dialect A that has
the oddities. When I was a kid, BE speakers in Marshall, Texas, were
annoyed by my, to them, snooty "proper" manner of speaking. Back in
Saint Louis, people laughed at my "country" accent. I quickly became
bi-dialectal. It probably goes without saying that black Marshallites
considered the speech of black farmers from surrounding Harrison
county to be the "country" dialect and not their own speech.

-Wilson

-Wilson

On 10/2/07, Cohen, Gerald Leonard <gcohen at umr.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Cohen, Gerald Leonard" <gcohen at UMR.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Two other countries separated by a common language
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Here's another one.  Some years ago a female faculty member from my campus visited the Harvard library to do research there and asked a fellow where the ladies room is.  His Boston-accented reply sounded like "The gods can tell you."  She replied: "I know the gods can tell me. I was looking for someone a bit closer to earth."
>
> Gerald Cohen
> University of Missouri-Rolla
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Lynne Murphy [mailto:m.l.murphy at SUSSEX.AC.UK]
> Sent: Monday, 01 October, 2007 10:46
> Subject: Re: Two other countries separated by a common language
>
> If anyone's interested in more stories of international toilet
> misunderstandings, I covered the toilet/bathroom/restroom/WC (etc.) issue
> on Separated by a Common Language:
>
> <http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/2007/03/toilet.html>
>
> Lynne
>
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>


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All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
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                                              -Sam'l Clemens

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