Heard on Springer: an unnecessarily-snarky remark

Wilson Gray hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Tue Jun 8 18:38:14 UTC 2010


Twenty-ish, black male "guest" speaking with ordinary, Springer-class,
BE accent:

[Blah, blah, blah, babble, babble, babble, etc.]

Thirty-ish, white male audience-member speaking with non-lower-class UK accent:

"What language is it that you're speaking?

BM:

"English."

WM:

"Odd. I'm English and I didn't understand a word that you said!"


Now, when I was in the Army, many British soldiers served with us in
our unit, from Capt. Conybear of the Durham Light Infantry (the name
"Conybear," his suave, "English" accent, the maroonish-purplish color
of his "berry," i.e. "beret,"  his British-Army-style hand-salute, and
even the name of his home unit made him unforgettable) to Mike, a
fellow EM whose dialect was such that I was literally never able to
understand a word that he said, though he was quite friendly and we
often "chatted." I used to wonder how it failed to be obvious to him
that I wasn't understanding a single word, not even the articles and
the numerals.

Unfortunately, I'm a victim of social-avoidance syndrome. So, as long
as Mike acted as though everything  was cool, I was blocked from doing
anything, like asking him to repeat himself, that might indicate that
*I* thought that something was wrong with *him*, since he never acted
as though anything was wrong with me. And there was the fact that
everyone else seemed to be able to understand him. So, what was wrong
with me that *I* couldn't? It was a shaming situation

There was the usual contrainess. It was considered a sign of brain
damage to allow oneself to be caught in a position in which one was
forced to render a salute to an American officer in the wild, but GI's
went out of their way to salute Capt. Conybear or any other British
officer, under any set of circumstances, just to get the weird British
salute in return.

-Wilson
–––
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"––a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
–Mark Twain

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



More information about the Ads-l mailing list