The regulars over on the Men’s Rights Subreddit are currently getting amused and/or outraged by the existence of a book titled “Girl, Get That Child Support,” a guide to help single mothers track down deadbeat dads and get the child support they are owed. A few of them were apparently so overstimulated by the book’s title, and a reference to “Baby Mamas” in the subtitle, that this little conversation ensued:
Note the upvotes and the (scarcity of) downvotes. And the complete lack of anyone saying “hey, you’re being racist assholes.”
The Men’s Rights Movement, the “most significant civil rights movement of the 3rd millennium.”
For people who are interested: Vowel shifts and politics
@pecunium
is it just me or is that link not working?
Big Momma: It seems to be not working. Let me try again.
Vote and vowel shifts
It’s interesting, but it’s conclusions are a bit sensational… it’s Discover.
This entry is giving me so many fond memories of my old Linguistics courses…
I’m from the South, but don’t sound it unless talking to relatives. And MY accent is still COMPLETELY different than that of my husband, who has a thick Southern accent that still gets Yankees here mistaking his Is for Rs. And both of us sound completely different to my granny who has a big-time New Orleans accent.
My husband’s accent is probably considered the most “low class” one, but it also seems to help him appearing “friendly,” which works very well with his personality.
I want to throw my hat into the language ring! I was raised in the Chicagoland area. I hit my a’s really hard, and i say “haffing”. Like: “I made it to the store without haffing to stop at any stoplights”. Also, a (N. Wisconsin) coworker got confused when I was talking about grain elevators near my rural, corn-farming hometown. He said “Wtf is a “green elevator?”. I also tend to say “tawk or wawk” more than “talk or walk” My parents are both from southern Illinois. Dad from Shelbyville, near Springfield, and my mom from Johnsonville/Xenia, not terribly far from the Kentucky border. Dad says warsh, and my mom drawls a little bit.
I moved up to Madison, WI last year, not two hours away from Chicago. My boyfriend is from way northern Wisconsin. He sounds slightly Canadian with his “hohws (house)” and “abohwt”. But everyone here says “beyg” instead of bag, and “teyg” instead of tag. They pretty much pick me right out as a dirty FIB because I say “baaag” with a very hard, somewhat longer “a” sound. Being back down around either my hometown, or the more-urban Chicago area freaks FiletofSwedishBoyfriend right out, cause he says “FoSF, everyone here talks like you and it’s weird”. Also, the new Geico commercial where the gecko is in Chicago is totally off base.
I lived in Hawai’i for 12 years, and spent a couple years working at a native Hawaiian charter school. What was interesting was how (relatively) quickly and subconsciously I took on code-shifting: auto-negotiating from standard AmEng through pidgin (HCE) and into full Hawaiian, oftentimes in the same conversation. And now that I live in New England it’s really hard, well-nigh impossible in fact, to avoid getting all non-rhotic when in a crowd of R-droppers.
My fiancée was raised in San Diego and Eastern Mass by two midwestern parents, and is almost an idiolect: she pronounces ‘milk’ as ‘melk,’ which neither of us have ever heard anyone else say. Weird how accents/dialects accrete like that.
heh i started reading that article and thought ‘hey that reminds me of learning Anglo Saxon (yup, you heard right) and my tutor waxing lyrical on the great vowel shift that occurred’ and whaddya know, they reference the great vowel shift a few sentences later!
I have the whole Ozark twang, and most of my family and friends do, too. If you know Larry the Cable Guy (Tow Mater on Disney’s Cars), that’s kind of common in southern Missouri. It’s not seen as prestigious. However, I find the whole redneck accent to be charming and endearing. I mean listening to Larry the cable talk, you get the feeling that he’d be real down to earth and a fun guy to drink beer with. That might be part of the appeal of the Redneck comedy tour.
Huh. Inland South basically followed the Tennessee River Valley up into Kentucky.
I knew that folks south of Lexington tend to say “yinz” sometimes instead of “y’all,” but I wasn’t aware that folks in the north of Kentucky and the southern reaches of the states to its north used it.
This is fascinating =)
I was born in Pittsburg. My parents came from Cleveland and Rockville. I grew up, to the age of eight, in N. Indiana, the S. Side of Chicago, and in/around Cleveland.
I moved to E. LA, and spent 35 years up and down the coast (with a sojourn in the middle of the Mojave). I speak three languages (ASL doesn’t count for this discussion) and can get by in a couple of others (to about Level 1 on the DLPT* My english is somewhere between 4+ and 5. The CG website leaves out some of the requirments for a spoken 5, which involves, at the very least some ability to contextually register shift).
My father lives in E. Tenn., and 16 years in the Army sent me around the US, and to a few non US countries.
I have a very plastic ear. I can fake Americans into thinking I’m non-native (sometimes by accident, when I’m in a region where I don’t speak the idiolect, which makes me much more careful about my pronunciation; this stilts my speech somewhat. It causes people to listen more attentively; because they notice that I’m not speaking as they are. I don’t do it conciously).
I can do some of the subtle shifts (as in the way people in LA refer to highway names, compared to how people in SF do it), without noticing. Other things (such as the difference between soda, pop, coke and tonic) I have to be in a place for a little while to pick up. But I am lucky enough to usually be taken, in fairly short order, for someone who is, while not native, local.
If I make the effort to speak a language I know some of, I get treated better than I expect. On the flight back from Paris the Lufthansa staff seemed to think I spoke fairly fluent German, though my skill isn’t more than about that Level 1, perhaps shading to 1+
Like I said, I like language.
I get stopped by people who want directions, all the time; even when I’m in a foriegn country (most usually Canada, but it happened in Paris once).
*Scan down to get the DLPT Scale
My prof wrote that Discover blog post! She’s pretty alright.
The most interesting example of code-switching I ever personally witnessed was on a bus in Montreal. Two teenage boys got on the bus, making dirty jokes about Harry Potter. Almost their entire conversation was in French, except they cursed regularly and fluently in English. I don’t know if they slipped any French swear words in there, since my French is far from perfect, but it seemed to me that French was for content and English was for emotional flavour. It was interesting, since I assumed (perhaps wrongly, to be fair) that French was their first language and English was learned later, and usually swears in your native tongue feel a lot more potent. Obviously the languages interact in complex ways in Montreal, and I have absolutely no expertise in that area. Maybe that’s quite typical for Montreal youth, and anyone who hails from there can tease me for being such an ignorant Westerner XD.
Viscaria: French and English swearing is very different (forgive me if you’ve gone over this somewhere else). English uses bodily functions. French uses religious terms. If you speak french (esp. Quebecois), you NEED to see Bon Cop, Bad Cop. It’s Fookin’ Brilliant!
The scene about how to swear… Oh My God! 🙂 😀
Russian has a completey different way of swearing, so much so that they refer to it as another language, and I have an (out of date by now) couple of hundred page, 8×10 “Dictionary of Slang annd Vulgarisms” from when I was in the Army. They have single verbs for things it would take phrases, or sentences to say in English.
I really like Russian. I am terribly out of practice, and this thread has been useful, in that it reminded me to look at the DLI CE materials, not all of whch require being in the DoD to take advantage of. Russian is the first language I made an intentional pun in, outside English.
For all you who personally attack me because you hate my political views, you can go fuck yourselves you fuckin’ morons!
And yeah, if you have a white collar job interview, and you talk like Larry the cable guy, don’t expect to get the job.
Do francophones other than Quebecoises use “tabarnac,” “câlice,” etc?
I just find that hilarious.
@Pecunium: Whereabouts in the US do they refer to sodas as tonics? That’s a new one on me.
Some places south of me, I hear tell they try to have it both ways and call a soda a “popcoke.”
RE: Ruby
Sweet Jesus, person, I didn’t attack you! I mentioned that my experience in the South is that there are different responses to different accents. And I STILL think discriminating against someone against an accent is damn foolish.
What does that have to do with your personal belief system or you as a person? Christ.
PDAs: Yes, other francophones use sacral terms to swear.
As part of my (fairly orthodox) French education, I was taught that continental French speakers do use religious terms as swears. I don’t think we learned many, and I can’t recall any right now, so I don’t know if they use “tabarnac” or not, but I want to say that they do.
@Ruby Hypatia: Sorry, we’re ignoring that kind of thing unless it’s cast in some form of meter. Try a pantoum, I don’t think we’ve had one of those yet.
Falconer: New England. I first saw it in Boston-ish. The supermarket/grocery/A&P (depending on where one lives) had an aisle, “Tonic”, and I went looking for Tonic Water, all it was was sodas. For Tonic Water I had to go to the section which was labled, “Mixers”, and there it was, nestled with the seltzer and the margarita mix.
Texas… the place I ordered a coke and was asked what kind I wanted. I asked what kinds of coke they had (cherry, lemon, vanilla, etc.), and was told, “well we got all kinds, Dr. Pepper, Pepsi, Seven-Up.
Nothing actually by the Coca-Cola company.
Right now, it’s because you’re a racist moron. That you are also an idiot is grating, but htat you are a fucking racist, moreso.
Does this look like a motherfucking job training seminar to you? Shit, you fucking idiot, even though it’s true, you’re not going to hear me defend that fucking idiotic line of reasoning; Yes, you should talk like a privileged person to the best of your ability in a job interview, assuming you want the job, but it sucks that we have to because of classism, racism and the like. You shouldn’t be proud of these facts somehow.
I’d guess that’s from the Midwestern parents, since most people around where I live (Kansas City) say “melk.”
(Also, I’m stupidly, nerdishly excited by this, because I didn’t consciously notice till now that other people didn’t say “melk.” I like finding new words that I can use as accent-markers, since one of my little nerd-games is meeting people and trying to see how quickly I can identify their origins based solely on how they talk.)
A good number of my extended family members have accents that are either full-on Ozark or halfway there, so I find it rather endearing, too – but it was kinda hilarious watching the upper-class kids from Connecticut wince when I’d do my best imitation of it. :-p
I’d guess that’s from the Midwestern parents, since most people around where I live (Kansas City) say “melk.”
And that’s the funny part, because neither of them use that pronunciation or know anyone who does. They’re from Milwaukee and Minneapolis.
San Diego being the migrant town it is, though, I’m guessing there was some long-forgotten childhood friend who was raised somewhere around the confluence of the Missouri and Kansas. Good to finally know where the “melk”ers are!
Ha. I love that sort of total, unexplained randomness in accents. I’m still trying to figure out why my father says “warsh” instead of “wash,” but not one of his eleven brothers and sisters does.