By David Futrelle
Just a reminder that Jordan “Slappy” Peterson’s fanboys are totally not cult members in a cult or anything, why would you even think that?
Ok, ok, he doesn’t mean a LITERAL voice in his head telling him what to do and not to do., that would be weird, just that “‘the little voice’ telling [me] not to do stuff often takes on Peterson’s tone and speech pattern.” Which is TOTALLY NORMAL.
I mean, seriously, who doesn’t have some strange Canadian dude in their head — FIGURATIVELY — telling them what to do? In my case, it’s the late Doug Henning, the fuzzy-mustached magician dude who was born in Winnipeg.
In case you’d like to know what it would be like if Jordan B. Peterson were a voice in your head, this brief video should help.
The Muppets has gotten weird pic.twitter.com/fFLTQxD0ei
— Wild Geerters (@steinkobbe) March 30, 2018
Canadian Voice.
Whispers all things right and just.
Jordan Peterson.
“Peterson is a surrogate father figure for a lot of people.”
“Peterson is a surrogate mother figure for a lot of people.”
There, fixed that.
(Added: who else tells you to fold your laundry?)
I have one literally. Which of course is me.
TM must have put a lot of money into the Canadian Natural Law Party, as they sent out a complete copy of their platform in 1993. It was a 43 page document that was sent out as a flyer in various newspapers.
Another project during the Henning era of TM was Maharishi Veda Land, a proposed theme park that Henning was involved in the design of. Land was actually acquired in Niagara Falls, Ontario, and Orlando, Florida, but they never reached anywhere near the construction phase.
I’ve sometimes wondered if Henning wouldn’t have become the public face of TM if he hadn’t died.
Martin Short did a pretty good Doug Henning in his 1985 comedy special.
@Fluffy spider
Peterson is a Canadian university professor and clinical psychologist, who came to notice after announcing that he would refuse to acknowledge transgender students’ pronouns (to my knowledge this was completely hypothetical, I don’t believe he’d had a student ask him). Since then he’s done the usual evo-psych nonsense, coming up with just so stories and cherry picking animal species which he believes justify his assholishness. One memorable comparison was lobsters and human society.
The current crop of neo-nazis like him because he says things that they agree with, he’s right-wing in a supposedly left dominated environment, and he gets a bit of martyrdom, since there was talk at one point of his pronoun fuckery violating Canadian civil rights legislation.
Jordan Peterson is abzurd! This is how he talks.
Oh so he’s an idiot?
I prefer the other Slappys by far.
Poll answer: I sometimes imagine the characters’ dialogue in the voices of actors/actresses, if I know who the character and actor/actress are (in fanfiction) or if I can think of a suitable actor/actress for the character (in general reading).
@Nikki: Ditto.
There’s something to be said for Anglo Canadian accents. It seems that non-Canadians are really drawn to our speech patterns: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/06/world/canada/ai-2001-space-odyssey.html
Also, props for Pontypool! That movie is great and, whenever I pass the town on the highway, I get a bit of the shudders every time.
Poll answer:
So… I was born in, raised in, and live in the US. I am also a massive Doctor Who fan. If I had the money to do it, my fandom would be almost embarrassing with the amount of DW merch I would collect. I also belong to the Gallifrey Base forums, several DW Facebook groups, and two DW subreddits.
Whenever I engage with DW fandom, or talk about DW online at all, I read literally everything with a British accent… even typing this post, my brain has reverted to hearing the words I’m typing in this comment in a British accent. I don’t really know why and it annoyed me for a while, but now I’m used to it.
Oddly, this doesn’t happen when I engage with Led Zeppelin fandom, even though I’ve been a fan of them longer than I have of DW… I’m not really sure why that is, honestly. Maybe it has something to do with LZ being music as opposed to a TV show?
As for Jordan Peterson… I really have nothing to say, other than my continued annoyance at his popularity…
Shadowplay:
Actually, I’d love to see classic SF redubbed with regional accents. Ellen Ripley as a Bolton lass. A Bristolian Terminator. A Scouse Jean-Luc Picard. Glaswegian HAL.
Speaking of SF, I’m really hoping for some manchild meltdowns about the droid in the next Star Wars flick being voiced by a feeemale (Phoebe Waller-Bridge).
I do have a voice in my head when reading a book. Ever since watching the 3rd season of Fargo it’s usually David Thewlis doing the narration.
Man, I’m tired of Jordan Petersons rambling incoherent platitudes.
@wwth
I actually thought about this question for some time and what is interesting about it is what it presupposes. As Shadowplay already mentioned, you cannot really imagine something in an accent that you have never even heard. For this question to be something you can meaningfully answer – or something you can meaningfully ask – you must assume people to read books set only to a very limited geographical and temporal area whose people’s speech patterns and accents in the same language as the book is in they have personal experience with.
Something that is very visible from the answers, on the other hand, is that no one apparently reads books in more than one language anymore… Or any translations of foreign-language books, for that matter. 😀 All the answers have essentially been talking about current regional accents inside UK and US on English. What about when reading historical fiction set in France in the Middle Ages, written originally in English by an Aussie, translated into Swedish, read by a non-native Swedish speaker? (<—actual book I read, btw; this is not a hypothetical example) Can (or should) I even assume that the author themselves knew what the characters truly sounded like?
Then there’s also the delightful question of how to indicate a foreign or regional accent – or its lack – in fiction. This circles back to the first point: namely that most people know only how very few foreign accents sound like on their own native tongue and that’s it (Hollywood really isn’t a good resource for foreign accents, they are getting better but it’s happening quite slowly). For regional accents inside people’s own country, the situation is usually a bit better, but that’s not a given either. If you are writing a book in a specific language set in a place or time where that language wasn’t spoken, the language the book is written in is assumed to stand in for the local language. Imagining French peasants speaking Swedish with a French accent among themselves pretty much defeats the author’s purpose (and kinds breaks the reading experience). 😉 And no, if an Englishman would have wandered into that book, I wouldn’t have seen any point in imagining them speaking Swedish with a modern (BBC) British accent to French peasants either. 😉
Obligatory mention for Shakespeare having written for an accent roughly comparable to Bristol/Somerset (which is also roughly where the “arrr, Jim lad” pirate accent comes from, iirc). There are some examples on youtube, for whose accuracy I personally cannot vouch but which are probably legit.
And yet we’re generally so used to Shakespeare being spoken in UKanian posh/RP that anything else sounds weird to us :-s
@ opposablethumbs
A lot of the puns and wordplay in Shakespeare only work properly in a West Country accent. It has been suggested that even Elizabeth I may have spoken with one.
As for the stereotypical pirate accent, that seems to be down to this chap.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Newton
I thought about this when watching “the death of Stalin” recently in theaters. I’ve seen a lot of people point out that the actors speak in normal English accents instead of doing a Russian accent. I like that! You’ve already taken a step away from realism by having supposed Russians speak English. If you’re gonna use English as a stand-in for Russian anyway, it doesn’t become more “realistic” if they were all to speak in Russian accents. (It was a great movie btw. Recommend it for everyone who likes The Thick Of It and Veep, or who’s just generally a fan of pitch black humour.)
When I read novels, I pretty much never think what the characters would sound like, even if they’d actually speak the language I’m reading them in.
One of my favorite Finnish novels has characters speaking in 11th century Finnish/Veps, Swedish/Gutnish/Norwegian, Meryan, Russian/Ukrainian, Pecheneg, Greek, Hungarian, Latin, French and English. Another from the same author* has characters speaking in Swedish/Danish/Norwegian, German, French, Latin, Italian, Greek, Armenian and Arabic.
*Apparently, Kaari Utrio’s novels are not available in English, though several of them have Swedish and German translations.
WWTH:
Me too, unless the character is (or is based on) someone I’ve heard IRL. If, say, I’m reading dialogue supposedly spoken by George W Bush, my internal voice will sound like GWB. It would be strange to hear him speaking with a London accent!
Followup question: if you’re reading something where a character’s gender isn’t identified, how do you hear their dialogue? For example, when I read Ancillary Justice, where the culture does not distinguish people by gender, I heard every voice as female – which led to some jarring moments, when the text overturned this.
@Dvärg
Exactly – you said this so much better than I did.
Although movies do give the additional option of having the actors speak one language and subtitling the lines into a different language. Basically what LotR did with Quenya/Sindarin.
Oh, I hate it when foreign characters speak to each other in accented English. If the whole movie is set in that language zone, they should all speak English. Otherwise, English speaking characters should speak English, and e.g. Russian characters should speak Russian and get subtitles.
@Moggie
No, this is the accent Sir Patrick grew up with: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p019nlqj
Having spent a fair bit of my time at university reading late-medieval English religious dramas, mainly the York Cycle, I’m all for philosophy in a Yorkshire accent.
Then there’s the trope of indicating a character is foreign by leaving greetings and exclamations in their native language — this goes for “indicating that they’re speaking English with an accent” *or* “indicating that the conversation is in another language.” If it’s in a book the phrases are usually in italics. I realized what a cliché this was recently when I watched a German movie and found myself thinking “how cheesy” every time a character said “auf wiedersehen” or exclaimed “Gott in Himmel!” even as I realized those were perfectly natural phrases to use when the entire conversation was in German.
*clonks head against wall for eight straight minutes* I swear, Mammotheers, the school I have a degree from isn’t all this effin’ guy. The University of Toronto has produced Canada’s finest thinkers since it was founded by a crusty ol’ Anglican Bishop almost 200 years ago and has produced 10 Nobel laureates and Marshall freakin’ McLuhan! Slap-Happy Peterson is no Marshall McLuhan.
I have it on inside information that Peterson is crafty enough to stay just on the right side of the line with the Governing Council. Hell, even if he were disciplined by the school’s higher-ups, he’d just milk it for Patreon dollars, so he might as well be just shoved into a sub-basement and pretend he’s not there.
And for the record, if you gotta hear a Canadian guy in your head telling you stuff… might as well be Maurice LaMarche.
Re: reading accent
It depends. Most times, my own. If characters are meant to be speaking in diff dialects or accents or affects, then I’ll pick some that sound right if not given any direction. Aloof people get Received Pronunciation or an old Midatlantic deal, frex. If everyone is from the same foreign place, mine. If there are different kindsa foreigners, then my best approximation of that regional accent. Which is always a pretty terrible approximation, but I’m not recording an audiobook, am I? ?
Re: gender
Usually I read in my voice until told it’s not a dude talking. Besides, my acting voice is dynamic/androgynous enough in register (or it sounds that way to me) that it’s not a huge problem anyways