They are seriously running out of ideas over there on the Ask The Red Pill subreddit.
Oi! Piss off, mate!
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The kind of guy who talks about “pulling” “girls” is definitely the kind of guy who counts.
“Standard American accent” is a term common among non-American actors needing to “sound American” without any strong regional identity. Does it have any currency outside that context? What would someone from Brooklyn and someone from Atlanta understand by the term?
I don’t understand why this certified multiple-lady-puller, with 20+ successes that definitely nobody is keeping count of (but did we mention it’s OVER 20), would need an extra trick up his sleeve, one that requires a lot of extra effort to convincingly pull off. It only makes sense if deception is the main goal, not the actual sleeping-with.
If he goes through with this plan, I hope he goes all out and wears an ascot and a bowler.
Re: beans, American baked beans are sugary molasses-soaked nightmares, so I’ll take everyone’s word for it that the British version is tastier.
@Alan Robertshaw
I recently moved to the West Country and heard my first “proper job” the other day 🙂 I imagine “emmet” might be close behind, haha.
I think what I perceive as the Standard American accent is actually lots of different accents, to those whose ear is attuned to it. I realised when visiting family from the States that their accent – which I thought of as first as generally American – has qualities unique to El Paso, where they are from. Although I have been assured that the USA doesn’t have entirely different accents just a few miles apart like the UK does.
@all about the beans
I’m sorry but that is really disturbing, It’s just going to make your bread wet with all the bean juice from the can. But then again I’m from Kansas and I can’t imagine eating chili without a giant cinnamon roll on top of it. So go as you will with your baked beans on toast monstrosity.
@ lollypop
Proper Job is also a rather nice beer. I got to field test some prototype proper job peanuts once. There were only ten jars produced. I meant to save them for posterity, but I ended up scarfing them all walking back from the pub.
Have you visited Porthemmet beach yet? It’s lovely; and very exclusive 😉
http://www.porthemmet.com
@ Eliane
The trick is to let the toast cool a bit first. Then the bread forms a sort of impermeable crust; so it doesn’t go soggy.
Having said that, I like ‘Beans on Toast Tartare’; which is basically cold beans tipped over bread. Get the right bread though and that’s lovely.
One of the most amazing things I learned in a college speech class was that dialects can be temporal as well as regional. The example given was the “Valley Girl” thing from the 80s.
I legit WAS a Valley Girl, but in the late 70s and all of my friends and I talked like that. We gave it up pretty much immediately upon graduating high school but I had never considered that it was an actual dialect of US English. And it was very specifically located in the San Fernando Valley during the late 70s and early 80s. It got picked up more widely after the Moon Zappa song became popular.
I was in the Air Force, stationed in Nebraska the first time I heard the song and was mystified that it would be understood by anyone in the Midwest. I had to start telling people I was from Iowa for a while so they would stop asking me to talk like a Valley Girl!
@Moggie
I’m not from Brooklyn or Atlanta, but I am American. To me, the phrase “standard American accent” doesn’t mean much, since I grew up in a different region than I currently live in and I’ve travelled a lot, I’ve heard a lot of different accents. Maybe to someone who has lived in the same area their whole life it means something?
@Lollypop
Although there aren’t entirely different accents, it’s more of a continuum, there definitely are variations. For instance, in Massachusetts there are subtle yet noticeable (to locals, at least) differences between Boston and Worcester accents, cities which are about an hour’s drive apart.
It’s possible (albeit unlikely) that the poster meant the Standard American stage accent
@Alan Robertshaw
Ha! Took me a clear ten minutes to catch on 😉
@Naglfar
This makes sense, and it did occur to me reading your comment that there’s different accents just in native New Yorkers if pop culture has taught me anything, so I imagine its one of those truisms about the US that isn’t that true.
@Naglfar
Some of the variations are class-based (think Revere Beach vs. Brookline), but there are differences as you go west. I like to think people in Woostah pick up the extra “r’s” that get dropped by people in Boston (ideah -> idear) so that there’s a total conservation of r’s. They’re more likely to say “shot” for “short”, where in Boston it would be more like “shaart”.
Maine has quite a few dialects, which isn’t surprising in a rural state. There’s Downeast, midcoast, southern Maine (technically eastern New England), island vs. mainland. People who live in Houlton sound functionally Canadian. Franco-Americans in Biddeford speak differently than Franco-Americans in Madawaska. Lobsterese changes to loggerese as you get north of Lewiston.
Nowadays, the variations might be more generational than geographic. Young people are more likely to move out of state for college/jobs and lose the accent. These days you have to go pretty far north to hear people saying “ayuh”, “spleeny” (to mean wimpy) and cleaning the “culch” (rubbish) out of their cars.
O/T, but it’s just been announced that Rush Limbaugh is dead.
@Penny Psmith
I’ve heard enough cringy stories about Finnish-speaking Finns doing whatever they can think of to sound less Finnish when they’re abroad to think it’s reasonably possible that a person would find their “normal” accent to be unappealing for any sort of… pulling activities. That said, it would make a lot more sense to explain that if you actually wanted advice on which accent you should try to adopt when operating in an environment that’s foreign to you.
re: not counting
Considering that he’s not counting, I’d be interested to know what time period he’s talking about. 20 women a night is a different figure from 20 women over the course of his life. Even if he was just guesstimating the number by how often he goes out and how he typically fares, that would still involve some counting. (Also, it speaks volumes that this uncounted pull is his only context when he’s neglected to say where he’s from or what languages he speaks etc.)
On a related note, I only recently noticed that once there’s more than five of something, I no longer can tell the amount at a glance, which makes it interesting when I try to keep track of how many people there are in a room at work (because of Covid restrictions) and have a hard time differentiating between “uh, sevenish?” and “the room is chock full what is happening”.
@moggie
when I was at Emerson College in the early 90s they required students to take Voice and Articulation, which our instructor told us meant learning to speak like a U S newscaster.
Just no! Baked beans are vile. It’s a texture/smell thing for me. I never could understand why my mum liked them, or mushy peas. I can’t stomach humous either. Reading about medieval food in Ruth Goodman’s new book made me very glad I live now.
Oh, and please, we can tell when the ‘British’ accent is fake. It’s that regionally non-specific/faux London noise that people try in films.
The traditional Quebec “sugaring off” meal (to celebrate the maple sugar season) often has a side of beans in maple syrup. 🙂
And accents are something I’d happily blab about for hours, but I’ll try not to!
Yes, “standard American accent” seems too broad, but I’ve heard people posit a standard northeast one. Like a news reporter in New York probably sounds more like one in Ontario than one in, say, North Carolina.
Locally, of course, there are lots of variants. I’ve had my Montreal accent mistaken for a New York one, but that’s probably because I tend to put glides on vowels if I’m speaking casually, e.g. saying “toime” for “time.” Apparently this happens a bit more in Quebec English than Ontario English, so it’s not just me. It’s also a feature in New Jersey if “New Joisey” is anything to go by 🙂
The New England accent is a bit different, but as @Buttercup was saying, there’s more than one. My dad grew up in rural Maine, so if he’s tired he’ll drop Rs in words like barn (baahn) & pronounce the “h” in “wh” words (so “why” comes out like “hwy”).
first chip buttys are only suppased in yummynes by pizza. and secondly he should go for the Norflok accent which I love. one drawback it may be incomprehensible to Americans.
@ chris
And to think, he claimed to be pro-life.
I hate baked beans. Although I’ve never had the English variety before, so maybe it’d be different. I only usually eat beans when they’re in Mexican or Americanized Mexican food. Particularly black beans. Yum.
The “neutral” American accent is one that nobody has ever spoken natively, but was developed by newscasters and other early broadcasters to be understandable to the maximum number of speakers. Even then, there’s an East Coast neutral, a Midwest neutral (the one most familiar to foreigners, I’m not sure why), and a West Coast Neutral. Oddly, these are among the few English-language accents that I can’t mimic almost perfectly after a little exposure to it. (Only accents of native speakers, though, which may account for my difficulty with the neutral ones; I can under no circumstances pass as someone for whome English is a second-nth language, not even French, despite my being fluent in Parisian and Quebecois French.)
@Masse_Mysteria
Neither can anyone else; I’ve actually seen some studies on that, and ot appears to be a hard limit in our neurology.
@ North Sea Sparkly Dragon
The first thing when I read his comment was: “Wait… won’t the real Brits be able to tell?”
I’m not a native english speaker so I’ve got no idea (despite being kinda fascinated by the global variation of the english language). But if someone from another region of my home country tries to copy my accent. I’ll notice. Unless you lived there forever and pick it up naturally as a means to communicate on eye level so to say…
And in any case, if those girls he’s “trying to pull” notice, I’m pretty sure he will come off as an asshat. What’s he gonna say when they ask where he’s from? Lie and possibly face followup questions that will out him?
I’m still not sure whether to be amused, confused or just revolted by how these guys come off as the cringiest people alive and then present ideas on how to get even cringier to a bunch of people on the internet.
@ masse mysteria & dali
It’s called subitizing.
That’s the ability to work out the number of things without actually counting. The two methods work differently in the brain.
Some non human animals can do it; and chimps and covids seem better at it than we are.
https://blogofthecosmos.com/2016/03/01/the-numerical-abilities-of-non-human-animals/
I just popped into say…baked beans on toast is AMAZING!
Chip butties on the other hand…just say no.
@Moggie
“ As for accents, there used to be ads on the London Underground from (if memory serves) Las Vegas, saying “come holiday where your accent is an aphrodisiac”. I think there ought to have been small print saying “unless you’re a Brummie”
Oi!