I’m going to read that as a (poor) attempt at humor, but deep down inside, I feel the need to comment that (a) slurs against an entire people/nation/ethnicity are akin to “racism” and not allowed on these Message Boards at all; and (b) personal insults are not allowed in this forum.
To say that British pronunciations and spellings are eccentric is one thing; to attribute characteristics (such as “stupidity”) to British people is something quite else. In this case, I’m presuming it was an attempt at a joke.
And, Malacandra, please don’t compound it by a retort. Best response is to hit the REPORT BAD POST button (the little exclamation point in the red triangle in the upper right corner of the post.)
BTW, my favorite British pronunciation is Cholomondely, pronounced “Chumley.”
That’s what I had typed (from memory) at first, and then I checked the imdb which said accent grave. It’s been a couple hundred years since I took French, so I didn’t remember, and I trusted the imdb.
Well, Fields was a comedian and loved the sounds of words. “Accent grave” sounded pretentious enough for the character, the fact that it is inaccurate makes it that much funnier for the six people in the audience who “get” it.
Well, there was the Nicholas Cage skit on SNL in which he and his wife are trying to pick out a new for the upcoming baby. He’s rejecting all of them as too easy to make fun of. At the end of the skit, a delivery man calls himby the name on the address (Asswipe) and Nick corrects him that it’s pronounced “Ahz-WEE-pay.”
FTR, I’m actually something of an Anglophile – but I always enjoy a chance to twit our dear British cousins over those many little cultural eccentricities of which they seem so curiously proud. And archaic/idiosyncratic orthography tops the list. I mean, come on! Pronouncing “Edinburgh” with four syllables?!
Good heavens, I didn’t think it anywhere near report-worthy - I don’t for a moment suppose that BG seriously meant to insult the entire country just based on either our eccentricity over place names or his inability to understand why we pronounce them the way we do.
Seriously, most of the answer is that places in Britain have been around for a long time, and most of the names were given hundreds of years even before the Normans came over and started mispronouncing them, which is probably part of the problem; the rest is that the entire damn language keeps drifting pronunciation-wise. You guys might very well understand the entire conversation round the table when the Declaration was signed, if you could hear it rendered faithfully; I wouldn’t give myself a prayer of comprehending what was said at Runnymede in 1215, even the bits they actually said in English.
One of those, BTW, and a very curious one, is that the Brits are historically very proud of being stupid! George Orwell commented on this national trait at length, noting that the British had adopted as their unofficial national symbol the bulldog – a breed known for its strength and tenacity, but also for impenetrable stupidity; and that patriots of the “Colonel Blimp” type, who read Blackwood’s, would publicly thank God that they were “not brainy”; and that in British popular fiction, the most intelligent characters (Jeeves, Svengali) are almost always also the most unscrupulous.
I sometimes wonder whether this is a case of making a virtue of necessity, or an elaborate plot to lure the rest of the world into underestimating the Brits . . . No conclusion reached as yet.
