That, and most people understand this to be "100 yards, (or "110 yards for Canadians), when football fields actually include end zones.
One other nitpick: Candians, Australians, Americans and Englishmen all speak English with a dialect. Germans speak English with an accent.
No, you don’t speak English “with” a dialect. You speak a dialect of English. Pronunciation (aka “accent” in this case) is one aspect of a dialect. Vocabulary and grammar are two others.
And from dictionary.com’s entry for accent:
I do realize people can “acquire” dialects, but this guy’s been back here for at least a decade.
I have a southern accent, unmoderated by my 17 years of living up north.
I still say it’s an affectation.
You’re probably right, but my point is that there is a meaningful distinction between someone whose primary language is not English, and someone who speaks a different regional dialect of English. A German will generally try to lose his German accent to the extent he is able. You’re obviously using accent in a neutral way, that makes no judgement about either dialect being more correct. That’s usually not the way the word is used.
It’s a bit much to extrapolate from your own personal experience with accent aquisition and assume everyone else is much the same.
College was a great place to watch regional accents neutralize. When I was a freshman, I had a fairly disctinct Chicago accent (and some people still notice it from time to time), but mellowed over time into generic standard American English. It was never conscious. One guy had the strongest Brooklyn accents I’d ever heard, and by senior year had lost all but the occassional trace of New York in his speech. I spent two months in Scotland and, according to the locals, I had been developing a Scottish accent. I never noticed any change in my pronunciation, but everybody I asked claimed that I was developing Scottish rhythms and pronunciations. I was very surprised, as I never noticed it myself.
I also have one acquaintance who spent his whole life in Chicago, until he married a girl from New Orleans and moved down there. If you met him today, you would never guess he lived his formative years in Chicago. He sounds so much like a local New Orleanean, it’s disconcerting.
Some people readily pick up accents without even trying. Some retain them for whatever reason. When I moved back to the US from living in Hungary, I had to consciously drop a lot of Britishisms and Hunglish I picked up from the ex-pat community there, lest I be accused of affectations in my speech. Even to this day I have to stutter to say “apartment” because “flat” is a much better word (to me) and always wants to come out.
So, just because you spent 17 years up north and didn’t pick up an accent doesn’t mean other people don’t.
Damn Hijackers! I was hoping for a good conclusion to this thread as I read the book and quite enjoyed it. I did not think this book was ever suppose to be a serious science book but rather a good introduction to science to people like me who don’t know much about science.
I suppose the conclusion is: Take this book with a grain of salt. Its mostly accurate, but in no way should it be considered the be all and end all of science for the non-science.
I don’t know. “He’s got a Chicago accent.” “He’s got a southern accent.” “She speaks with a British accent.” I don’t see any value judgments here, and I think my usage is pretty representative of normal usage. Perhaps if you say “he speaks with an accent,” there is an impression of foreignness in that, but the way I’m using the word is just as usual as the latter.
Actually the context I was thinking of was, “Around here, we don’t speak with an accent.”
Sure, there’s a value judgment in that context. But this thread was using a fairly neutral connotation of accent. An Arky was making an explicit judgment based on the fact that Bill Bryson acquired and retained a British accent, but his use of the phrase “British accent” alone does not connote any negative meaning, as far as I read it. I’m just saying that in most of this thread, I feel “accent” is used in its more general, neutral sense.
“Football” itself isn’t even standard, much less the field it is played on. For the majority of the world football is what you call soccer, with rugby union and rugby league being the next closest followers. Only a minority of people would even think about what you think of when you use the term football.
Needless to say with so many different variants of what football actually is the fields are not all a standard size.
Touche. I didn’t think to include endzones.
That is not correct.
He lived in the UK for 22 years from 1973, then spent 8 years back in the US before moving back to the UK in 2003.
Yeah, but he didn’t grow up there. Unless he didn’t learn to talk until adulthood, he’s a pretentious tosser.
BTW, I really like his books, so this whole fake accent thing really disappoints me.
Eh, I’m being a prick. Never mind my previous post. Sorry…
IIRC there is a part in A Walk in the Woods when his buddy Katz is apparently mocking his accent. I think it is at night when Bryson hears some type of critter outside his tent.
I find Bryson marginally amusing, meaning I’ll read his stuff if there’s nothing better to read. But I find him to be an absolutely unreliable reporter of facts. It’s disappointing, since he spent his career as a copy editor. But it seems to me that Bryson’s shtik is to find some “gee whiz” factoid a la Paul Harvey and make some kind of half-lame joke out of it. I would not rely on one damn factual claim Bryson makes. Take it all with a grain of salt.
What bothers me even more about Bryson is his reporting of “humourous” conversations that have none of the character of genuine human conversations. The language used is so obviously false and made up. He’s really like your half-drunk uncle who thinks he’s just the world’s wittiest guy.
Regarding his accent, while it sounds very strange, I have no reason to believe it’s affected. He sounds neither American nor British. I doubt anyone would choose to fake such speech.
In my own personal experience, you’re wrong, wrong, wrong. It seems to me very common for people’s accents to start to change when they go to a new place. And I don’t think it has anything to do with people lacking a “strong sense of self” or “eager to fit in.” Granted, those categories of people might be likely to intentionally change their accents, but it seems to me that unintentional accent changing is very, very common.
[SARCASM]If you’ve lived somewhere else for 17 years and haven’t learned to talk like the locals, then you’re obviously being pretentious.[/SARCASM]
I pick up “local” accents quickly, but like most people, bits and pieces of the old accent hang on. I visited Scotland for a week and didn’t think I was speaking any differently, but a Brit mistook me for a local based on my Scottish accent. I’ve lived in Montana for four years, and I don’t speak noticeably differently from any educated Montana native.
I think there’s a good chance that Bryson isn’t even aware of his accent on a day-to-day basis.
“…Bryson compares the size of Pluto to the size of the Earth. On page 22 he says that if you set Pluto down on top of the United States it would cover not quite half of the lower 48 states. But, on page 24 he says that if the Earth were the size of a pea, that Pluto would be about the size of a bacterium…”
I thought the same exact thing. Science by definition is largely non-factual – if it weren’t it would be religion. Or, to paraphrase Kant, all models are wrong but some are useful. What I believe BB meant is Pluto would appear to be the size of a bacterium if you and the distance between the two solar objects were proportionally shrunk. In any case, you can forgive his factual transgressions – it’s infotainment, and no more so than CNN or NPR. Some of the errors surfaced over time as well. He mentions no virus has more than 10 genes, but since the book was published, organisms such as Pandoravirus have been found to possess a couple thousand genes. Suspend disbelief and enjoy the ride.
That was generally accepted for a long time, only recently being disproved.
Glass is indeed a odd state a matter, being a *amorphous solid—a state somewhere between those two states of matter.
*
Note the 2013 date on* The ‘glass is a liquid’ myth has finally been destroyed.*
So, since that info appeared in Science textbooks for decades, and ASHoNE was done in 2003, I think we can give Bill a break on this one.
but the “thicker at the bottom” window stuff has always been known as an urban myth, seeing as the original glaziers knew exactly why the panes of glass were manufactured in that way and why they put the thicker end at the bottom.