In the 60s & 70s, this happened in one episode.
These days, that story line plays out in the background over the whole friggin’ season. (Even though everyone knows the woman is toast as soon as she showed interest in Dr. Wonderful.)
Nobody just “takes off” their badge. They slam it down on the chief’s desk and storm out.
Or they toss it into the harbor,
Still they’re back for the next episode/movie like nothing happened.
“That’s the sixth badge this month, Howitzer!”
My favorite “I’m turning in my badge” line, from a Dirty Harry movie:
Here’s a seven-point suppository for you!
Well, I’d like to read this entire thread, but I ain’t got time for this shit. I’m retiring this afternoon.
If a lone police detective tells you that there is a large group of police outside your desolate hideout and thus you should give up, you should not give up because there is not a large group of police outside your desolate hideout and the detective is on their own.
My mother was born in Missouri and taken to live in Chicago when she was seven or eight. She said the kids in Illinois teased her unmercifully about her accent. (She lost it completely long before I was born.)
I’m from Minneapolis and have never said “aboot,” except when I’m channeling Bob and Doug MacKenzie. When I told some Torontonians I heard it used by a guy from the Maritimes, they insisted Canadians never talk like that!
Final patrol, then it is back to the station to turn in my badge. Been bonding with my partner, he opened up to me and told me about his family, I talked to him about fishing and said that I was thinking of getting a boat now that I am retired and…something is going on just up ahead, we had better check it out.
Someday an AI bot is going to find this thread, harvest the best parts, and start writing for TV. Magnum, CPU
Up next after the news.
I used to be a company appointed official Mancunian translator. There’s just no reason for people to talk that way. And even worse they complain about other’s accents. It sounds cute when there’s a touch of it in speech like with the Beatles, but nobody needs to sound like they have mouth full of thumbtacks when they talk.
In parts of the US you can get very different accents in a short distance. Go from NYC to Northern NJ to Central NJ to Philly and South Jersey and the accent changes completely. I lived 30 miles from my cousins on Staten Island and we sounded like we were from a different country.
I forget which British actor it was who said it but I remember one saying that it’s easier for a Brit to do an American accent because it meant relaxing the mouth. An American actor has to tense up parts of their mouth and thought to do a British accent which is harder. I don’t do accents so that sounds good to me.
If you are an older cop who has begun to bond with your younger partner after initial conflict, do not, under any circumstances, show them a picture of your adorable teenage daughter. You’re a dead man.
If your shift is already over and you’re driving back to the police station to clock out, if you happen to get just one last call, just ignore it and have someone else check it out.
Because you’re either A Going to Die or B Going to be part of a hostage situation that won’t resolve itself until 12 hours later.
The showrunner for House would disagree with you.
Some regional accents are certainly , but some experts have said that some American speakers are more or less accent-less.
No, nobody who is an expert in language would say anyone didn’t have an accent.
British accents are odd though. On two separate occasions, I met someone in Canada who could identify what neighbourhood of the British city where my father grew up.
Yeah, the British have more accents per square mile than Americans do, that’s uncontroversial, but nobody who speaks at all can possibly not have an accent. Here’s a PDF which will serve as a cite because I do want to make this point:
The reason I want to make the point is because people who think there are ways of speaking “without an accent” tend to believe that people who do have (what they regard as an) accent are uneducated, and possibly a lesser variety of person. It’s bigotry, and often the sibling to classism and racism.
I do wish the cite wasn’t blatantly idiotic about Chinese (“one language, multiple dialects” my goddamned White ass) but you can’t have everything.
A few years back, I played Theseus in a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The producer/director (a very, very English woman) cast me in the role after I read for it in my “posh” (her word) British accent.
The audience was a mix of native and non-native English speakers, and the Brits I chatted with in my normal voice after each performance invariably said “What, you’re American?!?”
A fellow member of the cast (who really did speak with a posh British accent) said “The hardest thing for an American doing a British accent is to get the vowel sounds right, and yours are spot on.”
I knew about the vowel sounds because I had been teaching English out of EFL textbooks printed in the UK for several years, and I spent hours going over the phonemic transcriptions of the vocabulary.
If the police tell you you’re completely safe because there are X cops in the building, you’ve just been invited to play the Countdown Game.
That’s why a Southern U.S. accent is so easy for me. Ah jes’ leh-muh mahth go all limp…
I have a friend from Georgia, and I’ll pick up her accent in five minutes of talking to her.