I believe you have it backwards. A rhotic accent pronounces an R in all positions. Most Americans do pronounce the R followed by a consonant, while most Brits do not. Still, there are rhotic accents in Britain, and it wouldn’t surprise me if some did pronounce arse the way many Americans do.
Still, I thank you for clearing it up. Ever since I was told that the British term is “arse,” I’ve heard it all the time. Yet as a kid, I remember hearing Brits say “ass” a lot. I guess I just hadn’t developed the ear to tell the difference. I remember being taught that the “broad a” was the same sound as a “short o” (e.g. father and bother always rhyme).
ETA: Sorry that I was repeating: I didn’t notice the second page.)
My mother once told me that her flight was delayed ‘because of the war in Suburbia.’ She was getting mixed up with Serbia, but she actually thought Suburbia was a real country and wouldn’t believe me when I told her otherwise.
I’ve also been told off for using big words. The big word in question was ‘fickle.’
I constantly have to correct myself on that one - I know the US has 50 states but my brain immediately says 52. In fact, I just had to correct it as I typed. It’s probably something to do with 52 weeks of the year, or knowing that Hawaii and Alaska are pretty new states - though you’d think ‘Hawaii 5-0’ would help.
Other way round: most American accents are rhotic, most English (not British) accents are not. But if an American, or for that matter a Scot or someone from Devon or Cornwall or Ireland or a few other places where the word arse is frequently used, were to say ‘arse,’ they would pronounce the r and it would be correct.
Just the other day I read about a family that thought it would be a great idea to move their outdoors grill indoors and continue their bar-b-q when it started raining (or something to that effect).
That happened to a friend of mine … in the seventies.
I have a friend who insisted that the Bronte sisters were characters in a book, and not authors in their own right. Insisting that I’ve visited their house in Haworth didn’t persuade him that he was mistaken.
I think Kimmy is referring to the phenomenon that leads to the sound we Yanks write as “Uh…” (used to indicate the sound people make when pausing in the middle of a sentence or thought). In many instances, that sound is inexplicably written as “Er…” even though from a straight onomatopoeia perspective, we don’t read “Er…” as the “Uh…” sound.
But Brits (non-rhotic Brits, anyway) find those two renderings pronounced similarly.
And for them, “Arse,” is pronounced similarly to “Ass,” with no ‘r’ sound.
Yes, I flipped it in my head. American English is typically rhotic; British accents (including RP and SE England [what is called “Estuary English”]) typically are not.
Jay Leno did a bit called Jaywalking where he asks people on the street pretty straightforward questions and captures some stunningly stupid answers. Like the guy who couldn’t say who wrote Benjamin Frankin’s autobiography. Or the woman who thought the first man on the moon was Lance Armstrong.
My eighteen year old stepdaughter only found out a couple of months ago that New Mexico was a state.
I recently discovered that my eighteen year old daughter had no idea who Jack Nicholson was. I finally said, “You know that part in Aladdin where the genie says, If ya wanna court the little lady, ya gotta be a straight shooter, do ya got it? Well, that’s who he was impersonating!” She has since seen One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The Shining, so problem solved, but how did I let such a thing happen?
A Swedish guy once crowed to me that I was a typical stupid American for not knowing that the US actually had 52 states. I tried to get him to explain his logic, but he was a bit too far in his cups at that point. Eventually I got bored and walked away.
The morning news today mentioned a study which found that “many Americans” (no exact percentage provided) don’t know the difference between a teaspoon and a tablespoon and that this ignorance is the primary source of accidental OTC med overdoses, especially liquid acetaminophen. That surprised me - thought everyone learned that by the age of eight or so!
Well, at one time, just like the other examples, there was just one Carolina. The funny thing is, we in South Carolina wanted to dump the North Carolina part because it was backwards and rural and a money drain - South Carolina was the wealthy part. Now it’s the opposite.
There’s currently a person talking about evolution in another thread, who clearly doesn’t understand the first thing about the subject. I had no idea people were that uneducated, but it would definitely explain why people latch onto creationism.
I think that’s more like “American men” - my boyfriend keeps asking me which of our spoons are teaspoons and which ones are tablespoons (not for table usage, for measuring stuff) and I keep telling him to use the measuring spoons which are RIGHT THERE, but he seems to think that the two kinds of spoons everybody has are calibrated for measuring teaspoons and tablespoons. I haven’t been able to shake this bizarre belief.
I think that may be willful ignorance in many caes.
Not everybody cooks. My little sister doesn’t, and I don’t think she knows the difference. It’s just not part of her life.
I made breakfast for my 75-year-old father the other day. It was very cold (by Memphis standards) so I decided to include hot chocolate in the meal; and, not being a barbarian, I made it properly, on the stovetop, with baker’s cocoa and so forth. He was honestly surprised that it was so much trouble, as he thought it was just like making instant coffee.
He knows far more than I do about plumbing, though, so he’s probably ahead.
That’s like the huge number of people who misunderstand ‘survival of the fittest.’ The worst example of that is in a book about dinosaurs that I bought for my daughter. It starts with a section about survival of the fittest using the ‘strongest, fastest’ definition of ‘fittest’ rather than the ‘one which fits into its environment best’ definition, which is what Darwin meant.
This is a book from the Natural History Museum and it disgusts me that they’re perpetuating this ignorance.
A lady I know (in her sixties) thought Jimi Hendrix was “That guy who invented the Muppets.”
I made a fool of myself for years arguing that the Winter Solstice was the middle of Winter, not the beginning.
Just yesterday I stood in the Grocery Store line and looked at the covers of the gossip magazines and recognized NOONE. Usually there’s at least one with Brad Pit, or Angelina Jolie, or Paris Hilton on the cover. One cover had 7-8 people in little boxes around the sides, and I skimmed through them to try and find someone I knew. Nope. . .
