Missy Elliot. Although, but the time she made it “white people famous,” black people probably already thought it was lame.
That settles it for me. I definitely heard him say Fifty. See, I don’t actually care much about the guy and don’t hear him say his name that often, only other people, and other people will put their own dialect spin on it. Besides, it’s a rapper’s stage name, and “Fiddy Cent” flows a lot better than “Fifty Cent,” so I assumed what I heard was correct.
I say it in the Queen’s English
I think I picked up “Fiddy Cent” from Mad TV. 50 Cent is definitely one of those celebrities I am more familiar with through parody than through their actual work. I never made the connection between the “Fiddy” pronunciation and a black accent; I assumed it was either something 50 Cent made up to make the name more unique, or just an individual speech habit of his.
On his show, Jay Leno asked Chelsea Handler if it was “Fiddy,” and she replied “I call him Curtis when we’re having sex.”
I’d never say “Fiddy.” That sounds stupid. It never even occurred to me that it would be anything other than “Fifty Cent.” Not that I’ve heard his name spoken more than a handful of times. I mostly just see it in print.
I pronounce it fiddy like black people do as evidenced in yoyodynes post 102.
I say it in cockney - Arfur Dollar.
You’ve never heard of whom?
This video belongs in this thread.
Oh and when Mookie went to get his money from Sal after burning down Sal’s Pizzeria, his pay was “two fiddy”.
Moved from IMHO to Cafe Society.
What ever happened to that Two Pack fellow?
Heh, just got on a computer where I could listen to that Fifty Cent pronunciation clip. I get where you’re coming from, Nzinga - it does sound as though the interviewer is trying SO hard to be ‘with it’ that he pronounces the name in what he expects to be the way a black rapper would pronounce it, even when said black rapper says it as a very clear fifty. (Well, American fifty, where the t is almost a d, but it’s still not fiddy).
I’d say ‘Don’t Ask’ with my British RP accent because it would sound much more ridiculous to try to affect any other pronunciation. If I spoke British RP and had a band called ‘Don’t Ask’ then I wouldn’t expect anyone to change their pronunciation to suit mine either.
I’ve seen this a lot, but although the various British accents would say Andrea and Sarah in different ways, I can’t think of any that would say SAH-ruh and OHN-drea (or rather, AHND-drea). It’s a bit of a misconception that whenever American accents say ‘ay’ we say ‘ah.’ It happens, but not universally. The British RP pronunciation of Sarah is extremely close to the American Mid-West pronunciation. But Sara is SAH-ruh.
This first annoyed me in Beverly Hills 90210 when I was a kid. No, Ahhhndrea, pronouncing your name that way is not the British way - nobody says it like that here. It just makes you sound pretentious to us as well as your schoolmates.
I actually use “Fiddy” more often- but only because chances are if I’m ever referring to him I’m doing it ironically. But if I were, for some reason, seriously discussing him, I’d use “Fifty”.
I didn’t mean that SAH-ruh and OHN-drea are both British pronunciations, only that ANN-drea and OHN-drea are not (to me) interchangeable pronunciations. People with that name pronounce it one way or another, and consider it “wrong” when it’s pronounced the other way. Whereas with Sarah, I just consider it an accent difference, and not a totally different pronunciation of the name. And I never, ever thought that Sara is pronounced differently from Sarah, that’s just bizarre to me.
It’s not so much a Midwest thing as a general American accent thing. And the sound isn’t really a “d” (at least not like the “d” in “dog”), but rather an alveolar flap. Specifically, the phenomenon is called intervocalic alveolar flapping, as it occurs when “t” or “d” sounds are positioned in between vowel sounds. It’s also a feature of Australian and New Zealand dialects. The only time I really hear North American accents without flapping is on NPR, where they have a tendency to over-enunciate everything.
ANN-drea and OHN-drea aren’t interchangeable pronunciatons for me either. Well, we don’t say ‘OHN,’ but I know the pronunciation you mean, and that is not the norm for Andrea.
Sara, at least in my experience, has been around as individual name for a long time, so it’s not strange that it has a different pronunciation to Sarah.
Wasn’t there a movie or a TV show (The Wire? Law & Order?) where they identified the bad guy because he didn’t flap?
I also remember a young Will Smith teaching himself not to flap (or drop the f) when pronouncing “bottle of beer” in the movie “Six Degrees of Separation.” I think that was his first acting gig, even before “Fresh Prince of Bel Air.”
This may not be fair, but I say ‘eerbody’ like eeer’buu’daaah! and ‘get yer nails did’ as a way to be…obnoxious. like i want to convey a feeling. generally, when i exaggerate.
it’s not a way of making anything cool so much as it is a way of being (in a white person bitch way) facetious. my best friend of 12+ years and i exaggerate about 90 per cent of our speech - from stuff like that to accents to ‘locker room talk’ to private jokes. it’s like we don’t know to be serious.
but when white people use stuff like that as part of their regular speech, i do get uncomfortable. the only things i can think of that came into my vernacular after awhile were ‘vato’ (not the gangbanger kind - more of the ‘dude’) and a couple of iconic movie quotes.
still, there’s no way he pronounces it ‘fifty’. fi’tee, maybe, but not fifty. i think non-white people just have a hard time pronouncing it like he does, since it’s clearly distinct from fifty. since he uses words like ‘da’ for ‘the’, the disconnect is understandable.
Yup…the former sounds a little…Minnesotian. :o